A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland

by Mary Platt Parmele

You cannot combine oil and water by pouring them into one glass. The union was not a union. The natures of the two races were utterly hostile. Centuries of cruel wrong and outrage had accentuated every undesirable trait in the Irish people. A nature simple, confiding, spontaneous, and impulsive, had become suspicious, explosive, and dangerous. Pugnacity had grown into ferocity. A joyous, light-hearted, and engaging people had become a sullen and vindictive one; famine, misery, and ignorance had put their stamp of degradation upon the peasantry, the majority of the people. Intermarriage, so savagely interdicted for centuries, was the only thing which could ever have fused two such contrasting races. Such a fusion might have benefited both, in giving a wholesome solidity to the Irish, while the stolid English would have been enriched by the fascinating traits and the native genius of their brilliant neighbors. But the opportunity had been lost; and enlightened English statesmanship is still seeking for a plan which will convert an unnatural and artificial union into a real one.

The delusive promises of the relief which was to come with union were not fulfilled. Catholics remained under the same monstrous ban as before, and things were practically unchanged. Young Robert Emmett's abortive attempt to seize Dublin Castle in 1803 intensified conditions, but did not alter them. The pathetic story of his capture while seeking a parting interview with Sarah Curran, to whom he was engaged, and his death by hanging the following morning, is one of the smaller tragedies in the greater one; and the death of Sarah from a broken heart, soon after, is the subject of Moore's well-known lines.

The most colossal figure in the story of Ireland had now appeared. Daniel O'Connell, unlike the other great leaders, was a Catholic. In the language of another, "he was the incarnation of the Irish nation." All that they were, he was, on a majestic scale. His whole tremendous weight was thrown into the subject of Catholic emancipation; and, although a giant in eloquence and in power, it took him just twenty-nine years to accomplish it. In the year 1829, even Wellington, that incarnation of British conservatism, bent his head before the storm, and there was a full and unqualified removal of Catholic disabilities. O'Connell was not content; he did not pause. The tithe-system, that most odious of oppressions, must go. A starving nation compelled to support in its own land a Church it considered blasphemous! A standing army kept in their land to wring this tribute from them at the point of the bayonet! Think of a people on the brink of the greatest famine Europe has ever known, being in arrears a million and a quarter of pounds for tithes for an Established Church they did not want! Is it strange that Sydney Smith said no abuse as great could be found in Timbuctoo? Is it a wonder that there was always disorder and violence from a chronic tithe-war in Ireland, which it is said has cost a million of lives? But in 1839, in the second year of Queen Victoria's reign, Parliament gave relief, in the following ingenious way. The burden was placed upon the land; the landlord must pay the tithe, not the people! The exasperation which followed took a form with which we are all more or less familiar. With the increase in rents which, of course, ensued, there commenced an anti-rent agitation which has never ceased. A repeal of the Union was the only remedy, and to this O'Connell devoted all his energies.

In 1845, in one black night, a blight fell upon the potato-crop. Carlyle says "a famine presupposes much." What must be the economic condition of a people when there is only one such frail barrier between them and starvation! The famine was the hideous child of centuries. There is no need to dwell upon its details. Its name expresses all the horror of those two years, when Europe and America strove in vain to relieve the famishing nation, even those who had food, dying, it is said, from the mental anguish produced by witnessing so much suffering which they could not assuage. The great O'Connell himself died of a broken heart in beholding this national tragedy. When it was over, Ireland had lost two millions of its population. Thousands had perished and thousands more had emigrated from the doomed land to America, there to keep alive, in the hearts of their children, the memory of their wrongs.

Out of this wreck and ruin there arose the party of "Young Ireland," led, with more or less wisdom, by Mitchell, Smith O'Brien (descended from Brian Boru), Dillon, and Meagher. Mitchell was soon transported, and later O'Brien and Meagher were under sentence of death, which was afterward commuted, Meagher surviving to lay down his life for the North in the civil war in America. It is not strange that these men were driven to futile insurrections, maddened as they were by the sight of their countrymen, not yet emerged from the horrors of famine, forced in droves out of the shelter of their miserable cabins, for non-payment of rent. It has been told in foregoing pages how it came about that absentee English landlords owned a great part of Ireland. From this had arisen the custom of subletting; and when it is known that sometimes four people stood between the tenant and the landlord, it will be realized how difficult it was to place responsibility, to do justice, or to show mercy in such an iniquitous system. It was the system, not the landlord, that was vicious. Eviction has done as much as famine to depopulate Ireland. It has driven millions of Irishmen into America; and the cruelty and even ferocity with which it has been carried out cannot be overstated. Whatever the weather, for the sick, or even for the dying, there was no pity. Out they must go; and to make sure that they would not return, the cabin was unroofed! And then, if the wretched being died under the stars by the road-side, he might, in the words of Mitchell, "lift his dying eyes and thank God that he perished under the best constitution in the world!"

At the close of the American civil war it was believed by Irishmen that the strained relations between England and America would lead to open conflict. An organization named Fenians (after the ancient Feni) formed a plan for a rising in Ireland, which was to be simultaneous with a raid into Canada by way of America.

The United States Government took vigorous action in the matter of the Canadian raid, and the failure of this and of other violent attempts at home put an end to the least creditable of all such organizations.

It was in 1869 that Mr. Gladstone realized his long-cherished plan for the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland. The generations which had hoped and striven for this had passed away, and in the Ireland which remained, there was scarcely spirit enough left to rejoice over anything. The words Home Rule were the only ones with power to arouse hope. With the Liberal Party on their side, this seemed possible of attainment. In 1875 Charles Parnell entered the House of Commons and became the leader of a Home Rule Party. But the question of evictions, of which there had been 10,000 in four years, became so pressing, that he organized a National Land League, which had for its object the relief of present distress, and the substitution of peasant-proprietorship for the existing landlord system; an agrarian scheme, or dream, to which Mr. Parnell devoted the rest of his life. Mr. Parnell's weapons were parliamentary. He introduced an obstructive method in legislation which caused extreme irritation and finally antagonism between the Liberal Party and his own. This, together with the unfounded suspicion of complicity in the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, in 1882, militated against Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Act, which was defeated in 1886; and the cause awaited another champion.

But while the door bearing the alluring words "Home Rule" still remains rigidly closed, another has unexpectedly opened. One of the first subjects to engage the attention of King Edward VII. after his accession was the settlement of the Irish agrarian question which that practical Monarch recognized as the most essential to the pacification of his Irish subjects. This has resulted in an ingeniously devised system of peasant-proprietorship, which is made possible by Government aid, in money and credit. The New Land Act, embodying this result, went into effect November 1, 1903, whereby tenants, sub-tenants, or people who are not tenants may purchase land in small lots and hold it as their own, by the payment of a small annual rental which applies to the purchase. It is impossible to give here the complicated details which insure this result with benefit to landlord, tenant, and also to the Government itself. But a remedy seems to have been found which accomplishes all this; and the condition, more demoralizing to Irish life and character than any other, has been removed. With the sense of peace and permanence, and even of dignity, which comes from proprietorship it is hoped a new day is dawning for the peasantry of that unhappy country.

It has been Ireland's misfortune to be geographically allied to one of the greatest European Powers. She has been fighting for centuries against the "despotism of fact." She has never once loosened the grasp fastened upon her in 1171; never had control of her capital city, which, built by the Northmen, has been the home of her political masters ever since. Of course everyone knows that when the English Government solemnly doubts the capacity of the Irish people for Home Rule, its solicitude is for England, not Ireland.