Historical Papers / Part 3 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier

by John Greenleaf Whittier

In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details of that cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a Reformed Parliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV., "to ascertain the sense of the people." It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell's indignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform meted out to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case. The Irish Reform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of the United Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation. It diminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns and cities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs it established so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable to corruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system. It threw no new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice has O'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orange ascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunity on the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. [Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain, No. 1.]

In May, 1832, O'Connell commenced the publication of his celebrated Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain. Like Tallien, before the French convention, he "rent away the veil" which Hume and Atwood had only partially lifted. He held up before the people of Great Britain the new indignities which had been added to the long catalogue of Ireland's wrongs; he appealed to their justice, their honor, their duty, for redress, and cast down before the Whig administration the gauntlet of his country's defiance and scorn. There is a fine burst of indignant Irish feeling in the concluding paragraphs of his fourth letter:—

"I have demonstrated the contumelious injuries inflicted upon us by this Reform Bill. My letters are long before the public. They have been unrefuted, uncontradicted in any of their details. And with this case of atrocious injustice to Ireland placed before the reformers of Great Britain, what assistance, what sympathy, do we receive? Why, I have got some half dozen drivelling letters from political unions and political characters, asking me whether I advise them to petition or bestir themselves in our behalf!

"Reformers of Great Britain! I do not ask you either to petition or be silent. I do not ask you to petition or to do any other act in favor of the Irish. You will consult your own feelings of justice and generosity, unprovoked by any advice or entreaty of mine.

"For my own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, nor any want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights by peaceable and legal means."

The tithe system, unutterably odious and full of all injustice, had prepared the way for this expression of feeling on the part of the people. Ireland had never, in any period of her history, bowed her neck peaceably to the ecclesiastical yoke. From the Canon of Cashel, prepared by English deputies in the twelfth century, decreeing for the first time that tithes should be paid in Ireland, down to the present moment, the Church in her borders has relied solely upon the strong arm of the law, and literally reaped its tithes with the sword. The decree of the Dublin Synod, under Archbishop Comyn, in 1185, could only be enforced within the pale of the English settlement. The attempts of Henry VIII. also failed. Without the pale all endeavors to collect tithes were met by stern opposition. And although from the time of William III. the tithe system has been established in Ireland, yet at no period has it been regarded otherwise than as a system of legalized robbery by seven eighths of the people. An examination of this system cannot fail to excite our wonder, not that it has been thus regarded, but that it has been so long endured by any people on the face of the earth, least of all by Irishmen. Tithes to the amount of L1,000,000 are annually wrung from impoverished Ireland, in support of a clergy who can only number about one sixteenth of her population as their hearers; and wrung, too, in an undue proportion, from the Catholic counties. [See Dr. Doyle's Evidence before Hon. E. G. Stanley.] In the southern and middle counties, almost entirely inhabited by the Catholic peasantry, every thing they possess is subject to the tithe: the cow is seized in the hovel, the potato in the barrel, the coat even on the poor man's back. [Speech of T. Reynolds, Esq., at an anti- tithe meeting.] The revenues of five of the dignitaries of the Irish Church Establishment are as follows: the Primacy L140,000; Derry L120,000; Kilmore L100,000; Clogher L100,000; Waterford L70,000. Compare these enormous sums with that paid by Scotland for the maintenance of the Church, namely L270,000. Yet that Church has 2,000,000 souls under its care, while that of Ireland has not above 500,000. Nor are these princely livings expended in Ireland by their possessors. The bishoprics of Cloyne and Meath have been long held by absentees,—by men who know no more of their flocks than the non-resident owner of a West India plantation did of the miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thankless labor were annually transmitted to him. Out of 1289 benefited clergymen in Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending in Bath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, the wealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter by the bayonets of the military. Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm of Grattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompous priesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of false zeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the true religion, to their flocks oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, to their king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar,—they stand on the altar as a stepping-stone to the throne, glorying in the ear of princes, whom they poison with crooked principles and heated advice; a faction against their king when they are not his slaves,—ever the dirt under his feet or a poniard to his heart."

For the evils of absenteeism, the non-residence of the wealthy landholders, draining from a starving country the very necessaries of life, a remedy is sought in a repeal of the union, and the provisions of a domestic parliament. In O'Connell's view, a restoration of such a parliament can alone afford that adequate protection to the national industry so loudly demanded by thousands of unemployed laborers, starving amid the ruins of deserted manufactories. During the brief period of partial Irish liberty which followed the pacific revolution of '82, the manufactures of the country revived and flourished; and the smile of contented industry was visible all over the land. In 1797 there were 15,000 silk-weavers in the city of Dublin alone. There are now but 400. Such is the practical effect of the Union, of that suicidal act of the Irish Parliament which yielded up in a moment of treachery and terror the dearest interests of the country to the legislation of an English Parliament and the tender mercies of Castlereagh,—of that Castlereagh who, when accused by Grattan of spending L15,000 in purchasing votes for the Union, replied with the rare audacity of high-handed iniquity, "We did spend L15,000, and we would have spent L15,000,000 if necessary to carry the Union; "that Castlereagh who, when 707,000 Irishmen petitioned against the Union and 300,000 for it, maintained that the latter constituted the majority! Well has it been said that the deep vengeance which Ireland owed him was inflicted by the great criminal upon himself. The nation which he sold and plundered saw him make with his own hand the fearful retribution. The great body of the Irish people never assented to the Union. The following extract from a speech of Earl (then Mr.) Grey, in 1800, upon the Union question, will show what means were made use of to drag Ireland, while yet mourning over her slaughtered children, to the marriage altar with England: "If the Parliament of Ireland had been left to itself, untempted and unawed, it would without hesitation have rejected the resolutions. Out of the 300 members, 120 strenuously opposed the measure, 162 voted for it: of these, 116 were placemen; some of them were English generals on the staff, without a foot of ground in Ireland, and completely dependent on government." "Let us reflect upon the arts made use of since the last session of the Irish Parliament to pack a majority, for Union, in the House of Commons. All persons holding offices under government, if they hesitated to vote as directed, were stripped of all their employments. A bill framed for preserving the purity of Parliament was likewise abused, and no less than 63 seats were vacated by their holders having received nominal offices."

The signs of the times are most favorable to the success of the Irish Liberator. The tremendous power of the English political unions is beginning to develop itself in favor of Ireland. A deep sympathy is evinced for her sufferings, and a general determination to espouse her cause. Brute force cannot put down the peaceable and legal agitation of the question of her rights and interests. The spirit of the age forbids it. The agitation will go on, for it is spreading among men who, to use the words of the eloquent Shiel, while looking out upon the ocean, and gazing upon the shore, which Nature has guarded with so many of her bulwarks, can hear the language of Repeal muttered in the dashing of the very waves which separate them from Great Britain by a barrier of God's own creation. Another bloodless victory, we trust, awaits O'Connell,—a victory worthy of his heart and intellect, unstained by one drop of human blood, unmoistened by a solitary tear.

Ireland will be redeemed and disenthralled, not perhaps by a repeal of the Union, but by the accomplishment of such a thorough reform in the government and policy of Great Britain as shall render a repeal unnecessary and impolitic.

The sentiments of O'Connell in regard to the means of effecting his object of political reform are distinctly impressed upon all his appeals to the people. In his letter of December, 1832, to the Dublin Trades Union, he says: "The Repealers must not have our cause stained with blood. Far indeed from it. We can, and ought to, carry the repeal only in the total absence of offence against the laws of man or crime in the sight of God. The best revolution which was ever effected could not be worth one drop of human blood." In his speech at the public dinner given him by—the citizens of Cork, we find a yet more earnest avowal of pacific principles. "It may be stated," said he, "to countervail our efforts, that this struggle will involve the destruction of life and property; that it will overturn the framework of civil society, and give an undue and fearful influence to one rank to the ruin of all others. These are awful considerations, truly, if risked. I am one of those who have always believed that any political change is too dearly purchased by a single drop of blood, and who think that any political superstructure based upon other opinion is like the sand-supported fabric,—beautiful in the brief hour of sunshine, but the moment one drop of rain touches the arid basis melting away in wreck and ruin! I am an accountable being; I have a soul and a God to answer to, in another and better world, for my thoughts and actions in this. I disclaim here any act of mine which would sport with the lives of my fellow-creatures, any amelioration of our social condition which must be purchased by their blood. And here, in the face of God and of our common country, I protest that if I did not sincerely and firmly believe that the amelioration I desire could be effected without violence, without any change in the relative scale of ranks in the present social condition of Ireland, except that change which all must desire, making each better than it was before, and cementing all in one solid irresistible mass, I would at once give up the struggle which I have always kept with tyranny. I would withdraw from the contest which I have hitherto waged with those who would perpetuate our thraldom. I would not for one moment dare to venture for that which in costing one human life would cost infinitely too dear. But it will cost no such price. Have we not had within my memory two great political revolutions? And had we them not without bloodshed or violence to the social compact? Have we not arrived at a period when physical force and military power yield to moral and intellectual energy. Has not the time of 'Cedant arma togae' come for us and the other nations of the earth?"