what I had expected. But the generous, pure, and simple character of the people only made the impression which I received of the frightful wrongs and sufferings which have been and are still inflicted upon them the more painful.
There is not in the civilized world another country where the evils of tyranny and misrule are so manifest. One cannot help but feel that Ireland does not belong to the Irish. It is not governed in their interest; it is not made to contribute to their welfare or happiness. They are not taken into account by its rulers; their existence is considered accidental; a fact which cannot be ignored, but which it is hoped time, with famine, poverty, and petty persecution such as the age allows, will eliminate. The country belongs to a few men who have no sympathy with the mass of the people, who do not even desire to have any. They are for the most part the descendants of needy adventurers who, under Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William of Orange, obtained as a reward of their servility or brutality the confiscated lands of Ireland; or if they belong to the ancient families, they inherit their wealth from ancestors who owed it to a double apostasy from God and their country. It was these men, and not England, who enacted the Irish Penal Code. They are the traditional enemies of Ireland, sucking out her lifeblood and trampling in contempt upon her people. They have filled the land with mourning and death, with the wail of the widow and the cry of the orphan; they have freighted the ships which have borne the Irish exiles to every land under heaven; they have within our own memory crowded her highways with homeless and starving
multitudes; have pushed out her people to make room for sheep and cattle; in ten years have taken from her three millions of her children. My heart grew sick of asking to whom the domains through which I was passing belonged. It seemed to me that the people owned nothing, that the paucis vivitur humanum genus was truer here than ever in ancient Rome. The very houses in which the Irish peasantry live tell the sad tale that in their own country they are homeless. Like the Israelites in Egypt, they must stand with loins girt and staff in hand, ready to move at a moment’s warning. If the little hut shelter them for a season, it is enough; for another year may find them where rolls the Oregon or on the bitter plains of Australia. Ask them why they build not better houses, plant not trees and flowers, to surround with freshness and beauty that family-life which to them is so pure and so sweet; they will answer you that they may not, they dare not. The slightest evidence of comfort would attract the greedy eye of the landlord; the rent would be raised, and he who should presume to give such ill-example would soon be turned adrift. The great lord wants cabins which he can knock down in a day to make room for his sheep and cattle; he wants arguments to prove that the Irish people are indolent, improvident, an inferior race, unfit for liberty. I know that there are landlords who are not heartless. The people will tell you more than you wish to hear of the goodness of Lord Nincompoop, of the charity of Lord Fiddlefaddle. The intolerable evil is that the happiness or misery of a whole people should be left to the chance of an Irish landlord not being a fool and yet having
a heart. To any other people who had suffered from an aristocracy the hundredth part of what has been borne by the Irish, the very name of “lord” would carry with it the odium of unutterable infamy; among any other people the state of things which, in spite of all the progress that has been made, still exists in Ireland, would breed the most terrible and dangerous passions. For my own part, I could not look upon the castles and walled-in parks which everywhere met my view without feeling my heart fill with a bitterness which I could rarely detect in those with whom I spoke. What it was possible to do has been done to hide the land itself from the eyes of the people. Around Dublin you would think almost every house a prison, so carefully is it walled in. The poor, who must walk, are shut in by high and gloomy walls which forbid them even the consolation of looking upon the green hills and plains which surround that city. In the same way the landlords have taken possession of the finest scenery of the island. If you would see the Powerscourt waterfall, you must send your card to the castle and graciously beg permission. People who have no cards are not supposed to be able to appreciate the beauty of one of the most picturesque spots in Ireland. At the entrance to the Devil’s Glen the traveller is stopped by huge iron gates, symbolical of those which Milton has described as grating harsh thunder on their turning hinges; and when he thinks he is about to issue forth again into the upper air, suddenly other gates frown upon him to remind him of the lasciati ogni speranza voi ch’entrate, of Dante. Mr. Herbert has taken possession of half the
Lakes of Killarney, and exacts a fixed toll from all who wish to see what ought to be as free to all as the air of heaven. If ten thousand dollars added to his annual income be a compensation for such meanness, he is no doubt content. It is on the demesne of this gentleman that lies the celebrated ruin of Muckross Abbey. It stands embosomed in trees on a green slope, overlooking the Lower Lake, and commanding one of the loveliest views to be had anywhere. The taste of “the monks of old” in selecting sites for their monasteries was certainly admirable. A church was erected on this spot at a very early date, but was consumed by fire in 1192. The abbey and church, the ruins of which are now standing, were built in 1340, by one of the MacCarthys, Princes of Desmond, for Franciscan monks, who still retained possession of them at the time of Cromwell’s invasion. A Latin inscription on the north wall of the choir asks the reader’s prayers for Brother Thadeus Holen, who had the convent repaired in the year of our Lord 1626. That such a place should have remained in the possession of the monks for more than a century after the introduction of Protestantism is of itself enough to show to what extent the Catholic monuments of Ireland had escaped the destroyer’s hand previous to the incursion of the Cromwellian vandals. The ruins of Muckross Abbey have successfully withstood the power of Time’s effacing finger. The walls, which seem to have been built to stand for ever, are as strong to-day as they were five hundred years ago; and to render the monastery habitable nothing would be required but to replace the roof.
The library, the dormitories, the
kitchen, the cellars, the refectory with its great fire-place, seem to be patiently waiting the return of the brown-robed sons of St. Francis; and in the corridors the silence, so loved of religious souls, is felt like the presence of holy spirits. In the centre of the court-yard there is a noble yew-tree, planted by the monks centuries ago. Its boughs droop lovingly over the roofless walls to shelter them from the storm. In the church the dead are sleeping, and among them some of Ireland’s princes. In the centre of the choir a modern tomb covers the vault where in ancient times the MacCarthys Mor, and later the O’Donoghue Mor of the Glens, were interred. These are the opening lines of the lengthy epitaph:
“What more could Homer’s most illustrious verse
Or pompous Tully’s stately prose rehearse
Than what this monumental stone contains