In all this there is much that is new in the history of Irish politics; and it were impossible that it should not intensely interest, if not affect, the Catholic millions of America, bound, as most of them are, to Ireland by the sacred ties of faith and kindred and nationality.
What, then, is Home Rule? Is it Fenianism, “veiled” or unveiled? Is it Repeal? Is it less than repeal, or more than repeal? Is it a surrender or a compromise of the Irish national demand; or is it, as its advocates claim, the substance of that demand shaped and adjusted according to the circumstances, requirements, and necessities of the present time?
With the fall of the Young Ireland party, and the disastrous collapse of their meditated rather than attempted insurrection in 1848, there seemed to foes and friends an end of national movements in Ireland for the balance of the century. It is almost a law of defeats that the vanquished are separated into two or three well-defined parties or sections: those whom the blow has intensified and more embittered in their opposition; those whom it wholly overawes, who thereafter consider they have done enough for
honor, and retire entirely from the field; and, lastly, those who recognize, if they do not accept, the defeat; who admit the impossibility of further operations on a position so advanced, fall back upon some line which they imagine they can hold, and, squaring round there, offer battle with whatever of strength and resources survive to them. This is just what resulted in Ireland in 1848-49. The Young Ireland movement of 1848 was never national in dimensions or acceptance. O’Connell’s movement was, from 1842 to 1844; but from that date forward, though there were two or three rival movements or parties, having for their leaders respectively O’Connell, Smith O’Brien, and John Mitchel, no one of them had the nation at its back. The Young Irelanders led away from O’Connell the youth, talent, enthusiasm, and, to a large extent, though not entirely, the resolute earnestness and honesty of the old Repeal party. It is a very common but a very great fallacy that they broke away on a “war policy” from the grand old man whose fading intellect was but too sadly indicated in the absurd conduct that drove the young men from his side. They had no “war” policy or design any more than he had (in the sense of a war attack on England), until they caught up one in the blaze and whirl of revolutionary intoxication scattered through Europe by the startling events of February, 1848, in Paris. They seceded from O’Connell on this point,[140] because they would not subscribe to the celebrated test resolutions (called “Peace Resolutions”) declaring that under no circumstances was it or would it be
lawful to take up arms for the recovery of national rights. Spurning such a declaration, but solemnly declaring they contemplated no application of its converse assertion in their political designs for Ireland, the seceders set up the “Irish Confederation.” But the magic of O’Connell’s name, and indeed the force of a loving gratitude, held the masses of the people and the bulk of the clergy in the old organization. The Confederates were in many places decidedly “unpopular,”[141] especially when, the Uncrowned Monarch having died mournfully in exile, his following in Conciliation Hall raised the cry that the Young Irelanders “killed O’Connell.” Soon afterwards the seceders were themselves rent by a secession. The bolder spirits, led by John Mitchel and Devin Rielly, demanded that the Confederation, in place of disclaiming any idea of an armed struggle against England, should avowedly prepare the people for such a resort. The new secession was as weak in numbers, relatively towards the Confederation, as the original seceders were towards the Repeal Association. The three parties made bitter war upon one another. A really national movement there was no more.
Suddenly Paris rose against Louis Philippe, and throughout Europe, in capital after capital, barricades went up and thrones came down. Ireland caught the flame. The Mitchel party suddenly found themselves masters of the situation. The Confederation leaders—O’Brien, Duffy, Dillon, O’Gorman, Meagher, and Doheny—not only found their platform abandoned, but eventually, though not without some hesitation
and misgiving, they themselves abandoned it too, and threw themselves into the scheme for an armed struggle in the ensuing summer or autumn. It was thought, perhaps, that although this might not reunite the O’Connellites and the Young Irelanders, it would surely reunite the recently-divided sections of the O’Brien following; but it did so only ostensibly or partially. There were two schools of insurrectionists in the now insurrectionary party: Mitchel and Rielly declared that O’Brien and Duffy wanted a “rosewater revolution”; O’Brien and Duffy declared the others were “Reds,” who wanted a jacquerie. The refusal of the leaders to make the rescue of Mitchel the occasion and signal for a rising, led to bitter and scarcely disguised recrimination; and when, a couple of months later, they themselves, caught unawares and unprepared by the government, sought to effect a rising, the result was utter and complete failure. The call had no real power or authority behind it. The men who issued it had not the mandate of the nation in any sense of the word. They were at the moment the fraction of a fraction. They had against them the bulk of the Repeal millions and the Catholic clergy; not against them in any combative sense, but in a decided disapproval of their insurrection. Some, and only some, of the large cities became thoroughly imbued with and ready to carry through the revolutionary determination—an impress which Cork has ever since retained; but beyond the traditional vague though deep-rooted feeling of the Irish peasantry against the hateful rule of England, the rural population, and even the majority of the cities and towns, had scarcely any participation in “the Forty-Eight movement.”
When, therefore, all was over, and the “Men of ’48,” admittedly the flower of Ireland’s intellect and patriotism, were fugitives or “felons”—some seeking and receiving asylum and hospitality in America, others eating their hearts in the hulks of Bermuda or the dungeons of Tasmania—a dismal reaction set in in Ireland. The results above referred to as incidental to defeats as a rule were plainly apparent. Of the millions who, from 1841 to 1848, whether as Repealers, O’Connellites, Confederates, Mitchelites, Old Irelanders, or Young Irelanders, partook in an effort to make Ireland a self-governed or else totally independent nation, probably one-half in 1849 resigned, as they thought, for ever, all further hope or effort in that direction. Of the remainder, a numerically small party—chiefly, though not all, men who had belonged to John Mitchel’s section of the Young Irelanders—became only the more exasperated by a defeat in which they felt that their policy had not had even a chance of trying what was in it; a defeat, too, that left the vanquished not one incident to solace their pride and shield them from humiliation and ignoble ridicule. Chafing with rage and indignation, they beheld the rest of what remained at all visible of the national party effecting that retrograde movement alluded to in a foregoing page. Of all the brilliant leaders of Young Ireland, Gavan Duffy alone now remained to face on Irish soil the terrible problem, “What next?” Openly proclaiming that the revolutionary position could not be held, he ordered a retreat all along the line. Halting for a while on an attempt to revive the original Irish Confederation policy—an attempt which he had to abandon for want of support—he at
length succeeded in rallying what could be called a political party on a struggle for “Tenant Right.” It raised in no way the “national” question. It gathered Presbyterians of the north and Catholics of the south, repealers and anti-repealers, in an organization to force Parliament to pass a bill preventing the eviction of tenant-farmers unless for non-payment of rent; preventing also arbitrary increasing of rent that might squeeze out the farmer in another way. “Come, now, this is something practical and sensible,” said matter-of-fact non-repealers and half-hearted nationalists. “Why, it is craven surrender and sheer dishonor!” cried the irreconcilable section of the ’48 men. A band of thirty or forty members of Parliament were returned at the instance of the Tenant League to work out its programme. They were mostly corrupt and dishonest men, who merely shouted the new shibboleth for their own purposes. Were the people thoroughly in earnest, and did they possess any really free voting power (there was no vote by ballot then), all this could be cured; but as things stood, the parliamentary band broke up in the first three months of their existence. The English minister bought up its noisiest leaders, of whom Keogh (now a judge) and Sadleir are perhaps most widely remembered. In some cases the constituencies, priests and people, condoned their treason, duped into believing it was not treason at all, but “a great thing to have Catholics on the bench.” In other places the efforts of priests and people to oppose the re-election of the traitors were vain; free election amongst “tenants at will” being almost unknown without the ballot. The tenants’ cause was lost. Thus ruin,
in its own way as complete and disastrous as that which overtook the insurrectionary attempt of 1848, now overthrew the experiment of a great popular campaign based on constitutional and parliamentary principles. Not only was there now no movement for nationality in Ireland; there was not an Irish movement of any kind or for any Irish purpose at all, great or little. It was Pacata Hibernia as in the days of Carew and St. Leger.