Far different was the case of the Milesian Irish. Their history had been a series of heroic struggles, ending in what appeared to be irretrievable disaster. Before the process of consolidation, which was simultaneously going on all over Europe, and which would have welded the various septs and kingdoms into one nation, could be completed, the Norman invasion under Strongbow had introduced a new and more furious element of strife. The Reformation only changed their masters, but changed them for the worse. Hitherto they had been serfs. They now became helots. The glorious deeds of arms of the O’Neals and other chieftains, which more than once threatened to drive the English into the sea, delayed but could not finally avert the complete triumph of combined craft and superior resources. Projects for the extirpation of the native race were freely mooted. Famine, the sword, and the gallows at one time seemed almost to promise it. The same price was set on the priest’s and the wolf’s head. A non-Catholic writer, Lecky, gives this summary of the Penal Code as it existed when O’Connell was born:
“By this code the Roman Catholics were absolutely excluded from the Parliament, from the magistracy, from the corporations, from the bench, and from the bar. They could not vote at parliamentary elections or at vestries. They could not act as constables, or sheriffs, or jurymen, or serve in the army or navy, or become solicitors, or even hold the position of gamekeeper or watchman. Schools were established to bring up their children as Protestants; and if they refused to avail themselves of these, they were deliberately consigned to hopeless ignorance, being excluded from the university, and debarred under crushing penalties from acting as schoolmasters, as ushers, or as private tutors, or from sending their children abroad to obtain the instruction they were refused at home. They could not marry Protestants; and if such a marriage were celebrated, it was annulled by law, and the priest who officiated might be hung. They could not buy land, or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, or hold life annuities, or leases for more than thirty-one years, or any lease on such terms that the profit of the land exceeded one third of the rent. If any Catholic leaseholder so increased his profits that they exceeded this proportion, and did not immediately make a corresponding increase in his payments, any Protestant who gave the information could enter into possession of his farm. If any Catholic had secretly purchased his old forfeited estate, or any other land, any Protestant who informed against him might become the proprietor. The few Catholic landholders who remained were deprived of the right which all other classes possessed, of bequeathing their lands as they pleased. If their sons continued Catholic, it was divided equally between them. If, however, the eldest son consented to apostatize, the estate was settled upon him, the father from that hour becoming only a life-tenant, and losing all power of selling, mortgaging, or otherwise disposing of it. If the wife of a Catholic abandoned the religion of her husband, she was immediately free from his control, and the chancellor was empowered to assign her a certain proportion of her husband’s property. If any child, however young, professed itself a Protestant, it was at once taken from its father’s care, and the chancellor could oblige the father to declare upon oath the value of his property, both real and personal, and could assign for the present maintenance and future portion of the converted child such proportion of that property as the court might decree. No Catholic could be guardian either to his own children or those of any other person; and therefore a Catholic who died while his children were minors, had the bitterness of reflecting upon his deathbed that they must pass into the care of Protestants. An annuity of from twenty to forty pounds was provided as a bribe for every priest who would become a Protestant. To convert a Protestant to Catholicism was a capital offence. In every walk of life the Catholic was pursued by persecution or restriction. Except in the linen trade, he could not have more than two apprentices. He could not possess a horse of more than the value of five pounds, and any Protestant upon giving him five pounds could take his horse. He was compelled to pay double to the militia. He was forbidden, except under particular conditions, to live in Galway or Limerick. In case of a war with a Catholic power, the Catholics were obliged to reimburse the damage done by the enemy’s privateers. The legislature, it is true, did not venture absolutely to suppress their worship, but it existed only by a doubtful connivance, stigmatized as if it were a species of licensed prostitution, and subject to conditions which, if they had been enforced, would have rendered its continuance impossible. An old law which prohibited it, and another which enjoined attendance at the Anglican worship, remained unrepealed, and might at any time be revived; and the former was in fact enforced during the Scotch rebellion of 1715. The parish priests, who alone were allowed to officiate, were compelled to be registered, and were forbidden to keep curates, or officiate anywhere except in their own parishes. The chapels might not have bells or steeples. No crosses might be publicly erected. Pilgrimages to the holy wells were forbidden. Not only all monks and friars, but also all Catholic archbishops, bishops, deacons, and other dignitaries, were ordered by a certain day to leave the country, and, if after that date they were found in Ireland, they were liable to be first imprisoned and then banished; and if after that banishment they returned to discharge their duties in their dioceses, they were liable to the punishment of death. To facilitate the discovery of offences against the code, two justices of the peace might at any time compel any Catholic of eighteen years of age to declare when and where he last heard Mass, what persons were present, and who officiated; and if he refused to give evidence they might imprison him for twelve months, or until he paid a fine of twenty pounds. Any one who harbored ecclesiastics from beyond the seas was subject to fines which for the third offence amounted to the confiscation of all his goods. A graduated scale of rewards was offered for the discovery of Catholic bishops, priests, and schoolmasters; and a resolution of the House of Commons pronounced the prosecuting and informing against papists ‘an honorable service to the government.’”[154]
This is a dark picture. Yet it is drawn by an unwilling hand. Instances might be accumulated where the severity of the law was outstripped by the barbarity of its execution. Important relief bills were passed in 1777 and 1793. But they provided only for the removal of some of the civil and political disabilities of the Catholics. The badge of religious degradation remained untouched. The heaviest fetters of that iron code still trailed after the limbs of the Irish Catholic. It is the glory of O’Connell that he finally snapped them in twain, and trampled them for ever in the dust. Englishman, Norman, and Milesian—the British colonist who clung to a proscribed faith in every quarter of the globe—shared in the results of that herculean labor.
But it is the special claim of O’Connell to the eternal gratitude of that native Irish race to which he belonged, that he, first of all, after that bondage of centuries, taught them to lift up their heads to the level of freemen. Had his work stopped at Emancipation, had his claim to fame and a place in the national memory been included solely in the noble title of Liberator, enough had been done by one man for humanity and his own renown. But in the course of that long struggle a greater and further-reaching consequence was involved. A transformation took place in the character of the native Irish, the full results of which are not yet visible. In their journey through the desert, in their marchings and counter-marchings, their victories and transient defeats, as they neared the borders of the promised land towards which he led them, a change wonderful, but not without parallel, became visible in their spirit and their hopes. Insensibly and by slow degrees the political torpor of centuries yielded to a new and living warmth. A generation sprang up which had flung aside the isolation and submissive hopelessness of 1775, yet was capable of a greater and more sustained effort than the frenzy of despair which prompted ’98. Under the ardor of O’Connell’s burning words, a full understanding of the functions of self-government permeated a race which had hitherto seemed to exist by the sufferance of its masters. He not only liberated his countrymen from religious bondage, he organized them into a nation. He gave them the first impact of self-government since the Invasion. And that impact is never again likely to be lost.
Daniel O’Connell did not, like some other great popular leaders, spring directly from the midst of the people whose passions he swayed and whose actions moved obedient to his will. His family belonged to the old Irish gentry. He had the advantages of that collegiate course in France which was the only way then open to Catholics of the upper classes to afford their sons a liberal education. Yet his family was allied closely enough to the people to make him share in all their feelings, sympathies, and sufferings. The author whom we have already quoted, with that curious blindness, the result of unconscious prejudice, which makes most non-Catholic writers, however otherwise acute, miss the true threads of Irish history, and insult the national sensibility at the very moment they think themselves the most liberal, sets down as a defect in O’Connell what was in reality the secret of his power. “With the great qualities,” he says, “of O’Connell there were mingled great defects, which I have not attempted to conceal, and which are of a kind peculiarly repulsive to a refined and lofty nature. His character was essentially that of a Celtic peasant.”
Yes, this was at once his glory and his strength. O’Connell’s personal traits of character reflected faithfully, on a heroic scale, the national features of his race. Not the coarseness nor scurrility ascribed to it by the stage buffoon or the unsympathetic publicist, but the powerful yet subtle understanding which has won for Irishmen in every age the highest distinction in the field and in the schools, the large, warm heart, easily swayed by generous impulses, the humor closely allied to tears which is the secret of the most popular oratory. It is this thorough identification with the national spirit, with the religion which the persecution of centuries had made inseparable from it, that makes O’Connell without equal or second among the great men who nobly contended for their country’s freedom at the end of the last and beginning of the present century. He stands alone, gifted with a power to which neither the highest intellect nor the most brilliant oratory could otherwise obtain. He swayed the force of the nation he had welded into shape. It was this tremendous lever—obedient, one might almost say without figure of speech, to his single arm—that enabled him to wrest Catholic Emancipation from the combined determined opposition of the King, Parliament, and people of England.
For forty years Henry Grattan labored with chivalrous devotion in the service of Ireland. His eloquence has a charm, a poetical inspiration, a classical finish O’Connell’s never equalled. It thrilled the Irish Parliament like the sound of a trumpet, and held spell-bound the hostile English House of Commons. His patriotism was as unselfish, his zeal, in a certain sense, as ardent as O’Connell’s. Yet what did Grattan ultimately accomplish? What was the end of all these noble gifts and labors? Having, as he said, “watched by the cradle” of the constitutional independence of the Irish Parliament, he lived to “follow its hearse”; and when he died in 1820, Catholic Emancipation, the cause of which had been committed to his hands, became more hopelessly distant than ever. His was individual genius, individual energy, of a very high, if not the highest, type. But it needed something more to win in such a cause. Classical eloquence was thrown away in such a struggle. The concentrated strength of national enthusiasm, careless of form, animated only by a single giant purpose, was demanded. Grattan, though such a man as Irishmen of every creed might well be proud of, was, unfortunately for his success in the attainment of great national aims, neither a Catholic nor identified with the “Celtic peasant.” He lacked the fundamental force bred of the soil. O’Connell, on the other hand, might truly be likened to that fabled giant of antiquity, Antæus, who gained a tenfold strength each time he was flung upon his mother earth. Well might he declare, when reproached on one occasion for the violence of his language, “If I did not use the sledge-hammer, I could never crush our enemies.” It was a war of extremities. It was an epoch surcharged with the elements of moral explosions, when men’s passions were roused to the highest pitch. Those who read now the measured language of Disraeli in Parliament will pause in astonishment when they turn back to the frenzied raving with which he replied on a memorable occasion to the terrible invective of O’Connell. In such an era of violence, of anarchic strife, Grattan’s “winged words” fell harmless, but O’Connell’s “sledge-hammer,” wielded with the arm of Thor, thundered its most effective blows.
Another great Irishman had passed off the stage while the young Dublin law student, Daniel O’Connell, was still only dreaming of the liberation of his country. Edmund Burke—revered and illustrious name!—had rounded off the labors of his long and honorable life in the cause of oppressed humanity, wherever found, by some strenuous and well-directed efforts for the relief of his Catholic fellow-countrymen. Yet he too failed, or at best gained but an indifferent success. The principles he enunciated are imperishable; his arguments will be preserved for ever among the grandest vindications of religious liberty in the English tongue. But in that age they fell upon deaf ears. He too wanted that element of success which comes from identity of race, religion, feelings, opinions, sympathies. To that native Irish race which must ever determine the destinies of Ireland he was a stranger. What a satire upon humanity to expect that men in their position—bondsmen, systematically, and under legal penalties, deprived of all education, of every means of information—could appreciate the teachings of a political philosopher, living in what they regarded, with good cause, as a foreign or even hostile country. It was well if they knew of his existence. He was no leader for them. Nor did Burke ever affect to act with them, but rather for them, upon the convictions of the higher English and Irish classes. Hence it is that O’Connell is to be regarded as the purely national type of leader; by means of action exercising a more powerful influence on human affairs through the wide-spread Irish race than Burke by means of thought.
It will thus be seen that we place O’Connell on a high plane—above, and different from, that of mere orators, or statesmen administering established affairs, however great. He is to be ranked with the nation-builders of all ages. This was the verdict of most contemporary European observers, of Montalembert, of Ventura, and other exponents of continental public opinion. To the English mind he was, and probably will always be, a demagogue, pure and simple. But so no doubt was Themistocles to the Persians. O’Connell stormed too many English prejudices—stormed them with a violence which to his opponents seemed extravagant and unendurable, but without which he could never have gained his end—to be forgiven. The judgment of his countrymen, however—the supreme arbiter for him—is already maturing to a decision in his favor which will place him in a niche in the hall of Irish heroes above all others, and side by side with that old king whose memory recalls the ancient glories and victories of Ireland.
But what of his defeats?—of the failure of Repeal? This is not a panegyric on O’Connell, but a sincere examination of his place in Irish history. In many instances, and above all on the question of Repeal, he miscalculated his forces and the strength of the forces opposed to him. Like the greatest men of action in every age, his movements were directed by the circumstances and exigencies of the occasion, by experience, by the shifting currents of events, by his ability to create those currents, or to turn them to his own purpose. The cast-iron rules of policy which political philosophers formulate in their closets may be singularly inappropriate for the uses of popular leaders. In 1829, under the banner of Moral Force, with the nation arrayed behind him, he had wrested Emancipation from the king and ministry. It was an immense triumph. His temperament was sanguine—an element of weakness, but also of strength. In the hopeless state in which he found Ireland, only a character of the most enthusiastic kind would have ventured on the crusade he opened. In 1843, he thought he could repeat his victory on the question of Repeal. But in 1829 Peel and Wellington yielded, not to moral force, which, so far as Ireland is concerned, is a term unknown in English politics, but to the armed figure of rebellion standing behind it. They were not prepared for the contest. In 1843, the English ministry were ready to crush opposition with an overwhelming military force. If they did not invite rebellion, as in ’98, they were equally ready to ride roughshod over Ireland. The circumstances of the contest had also changed. Catholic Emancipation attacked the religious prejudices of England; Repeal threatened its existence as a nation. It could grant the one, and still maintain its hatred of Popery; it could not yield the other without setting up a legislature with rival interests in politics and trade. The instinct of self-preservation was evoked. No argument will ever convince the average Englishman that in restoring a separate, independent Parliament to Ireland, he is not laying the foundation of a hostile state. The result in 1843 was inevitable. As soon as a sufficient military force was concentrated, remonstrance or negotiation ceased. England simply drew her sword and flung it into the scale. O’Connell and his associates were thrown into prison, and the guns of the Pigeon-House Fort were trained on the road to Clontarf.