The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated in this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the development of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the cause of liberty and the welfare of man.
The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in his native land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in England and Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form a new era in the history of the civilized world. Heretofore the patriot has relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration of his country and its redemption from oppression. His revolutions, however pure in principle, have ended in practical crime. The great truth was yet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love of freedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny—the relic of an age of slavery and barbarism—the common argument of despotism—a game
"which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at."
But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directed against the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon the united moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason over prejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energy where the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication of man's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but by weapons tempered in the armory of Heaven with truth and mercy and love.
Nor is it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, this triumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform of political abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down of the strongholds of arbitrary power. The emancipation of the Catholic of Great Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way for the bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832. The Catholic Association was the germ of those political unions which compelled, by their mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yield submissively to the supremacy of the people.
[The celebrated Mr. Attwood has been called the "father of political unions." In a speech delivered by his brother, C. Attwood, Esq., at the Sunderland Reform Meeting, September 10, 1832, I find the following admission: "Gentlemen, the first political union was the Roman Catholic Association of Ireland, and the true founder and father of political unions is Daniel O'Connell.">[
Both of these remarkable events, these revolutions shaking nations to their centre, yet polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, were effected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set in motion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him to every portion of the British empire like the undulations from the disturbed centre of a lake.
The Catholic question has been but imperfectly understood in this country. Many have allowed their just disapprobation of the Catholic religion to degenerate into a most unwarrantable prejudice against its conscientious followers. The cruel persecutions of the dissenters from the Romish Church, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, the horrors of the Inquisition, the crusades against the Albigenses and the simple dwellers of the Vaudois valleys, have been regarded as atrocities peculiar to the believers in papal infallibility, and the necessary consequences of their doctrines; and hence they have looked upon the constitutional agitation of the Irish Catholics for relief from grieveous disabilities and unjust distinctions as a struggle merely for supremacy or power.
Strange, that the truth to which all history so strongly testifies should thus be overlooked,—the undeniable truth that religious bigotry and intolerance have been confined to no single sect; that the persecuted of one century have been the persecutors of another. In our own country, it would be well for us to remember that at the very time when in New England the Catholic, the Quaker, and the Baptist were banished on pain of death, and where some even suffered that dreadful penalty, in Catholic Maryland, under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, perfect liberty of conscience was established, and Papist and Protestant went quietly through the same streets to their respective altars.
At the commencement of O'Connell's labors for emancipation he found the people of Ireland divided into three great classes,—the Protestant or Church party, the Dissenters, and the Catholics: the Church party constituting about one tenth of the population, yet holding in possession the government and a great proportion of the landed property of Ireland, controlling church and state and law and revenue, the army, navy, magistracy, and corporations, the entire patronage of the country, holding their property and power by the favor of England, and consequently wholly devoted to her interest; the Dissenters, probably twice as numerous as the Church party, mostly engaged in trade and manufactures,—sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish in feeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholic brethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; the Catholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, and almost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportion of the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession of landed property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws. Justly has a celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as "an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demons to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland. There was no disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, or religious, civil or military, which it has not heaped upon them."