On the other hand Catholic Ireland as a whole, and especially its leaders, ecclesiastical and other, viewed the enactment of the legislative Union with a kind of apathetic despair. Nothing apparently was to be hoped from the Irish Parliament in the direction of real religious equality or reform of the franchise: nothing more could be expected from armed resistance after the signal failure of the rebellion. The country was occupied by an English army and, whatever they thought, they must think in silence. Hopes were held out that the Union might bring Catholic Emancipation, that the Catholic clergy might receive a State subsidy similar to that given to the Presbyterian ministers. They were to find that Catholic Emancipation was no more to the taste of England than to that of the Irish Parliament and that a State subsidy to the Catholic Church would only be granted at the price which Castlereagh desired the Presbyterian ministers to pay for the Regium Donum. But for the moment they did nothing and there was nothing that could be done. Entitled to vote but not to sit in Parliament, but half-emancipated from the bondage, material and moral, of the Penal Laws, they had no effective weapon at their disposal within the constitution, and the only other weapon that they had had broken in their hands. They were forced into a position of silent and half-hearted protest, and have ever since been at the disadvantage of having to appear as the disturbers of the existing order. The hopes held out by the promoters of the Union were not realized without prolonged and violent agitation, and the cause of Ireland appeared doubly alien, clothed in the garb of a Church alien to the legislators to whom appeal was made. That the national cause was first identified with the claims of Irish Catholics to religious equality is the damnosa hereditas of Irish Nationalism in the nineteenth century. The music of “the Pope’s Brass Band” drowns the voice of orator and poet. The demand that the nation as a whole should no longer be compelled to support the establishment of the Church of a minority was represented as a move on the part of the Roman Curia to cripple Protestantism in the United Kingdom. The demand for the reform of the worst land system in Europe was looked upon as a resistance to the constitution inspired by the agents of the Vatican. The Irish people asks for nothing, but the Pope or the Irish Catholic hierarchy, working in darkness, is supposed to have put it into their heads, though the Irish people have taught both Pope and Bishops many lessons upon the distinction between religious authority and political dictation.
Thus there gradually developed during the nineteenth century the Unionist and the Nationalist parties, the former upholding the legislative Union though not averse (upon pressure) to the concession of administrative reforms: the latter under many forms claiming in greater or lesser measure the abolition of the fons et origo malorum, the withdrawal from the people of Ireland of the right to an independent legislature. The historic claim to complete independence has on many occasions been modified in theory or abated in practice by the National leaders: but a survey of the history of Ireland since the Union shows that, with whatever apparent abatements or disguises the claim may have been pressed, there has always been deep down the feeling that behind the Union lay the Conquest, the hope that to repeal the one meant a step upon the road to annul the other.
IRISH NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The political history of Post-Union Ireland opens with an armed rebellion. Robert Emmet for an abortive attempt to seize Dublin Castle was condemned and executed in 1803. His rising was the last effort of the United Irishmen. Since the Union, and for more than a century after his death, the country was governed under a species of martial law, and Coercion Acts were matters of almost annual enactment. The Government could not count on the steady loyalty of any class of the community. The Orange societies required to be placated, the Presbyterians to be muzzled, the Catholics to be suppressed. Castlereagh’s administration was a frank recognition of the fact that Irishmen as a body were hostile to the Union, and that any means might be employed to keep them quiet. For more than twenty years the Catholics waited in vain for the fulfilment of the hopes of emancipation held out at the time of the Union. Meanwhile “the bonds of Empire” continued to be drawn tighter and tighter. In 1817 the Irish Exchequer, the belated relic of Ireland’s independent existence, was amalgamated with that of England, and the long history of the financial oppression of the country began. At last in 1823 Catholic Ireland began the public agitation of its claims for civil equality with Irish Protestants. The agitation, justifiable and necessary in itself, natural and dignified had it taken place in an independent Ireland and had it been of the nature of an appeal to the justice of their fellow-countrymen, assumed the inevitable form of an appeal to a foreign legislature for a justice denied them at home. The Catholic Association founded in 1760 was revived by Daniel O’Connell and in six years’ time, so strong was the feeling aroused, the English Government yielded, for fear (as the Duke of Wellington confessed) of a civil war. O’Connell had talked as if he were ready for anything and the Duke of Wellington seems to have thought that he meant what he said. It was the first victory for “moral force” and O’Connell became enamoured of the new weapon. Next year the Tithe War broke out and ended in 1838 in an incomplete victory, the Tithes, instead of being abolished, being paid henceforth in money as an addition to the rent. But before the Tithe War ended, O’Connell (now member for Clare in the Imperial Parliament) had founded the Constitutional Party by giving his support to Lord Melbourne’s Government. For O’Connell’s policy there was this to be said: that, the Union being an accomplished fact, the only way to secure legislative benefits for Ireland was through the only means recognized by the constitution: that, both English parties being equally indifferent to the special interests of Ireland, it was sound practical policy to secure by an alliance with one or other, as occasion might dictate, some special claim upon its consideration and (incidentally) some hope of appointments to Government positions of Irishmen in sympathy with the majority in Ireland: that the only alternative was open defiance of the Constitution and the sacrifice of what otherwise might be gained by its recognition. Against his policy it could be urged that to employ constitutional forms was to recognize a constitution repugnant to his declared convictions; that appeals to the Parliament of the United Kingdom tended in practice to intensify Irish divisions and to break up the nation into two groups of litigants pleading before a bar which viewed them with an indifferent disdain; that in any case success in the appeal would be the result of accident and circumstance or be dictated by the interests of English policy. Between these two views of Irish national policy Ireland has been divided and has wavered ever since.
But O’Connell, having been successful once, seems to have conceived it possible to be successful always, and he decided to attempt the Repeal of the Union. It is hard to suppose that he thought this possible by any means which he was prepared to use. In 1840 he founded the Repeal Association, and in two years’ time he had practically the whole of Catholic Ireland, and a small but enthusiastic body of Protestants, behind him. Monster meetings were held all over the country. Repeal Clubs were founded, recruits pressed in, “moral force,” in the form of threats that “he would either be in his grave or a freeman” within a reasonable time, was employed by the leader. But when the Government proclaimed the meeting, announced to be held on Sunday, October the 8th, 1843, at Clontarf, chosen as the scene of Brian Boroimhe’s crowning victory over the Danes, O’Connell yielded at discretion. No reform, as he proclaimed afterwards, was worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood; and Brian’s battlefield saw the troops wait all day long for the foe that never came. Unable to persuade, O’Connell was unprepared to fight, the enemies of Repeal. But the Repeal Association continued: the Repeal members of Parliament either were (like O’Connell) arrested and imprisoned or withdrew from Westminster to deliberate in Ireland upon Committees of the Repeal Association on matters of national moment. As time went on, O’Connell (and still more his worthless son, John) gave the Association an ever-increasing bias towards sectarianism and away from Nationalism. He fought the “Young Ireland” Party, as Davis, Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel and their associates were called, who carried on the purely national and liberal traditions of the United Irishmen, and finally forced them to secede. Their paper The Nation, founded in 1842, was until its suppression the mouthpiece of the liberal and really National Party. It voiced in impassioned prose and verse the aspirations of the historic Irish nation. Its guiding spirit, Thomas Davis, was a member of a Protestant family in Mallow, and its contributors comprised men of all creeds, Irish and Anglo-Irish, who looked forward to the revival of Irish culture, of the Irish language and of an Irish polity in which room would be found for all sons and daughters of Ireland, free to develop as one of the family of European nations, released from all outside interference in national concerns. But Irish divisions, fostered by the Union, fomented by statecraft and furthered by many Irishmen, grew steadily more pronounced. Thomas Davis and his friends, at the risk of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, did their utmost to promote union on the basis of a common pride in Ireland’s past and a common hope for Ireland’s future. The Committees of the Repeal Association worked hard at reports upon Irish needs and Irish conditions. They promoted the composition and publication of Repeal Essays pointing to the results of the Union in diminishing manufactures and in an impoverished national life. They had a temporary success, and their writings were destined to supply inspiration to their successors, but they were battling with a running tide. The moderate people, tired of the struggle, were finding in Federalism a resting place between conviction and expediency or had made up their minds to accept the Union. The gradual process of Anglicization went on apace. The establishment in 1831 of the Board of National Education under the joint management of Catholic, Protestant and Presbyterian dignitaries was, in spite of much opposition, making sure headway. It was destined to destroy for all practical purposes the Gaelic language which till then had been in common use in all parts of Ireland. It proscribed Irish history and Irish patriotic poetry in its schools. It was seized upon by ecclesiastics of all persuasions and made, in the name of religion, a potent instrument of a policy of internal division and mistrust. It placed education, with all its possibilities of national culture and national union, in the hands of a Board definitely anti-national in its outlook, working through instruments to whom sectarian prejudices meant more than national welfare. Had Davis lived he might have done much with his great gifts, his tolerant spirit and his heroic temper: his death in 1845 was one of the greatest losses which Ireland suffered during the nineteenth century. O’Connell, whose later activities had been almost wholly mischievous, died two years later just as the full horror of the Famine burst upon the country. The Government which had assumed responsibility for the interests of Ireland, met this awful visitation with an ineptitude so callous as almost to justify John Mitchel’s fiercest denunciations. While the crops were being exported from the country over 700,000 persons died of starvation and as many again by famine fever. When the fever and famine had done their work, the clearances began. The population fled from the country where there was nothing left for them or, if they did not fly, they were shipped off by the landlords to leave room for the development of grazing farms. From 1846 to 1851, one million and a quarter of the population “emigrated,” and in the next nine years they were followed, thanks to the same causes, by another million and a half. During the same period 373,000 families were evicted from their holdings to provide room for a handful of graziers.
The Famine and its consequences seemed a final proof of the failure of the English Government to preserve the elementary interests of Ireland, and a section of the Young Irelanders could see no other remedy than an appeal to force, if they were to regain independence and keep Ireland from destruction. John Mitchel seceded from The Nation and founded The United Irishman, in which week after week with extraordinary eloquence and courage he advocated the policy of resistance. He advised the peasantry to procure arms, to manufacture pikes, if nothing better could be had, to resist the official searches for arms (for a stringent Coercion Act had been one of the weapons with which the Government combatted the Famine) and to refuse to allow food to leave the country. He appealed in a series of letters to the Protestant farmers of Ulster to help Ireland as they had helped before in the days of the United Irishmen. Had all the leaders of the Young Ireland Party possessed the spirit of Mitchel, and had any of them known how to organize a rebellion, they would not have lacked a very formidable following. But Mitchel was arrested, sentenced and transported before anything was done and the actual outbreak under Smith O’Brien and Meagher was doomed to failure from the outset.
Mitchel had advanced far beyond “moral force” and the Repeal of the Union. He had definitely renounced the idea of arguing the Union out of existence: he regarded no policy as either practicable or manly which did not begin and end in the assertion that Ireland was a free country and was prepared to adopt any and every means to put her freedom into practice. Like all the Young Irelanders, he had begun his political life as a Repealer and a follower of O’Connell; he had appealed to the Irish gentry to act again as they had acted in 1782. But Irish history since the Union and especially the experiences of the Famine years (there had been several partial famines before 1846) was making some serious thinkers very sceptical of a political solution which left one of the main factors of politics out of account. The man who saw the defects of the Repeal solution and exposed them most trenchantly and convincingly was James Fintan Lalor. In a series of letters and articles written for The Nation and for the Irish Felon he expounded a theory of nationality which went to the very roots of political facts. His policy was not Repeal; “I will never,” he said, “contribute one shilling or give my name, heart, or hand, for such an object as the simple repeal by the British Parliament of the Act of Union.” The facts of everyday life in Ireland showed that a new social system was required, the old having had its day. “There was no outrise or revolt against it. It was not broken up by violence. It was borne for ages with beggarly patience, until it perished by the irritation of God in the order of nature.” So long as a system remained in which the land of Ireland was not in possession of the people of Ireland, no repeal or other measure purely political would avail. If the landlords were to remain (and Lalor had no desire to expel them if they were willing to submit to the paramount right of the nation) they must accept their titles to whatever rights should be theirs from the Irish nation and the Irish nation only. “The principle I state, and mean to stand upon, is this” (he wrote) “that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they, and none but they, are the landowners and lawmakers of this island; that all laws are null and void not, made by them, and all titles to land invalid not conferred and confirmed by them; and that this full right of ownership may and ought to be asserted and enforced by any and all means which God has put in the power of man.” The coming of the lean years culminating in the Famine had taught Lalor the overwhelming importance of the question: “A revolution is beginning to begin which will leave Ireland without a people unless it be met and conquered by a revolution which will leave it without landlords.” Failure to observe (or to see the importance of) the land question had led to the defeat of Mitchel and Smith O’Brien. “They wanted an alliance with the landowners. They chose to consider them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce them to hoist the green flag. They wished to preserve an Aristocracy. They desired, not a democratic, but merely a national revolution. Who imputes blame to them for this? Whoever does so will not have me to join him. I have no feeling but one of respect for the motives that caused reluctance and delay. That delay, however, I consider as a matter of deep regret. Had the Confederation, in the May or June of ’47, thrown heart and mind and means and might into the movement I pointed out, they would have made it successful, and settled at once and for ever all quarrels and questions between us and England.” But though Lalor insisted on the importance of the question of the ownership of the soil and confessed complete indifference to Repeal, an indifference which he claimed was largely shared by the people of Ireland (for Repeal, as he said, the Irish wolf dog “will never bite, but only bark”) he was a land reformer, not out of a lack of interest in political questions, but out of an intense belief in the realities of politics. He never joined the Repealers, partly because O’Connell and his following disgusted him; as he says in a letter to Gavan Duffy: “Before I embarked in the boat I looked at the crew and the commander; the same boat which you and others mistook in ’43 for a war frigate because she hoisted gaudy colours and that her captain swore terribly. I knew her at once for a leaky collier-smack, with a craven crew to man her, and a sworn dastard and a foresworn traitor at the helm—a fact which you and Young Ireland would seem never to have discovered until he ordered the boat to be stranded and yourselves to be set ashore.” This language may be unnecessarily vigorous and hurtful but the judgment is not essentially unjust. But it was not merely disgust which kept Lalor out of the Repeal ranks. He disbelieved utterly in the Repeal of the Union as a solution for the Irish question. It was in the first place impracticable. “You will NEVER, in form of law, repeal the Act of Union. Never, while the sun sits in heaven, and the laws of nature are in action. Never, before night goes down on the last day.” What was, however, practicable was to claim the land, refuse to pay rent for it, and institute a protracted, obstinate and violent resistance to the attempt on the part of English troops to take it back again. Once the land was again in the possession of the people of Ireland their ultimate policy would be clear. “Not the repeal of the Union, then, but the Conquest—not to disturb or dismantle the Empire, but to abolish it utterly for ever—not to fall back on ’82 but act up to ’48—not to resume or restore an old constitution, but found a new nation and raise up a free people, and strong as well as free, and secure as well as strong, based on a peasantry rooted like rocks in the soil of the land—this is my object.” “Not the constitution that Wolfe Tone died to abolish, but the constitution that Wolfe Tone died to obtain—independence; full and absolute independence for this island, and for every man within this island.” Lalor knew well enough that this meant fighting in the long run, but he thought that it was worth fighting for while Repeal of the Union was not: but who was to lead the fight? Little was to be looked for from the Repeal leaders, content with “a small Dublin reputation,” with neither the desire nor the talents to lead a nation. His last article in the Irish Felon, written while Smith O’Brien and Meagher were in prison, is an impassioned appeal for someone to lead a nation that was only waiting for a man. “Remember this—that somewhere and somehow and by somebody, a beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green for ever?”
The perenni fronde corona which Lalor promised has not yet been won and may never be won by the means which Lalor thought of, but the influence of his writings upon later Irish political thought has been profound. The Repeal Movement brought out three men of real genius—Davis, Mitchel and Lalor. Davis was always more than a simple Repealer; his mind took in too great a range, his knowledge was too wide, his commonsense too great, to see in Repeal of the Union the ultimate end of Irish political endeavour. Mitchel abandoned Repeal for Revolution in hot blood and out of a haughty heart. Lalor had the cool head and the keen eye and the sense of reality which Mitchel lacked; but though he wrote less and did less and suffered less, what he lost in immediate reputation he gained in his influence over a later age and in a wider field.