“A system thus based on secure mathematical considerations, and taking as its starting-point a vacuum and atoms—the former actionless and passionless, which recognizes in compound bodies specific arrangements of atoms to one another; which can rise to the conception that even a single atom may constitute a world—such a system may commend itself to our attention for its results, but surely not to our approval, when we find it carrying us to the conclusion that the soul is only a finely-constituted form fitted into a grosser frame; that even to reason itself there is an impossibility of all certainty; that the final result of human inquiry is the absolute demonstration that man is incapable of knowledge; that the world is an illusive phantasm; and that there is no God.”
Such is the sentence passed upon Democritus and the atomic theory by Dr. Draper, on whom Prof. Tyndall assures us that he relies implicitly as an authority in the history of philosophy. Dr. Draper’s account of the philosophical opinions and writings of Cicero is in the highest degree inaccurate. But enough; we have done with him, and we advise Prof. Tyndall to seek a better guide. Suppose, for example, he were to read the dialogue of Velleius and Cotta in the first book of the De Natura Deorum.[153]—Edinburgh Review.
DANIEL O’CONNELL.
Man seeks in nature a hidden sympathy with himself. The quickened beatings of his heart, the restless currents of his mind, make for themselves a reflex image in the forces of the sea and sky. For ever, the white crests of the breakers rolling in from the western ocean curl up and lash themselves against the rocks on the coast of Kerry. For ever, in the gray dusk, the waves, advancing and retreating, moan out a sad and hollow sound. In sorrow and in gladness their monotone is the same. Yet it well might be that the Irish peasant, in the year 1775, gathering kelp for his patch of land from the shallow coves where the sea broke in over his naked feet, felt, without thinking too closely about it, that nature, chill, leaden, and stern, mirrored there his own lot. The sudden gleams of blue sky through the drifting clouds reflected a buoyant humor that no sufferings could quite subdue.
George III. had reigned fifteen years. Dull, bigoted, cruel; striving in a blind way to be honest, but his blood tainted with the stains of centuries of intolerance, he was now the living type of Protestant fanaticism. In Europe, the old order of things existed without break or fissure. In America, the first heavings of the volcano were plainly felt. The King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland existed in name. The Irish Parliament sat in College Green to register the degrees of the English Privy Council. But what a Parliament! Four millions of Catholics without a representative. The broken Treaty of Limerick might still be spoken of among the traditions of the Irish peasantry, but its guaranties had sunk more completely out of the mind of the English and Irish legislatures than the statutes of Gloucester. The Penal Code was in full legal effect. Burke had described it a few years before with the calmness of concentrated passion as “well-digested and well-disposed in all its parts; a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” Yet even Burke hardly gave credit enough to the magnificent qualities of the race which was able to survive this code. It failed in its object. It did not succeed in extirpating them. It never could degrade them, for they yielded neither to its blandishments nor its terrors.
But though holding fast the faith with such power as if God’s arm specially supported them therein for providential ends, English Protestant domination had broken down and crushed this once proud race to the very earth, in all material ways. The Israelites sweated not more hopelessly in the Egyptian sands. In some respects the lot of the Irish was worse. Their task-masters were an intruding race; they were aliens in their own land. The face of the country in many places still bore mute witness to Cromwell’s pathway of blood and fire. Then the scriptural image had been reversed, and the Irish had been hewn down like the Canaanites of old. The noonday horrors of Drogheda and Wexford had left a scar in the national memory which time has not yet effaced. Murder, lust, and rapine, under the guise of religious fanaticism, had made this people throw up its hands despairingly to heaven, as if hell itself had been thrown open, and its demons issued forth to scourge the land. The XVIIIth century had opened under changed, but it could hardly be said better auspices. The fury of destruction had ceased, but had been succeeded by the ingenious devices of legislative hatred and tyranny. The sword of Cromwell, dripping with the blood of men, women, and children, had given place to the gibbet of William of Orange. The lawless murderer was followed by the judicial torturer and jailer. The successors of William III. trod faithfully in his footsteps. The parliaments of Anne, of George I., of George II. heaped new fetters on the Irish papist. What wonder that a lethargy like death settled down upon the native race? The national idea was almost lost. It wavered and flickered like an expiring flame, yet was not quite extinguished. In caves and barns, by stealth, and at uncertain times, the Irish priest poured out a little oil from his scanty cruse which kept alive in the heart of his countrymen the memory of his religion and his national history. The “iron fangs” of the code relaxed a little during the first years of the reign of George III. Its victim lay stretched supine. More truly even than on a later occasion the words of Henry Grattan might have been applied to the condition of the country. Ireland “lay helpless and motionless as if in the tomb.” But though politically dead, the vitality of the race was inexhaustible, unconquerable. Population increased. There was little or no emigration except among the Protestant linen weavers of the north. The amazing fertility of the soil, spite of legislative drawbacks, made food plentiful. An English traveller, Arthur Young, in 1776, found the Irish peasantry quiet, apathetic, content to till their wretched holdings, at the mercy of their landlords, without complaint so long as they could keep a shelter over their heads, and had potatoes enough to eat. Political ambition or aspirations, the hope or even desire of shaking off their chains and asserting their rights as freemen, did not seem to exist among them. Thus far the oppression of centuries had done its work. Some efforts at enfranchisement had been made by the Norman Catholic aristocracy and the few old families of pure Irish blood who still held their estates, or portions of them, by sufferance; but the words of Swift continued true of the mass of the native race—not from want of natural capacity or manhood—far from it; but from the effect of this grinding oppression of centuries, and the systematic uprooting of all organization among them by English policy. They were “altogether as inconsiderable,” said the author of Drapier’s Letters, “as the women and children, … without leaders, without discipline, … little better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and out of all capacity of doing any mischief if they were ever so well inclined.” Swift went further and declared them devoid of “natural courage.” But this was the libel of the Protestant Dean, not the belief of the Irish patriot. The title of the land, with a few unimportant exceptions, had passed completely out of the native race. Under the law none could be purchased. Education was forbidden. Yet such was the ardor of the inherited love of learning which had once distinguished the island, that Arthur Young found everywhere schools under the hedges, or, as he himself says, often in the ditches.
The breath of liberty was beginning to stir among the Protestants of the north, and the Volunteer movement was soon to lead the way to the short-lived recognition of the legislative independence of Ireland which terminated with the Union. But among the mass of the Catholic Irish peasantry no corresponding feeling as to their political rights was manifested, or was even in any degree possible. Arms were forbidden them. Terrible as the appellation sounds applied to that chivalrous race which had won a deserved renown on so many battlefields of Europe, at home they, were, in all outward respects, helots. The risings which sometimes took place were seldom or never political. They were solely agrarian. The infamous tithe-proctor roused a spasmodic, bloody resistance, which ended with the removal of the special cause exciting it, never extending to any effective organization against the political slavery under which they lay torpid. The Whiteboys and Hearts of Steel were not the material, nor were their aims and programmes the policy, out of which could spring such a revolution as was contemporaneously taking place in the American colonies. The mass of the people looked on in hopeless indifference at the outbreaks of those secret societies, or in some instances voluntarily combined against their indiscriminate violence. The native Irish bore their misery alone, without friends or sympathy except from France; and the interference of this power, by means of some feeble and unsuccessful landings in Ireland, served only to irritate England and tighten the chains of her captive. The mighty lever of moral support which is now wielded by the united voice of her sons in every quarter of the globe did not exist. In some counties, such as Kerry, where the native language was chiefly spoken, and the Milesian Irish largely predominated, the harsh hand of the law was never stretched out but to seize upon the substance or the life of the people. The memory of liberty could scarcely be said to exist in the hearts of this ancient race. That gift which the Greek fable had declared to have remained at the bottom of Pandora’s box when all else escaped, seemed to have taken wing from Ireland. Hope had fled.
In that age, under those skies, Daniel O’Connell was born.