Ireland had made itself a field of battle, and the only relief for its emergencies was to make it a garrison.
The wisdom of that measure was shown in its fruits—the true test of all statesmanship: Ireland remained undisturbed for seventy years. During the party and popular irritations of the two first Brunswick reigns, during the two Scottish invasions of 1715 and 1745, and during the American war, Ireland was perfectly tranquil—certainly not through loyalty, and as certainly through law. At that time there was no favoured party of agitation—no faction suffered to clamour itself into place, and the country into tumult. There was no relaxation of the laws of the land for scandalous intrigue or insolent importunity. The rule was strict, and strictly administered; no manufacture of grievance was permitted to give a livelihood to a disturber, and no celebrity was in the power of a demagogue, but the ascent to the pillory. Common sense, public justice, and vigilant law, were the triad which governed Ireland, and their fruits were seen in the most rapid, vigorous, and extensive improvement of the country. No kingdom of Europe had ever so quickly obliterated the traces of civil war. Improvement was visible, in every form of national progress. Ireland had previously been a country of pasture, and, of course, of depopulation: it became a country of tillage. It had formerly been totally destitute of commerce: it now pushed its trade to the thriving States of America, and grew in wealth by the hour. It was formerly compelled, by the want of native manufactures, to purchase the clothing of its population from England: it now established the northern province as an emporium of the linen trade, which it still holds, and which is more than a gold mine to a crowded population.
The increase of human life in Ireland was perhaps the most memorable in the annals of statistics. In the beginning of the eighteenth century the population was calculated at little more than 700,000. It now started forth by millions. And the national increase of wealth, intelligence, and public spirit, was shown in a manner equally significant and singular. Ireland had the honour of inventing (if we may use the word) the Volunteers. The threat of a French invasion had alarmed the people, and Parliament asked the important question of the Viceroy, What forces were provided for the defence of the kingdom? His answer was, that he had but 7000 men at his disposal. The nation instantly determined to take the defence on themselves, and they raised an army such as the world had never before seen—wholly spontaneous in its rise, self-equipped, serving without pay, self-disciplined—80,000 men ready for the field!
The armies of Greece and Rome, even when republican, were conscriptions; the levée en masse in France was compulsory, and the guillotine was the recruiting officer; the gigantic columns of the Imperial armies were chiefly raised under the absolute scourge. The land-sturm of the Germans was created under the rigidity of a system which drove the whole population into the field—rightly and righteously drove them; for what but the low selfishness of brawling and bustling Radicalism, or the petty penury of superannuated avarice, would declare it a hardship to defend one’s own country, or hesitate to pay the manly and necessary expenditure which fitted them for that defence? But Ireland, without hesitation, and without stipulation—without the pitiful pusillanimity of a weaver’s soul and body, or the shrinking selfishness of a pawnbroker in the shape of a legislator—rushed to arms, and scared away invasion!
The expense of this illustrious effort was enormous, the occupation of time incalculable—but the act was heroic. And let what will come, whether Ireland is to have a career worthy of her natural powers, or to perish under the ascendancy of her deadly superstition, that act will form the brightest jewel in her historic diadem, as it will the noblest inscription on her tomb. But the whole effort implied the prosperity, as well as the patriotism, of the kingdom. Paupers cannot equip themselves for the field. The country must have had substantial resources to meet the expenditure. The arming of the volunteers would have exhausted the treasury of half the sovereigns of Europe, and yet the country bore it freely, fearlessly, and without feeling the slightest embarrassment in those efforts which were at the moment extending her interests through the world.
We have alluded to this fragment of Irish history, because it illustrates the system of fraud and falsehood under which pretended patriotism in Ireland has libelled, and continues to libel, England—a system which talks of peace, while it is perpetually provoking hostility; which boasts of its zeal for the country, while it is cutting up every root of national hope; and which is equally boastful in the streets, and cowardly in the field.
But another crisis came, and the manliness of the national character was to be tried in a still severer emergency. The Penal Laws were virtually extinguished, on the presumption that Popery was reconcilable by benefits, and that Irish patriotism was not always the language of conspiracy. The mistake was soon discernible in a Popish League for the subversion of the English Government. The “United Irishmen”—a name in itself a falsehood, for the object was to crush one-half of the nation, by establishing the tyranny of the other—were formed into a League. But the League was broken up, not in the field, but in the dungeon, and the insurrection was extinguished by the executioner. Wolfe Tone, the Secretary of the United Irishmen, came over in a French ship of war, to effect the peaceful liberation of his “aggrieved country,” was imprisoned, and cut his own throat. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the hero of novels, and the martyr of poetry, lurked in the capital, in the soldierly disguise of a milkwoman, was taken in his bed, wounded in the arrest, and died of the wound. Not one of the leading conspirators died in the field; all who were not hanged begged their lives, delivered up their secrets for their own contemptible safety, and were transported to America, there to recover their courage, and wipe off their shame, by libelling England.
But among the most cruel acts of those villains was the attempt to involve the students of the University in their crime. Their converts were few, and those among the most obscure; but those were effectually ruined. A visitation was held under the Lord Chancellor Clare, and the delinquents were chiefly expelled. On this occasion Moore was questioned. His intimacy with the family of the Emmetts, who seem all to have been implicated in the charge, and his peculiar intercourse with the unfortunate and guilty Robert Emmett, who, a few years after, was hanged for open insurrection, rendered him liable to suspicion. He was accordingly examined at that formidable tribunal. But his stature was so undersized, his appearance so boyish, and his answers were given with such evident simplicity, that, to suppose him intrusted with the secrets of conspiracy, still less the sharer of a sanguinary revolt, seemed next to impossible, and he was dismissed without animadversion. Thus the future author of so many strains on the slavery of Ireland, and the tyranny of England, the publisher of such stores—
“Of fluent verse, and furious prose,
Sweet songster of fictitious woes”—