In the varied history of the human race few spectacles have ever been presented of equal moral grandeur to those immense peaceful open-air meetings which gathered to hear the great tribune. No greater testimony was ever given of a nation’s confidence and love. Competent judges put down the number who assembled at the Hill of Tara at half a million of people. Yet to the unbiassed observer there is something almost as pathetic in the helplessness of this great multitude—hoping to wrest their independence from England without arms—as grand in the mighty surge of its numbers. It was the confederacy of the sheep against the wolves. O’Connell’s failure shows vividly how narrow is the plank upon which the popular leader walks between an immortal triumph and a prison cell. It reveals the tremendous power residing in an organized government, capable only of resistance by a people in arms and inured to the use of arms. That was a monster meeting of a different kind held on Bunker Hill one hundred years ago, and commemorated this year by these United States.
We are neither impeaching here the wisdom of the course pursued by O’Connell in 1843, nor advising armed rebellion against England at the present day. We discuss simply the historical aspects of the question in the light of the experience of other nations. Nothing can be more hazardous, however, or often absolutely fallacious, than broad generalizations from the history of other countries as capable of determining a particular line of policy for any given state. In nothing else did O’Connell show a higher wisdom as a leader of the Irish people than in rejecting those specious appeals to the success of arms in America, made by the more ardent patriots in 1845-46.
The circumstances of the two countries were radically different. The Americans exhausted every kind of “moral force” at their disposal, and their revolution, when it finally came to blows, was not aggressive but defensive; the policy of England made it incumbent on Ireland to strike the first blow in a contest which she would quickly have found herself unable to sustain. The Americans had a boundless territory; the Irish a narrow island, capable of being pierced from shore to shore by English troops in three weeks. The Americans were trained to arms by a war of one hundred years with the French and Indians, in which they were drilled and fought side by side with English regiments; the Irish—the native Catholic Irish, the people for whom O’Connell was responsible before God and mankind—could not keep a pike since the Treaty of Limerick. An Irish rebellion, therefore, would have meant simply a massacre; and O’Connell, in choosing the wiser course of present submission to superior force, merited as much, although in defeat, the gratitude of his countrymen as he did in his triumph in the cause of Emancipation. For it will have been gathered from what we have already said that we regard O’Connell’s greatest achievement in the service of his country—its political organization, the education of its sons in the knowledge of the rights and duties of freemen—as going on with equal step as well with the unsuccessful agitation for Repeal as with the triumphant struggle for Emancipation. His defeats carried with them the germs of victory. The most ardent lover of his country can scarce escape an uneasy feeling when he reads in the annals of Ireland that story, reiterated with painful monotony, page after page, of the harryings, the devastations, the ceaseless intestine wars, which mark its early history. It would seem sometimes as if the ancient learning of Ireland which produced those numerous and minute chronicles, served only the purpose of a reproach to the island which fostered it. Other nations had struggled through this transition period—common to the whole of Europe—and finally consolidated themselves into peaceful and harmonious states. But it was the misfortune of Ireland that this opportunity of domestic organization was snatched from her by a foreign invasion ending in a domination of which the cardinal principle was to “divide and conquer.” English writers satirize the civil discord of the Irish race, forgetful that from the time of Henry II. to that of George III. it was the steady, and as it then seemed intelligent, policy of successive English statesmen to foster wars between the rival chieftains and clans, to employ them against one another, and in every way to break down any incipient attempt at union, which must have been dangerous, if not fatal, to English power. No man had arisen among the Irish race till O’Connell’s time who neutralized that policy. He showed that they were capable of organization and self-government in a patriotic common cause. In those immense meetings which marked his progress, where men of every county united in one vast brotherhood, he proved, first, that the Irish people loved domestic peace and co-operation as much as any other race; and, secondly, that under happy auspices they possessed a wonderful capacity for order and self control. Even hostile observers concur in expressing as much admiration for the undisturbed peacefulness of those assemblages of from a quarter to half a million of people, as amazement at their vastness, unprecedented in history. They were the foundation of the political education of Ireland.
In another country, and a more remote age, another man of kindred, kingly spirit and organizing power, with whom O’Connell is not unworthy to be compared, had built up his vast empire by like national meetings, not less than by force of arms. In the great national meetings of the Franks, the Champs de Mai, Charlemagne gave the first impress of government to Europe, torn to pieces after the fall of the Roman Empire. O’Connell, another “king of men”—such as the Homeric legend sings of—emulated his labors on a less extended scale in Ireland. But the empire of Charlemagne fell to pieces with his death. Chaos reigned again. O’Connell’s work was more homogeneous, and promises to be more enduring. We are only entering upon the dawn of a more hopeful Irish history.
When we seek a comparison of individual action, in the history of England, with O’Connell’s, we are struck at once with the grand but sorrowful isolation of his position. Fortunate the country which has never needed a liberator! Happy the kingdom whose greatest revolution meant only a change of dynasty, a stronger leaven of republicanism, and surer guarantees against religious toleration! The growth of constitutional government in England has been comparatively steady and uniform. Never—since the amalgamation of races following the Norman invasion—subjected to the terrible consequences of conquest and occupation by a race alien in language, religion, and national prejudices, her political and religious struggles have been wrought out to an issue among her own population. Whenever her civil liberty or parliamentary privileges were threatened, sturdy champions were not wanting among her own sons. Her Pyms, Hampdens, and Eliots find their counterparts in the Grattans and Floods of Ireland. But the deliverer of a crushed and hopeless people, the inspired guide who led them out of bondage and defied their taskmasters, is a figure happily absent in English history.
The imagination naturally turns with vivid interest to great deeds of arms. The pomp and panoply of war, the heroic daring of the headlong charge, the valor, disdainful of death, that awaits with constancy an overwhelming foe—these are incentives to action, in presence of which the labors and even triumphs of peaceful agitation appear tame and slow. And the Irish are a people strongly susceptible to those influences. They are a warlike race. Wherever the tide of battle turns against great odds, where the smoke is thickest, and the carnage deadliest, there will be found some Irish name upholding the traditions of his country’s fame. O’Connell had therefore no easy task in restraining within peaceful limits the immense agitation he had evoked. And in estimating his place in history the same considerations place him at a disadvantage compared with those great warriors, the glitter of whose victories is identified with the warlike glories of their country. The “Bridge of Lodi,” the “Sun of Austerlitz”—these are talismanic words which then rang in people’s ears with startling sequence? Yet if we compare O’Connell’s labors and their results with those of the great soldier whose career had closed while the former was only beginning his peaceful struggle with England, there is no reason to shrink from the verdict. Emancipation was worth many Marengos. The rôle of the Liberator may fairly be set off against that of the Conqueror. The civic crown of green and gold placed on O’Connell’s head on the Rath of Mullaghmast, in the presence of 400,000 men, was an emblem of true sovereignty greater in many ways than that iron crown which Napoleon lifted with his own ambitious hands from the altar at Milan. One was rust-eaten, it might be said, with the blood and tears of unknown thousands; the other was invested with the halo of peace, which the attainment of religious liberty and education in the rights of freemen had introduced into a million humble homes. The career of both Napoleon and O’Connell ended in defeat. But how conflicting the emotions of each as he gazed for the last time on the shores of his country! One, preoccupied by the shattering of his gigantic ambition, and the assertion of petty details of etiquette in the midst of the ruin around him; the other, oblivious of self, weighed down by the doom of famine impending over his country—his last words a solemn and pathetic appeal for its protection. In the hour of adversity, stripped of the adventitious circumstances of power, O’Connell stands forth a figure of greater moral grandeur. Of the victories of Napoleon nothing remains but their name, and the terrible retribution that has followed them. The influence of O’Connell’s unselfish labors in the cause of religious freedom has a future practically endless; and after a season of adversity and apparent forgetfulness, his political maxims and principles are again reviving in Ireland in the constitutional agitation for Home Rule. Not in the demand itself, stopping short as it does of Repeal, but in the means by which alone its advocacy may be made successful.
It is a curious instance of the ebb and flow of historical movements that O’Connell was at one time prepared to take up, under the name of “Federalism,” the present demand for “Home Rule.” Ultimately, as is well known, he was forced to abandon it by the mutiny of his followers, who would be satisfied with nothing less than simple “Repeal.” And this reluctance to adopt a middle course was natural enough at the time. In 1840-45 the Irish people were still too close to the Union; the infamous history of that measure and the burning eloquence of Grattan and Plunkett in denouncing it were too strongly impressed upon the national memory, to allow any hope of success to a leader who would promise less than its total erasure from the statute book. Too many were still living—like O’Connell himself—who could remember the brief yet glorious history of Irish legislative independence, to give up the belief that it was yet possible to see an Irish parliament sitting in College Green. Experience, and the statesmanship which does not aim at the unattainable, have shown the practical superiority of the lesser demand as a political programme at the present day. But this does not impugn the wisdom of the Repeal agitation. The true course of a people in its national affairs is necessarily learned slowly. There is no ready-made chart in politics; and were any offered, Burke’s satire upon geometrical demonstrations in state affairs would be conclusive against it. Experience, even the experience of failure, is the only trustworthy guide; and successive agitations, though varying in their object, keep alive the cause in the national memory.
Though the best and truest friends of Ireland, including that venerable hierarchy which has steadily seconded every rational movement for justice and equal rights, have never hesitated to give their support to O’Connell’s policy of moral force, there have not been wanting from the first restless spirits who have made it their bitterest reproach against him, that he was unwilling to fling away the scabbard and plunge the country into rebellion. It would be unjust to speak of all these men as influenced by unworthy motives. Some of them breathed, and still breathe, the purest aspirations of patriotism. But it was a mistaken patriotism, influenced by examples which might indeed make martyrs, but which would never lift one chain from the neck of their country. They might make good soldiers, but were poor leaders. Ireland was not then, and is not now, in a position to gain anything by a policy of violence.
But there are others, inflamed not with a love of Ireland, but with a spirit of hostility to all governments, who would plunge their country into bloodshed in hope of themselves floating to the top. These men are infected with the spirit of the Commune. They are revolutionists—not in the sense in which Washington or Hampden or O’Connell were revolutionists—leaders of great movements for the liberties of peoples—but socialists, whose single incentive is the envy and hatred of all superior authority. Most of all, they desire to supplant the Irish priesthood as the guides of the people. A sorry exchange, from the well-tried friends, proved by the exacting ordeal of a thousand years, to men of no responsibility—mere political gamblers—whose highest motive is ambition, but a lower and more common one, the love of easy-gotten money from confiding people. These conspirators are the promoters of the secret societies against which O’Connell warned the Irish people. But unfortunately they too often find that generous-hearted race—embittered by the recollection of centuries of oppression—willing to give ear to their delusive promises. Indifferent to their own future, these men rejoice in anarchy. Some of them are no doubt poltroons, who would fly as soon as they had led their dupes into danger. But it would be false to deny them all the attributes of courage. Others would die bravely enough behind a barricade. But their wars are essentially wars of the barricades. If defeated they would perish recklessly, having nothing at stake to make life valuable—absolutely indifferent to the slaughter, to the burned homes, to the widows and orphans of the unfortunate people who had submitted to their fatal guidance. If successful, their next attack would be upon the Catholic Church. But success under such leadership is a delusion wilder than the most exaggerated dream of fiction. They have no conception of a national revolution higher than a conspiracy. The elevated principles, the far-sighted calculations of a Washington, an Adams, or a Franklin, which almost assured success from the start, are an unknown language to them. Blind hatred, even of an existing tyranny, is a poor basis upon which to sustain a long and exhausting war. And no one, with the history of the American Revolution before him, can doubt what the character of an armed struggle with England for the independence of Ireland would be.
The same spirit of patriotism, therefore, that urged Washington to throw his sword into the scale in the contest with Great Britain, animated O’Connell with a contrary purpose in the case of Ireland. Yet not less is the latter deserving of the title of “Father of his Country.” Success has crowned the American patriot with a more splendid fame. But when we weigh the individual exertions of each in his gigantic struggle with the great empire opposed to him, and consider the incalculable advantages which a boundless territory and an intervening ocean afforded to the American leader, the Irish liberator will not suffer from the comparison. Washington was surrounded and sustained by a group of great men who would seem to have been providentially raised up at that momentous epoch to lay the foundations of the noble structure of American liberty. O’Connell, standing alone, an Atlas supporting the fortunes of six millions of Irish Catholics on his shoulders, is a figure unexampled in history. His herculean labors recall the fables of antiquity. In the whole parliamentary history of England we read of no other example of one man facing and trampling over the utmost hostility of that proud and powerful assembly—the English House of Commons.