The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877

by Various

The present condition of a people is the latest phase of a life that has run through centuries, in all the events of which there may be traced the relation of cause and effect, and whose continuity has never been interrupted, though at times the current may seem to leave its channel, or even to disappear. The past never dies, but with each succeeding moment receives a fuller existence, survives as a curse or a blessing. The passion which urges the human mind back to ages more and more remote, until the gathering darkness shuts out even the faintest glimmer of light, is not mere curiosity, nor even the inborn craving for knowledge; rather is it the consciousness that those ancient times and far-off deeds still live in us, mould us, and shape our ends. We were with Adam when he plucked and ate the forbidden fruit, and that his act should work in us yet, like a taint in the blood, seems to be a postulate of reason not less than a truth of tradition or revelation. The cherishing of great names, the clinging to noble memories, the use of poetry, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, or any art, to give form and vividness to glories, heroisms, martyrdoms, are but the expression of this consciousness that the present is only the fuller and more living past. No vanity, much less scorn or hate, should prompt any one to lift into the light the glory or the shame of a people’s history. As we tread reverently on the ground where human passions have contended for the mastery, we should approach with religious awe the facts which have made the world what it is.

There are many persons, who certainly have no prejudices against the Irish people, many true and loyal Irishmen even, who strongly object to the prominence given to the sorrows and sufferings of Ireland. They would have us forget the past and turn, with a countenance fresh and hopeful as that of youth, to the future. Sydney Smith, full of English prepossessions but an honest lover of liberty, who labored as earnestly and fearlessly as any man of his generation in behalf of the wronged and defenceless, could not restrain his impatience when he thought of the fondness with which Irishmen cling to old memories and sacred associations. In his opinion the object of all government is roast mutton, potatoes, claret, a stout constable, an honest justice, a clear highway, and a free chapel. “What trash,” he exclaimed, “to be bawling in the streets about the Green Isle, the Isle of the Ocean, the bold anthem of Erin go bragh! A far better anthem would be, Erin go bread and cheese, Erin go cabins that will keep out the rain, Erin go pantaloons without holes in them.”

This may be very well, but we are persuaded that there is not an abuse or an evil in Ireland to-day which has not its roots in the remote past, or which can be understood or remedied without a knowledge of Irish history.

The bold anthem of Erin go bragh, which so provoked Sidney Smith, is the thread that leads us through the labyrinth. It is because the Irish are not English that England is neither able nor willing to treat them justly; and if she has rendered herself guilty of the greatest social crime in all history, it is because she has clung for centuries with terrible obstinacy to a policy which left the people of Ireland no alternative between denationalization and extermination. When in England the national spirit dominated and absorbed the religious spirit, the Irish, who had so long maintained their separate nationality, adhered with invincible firmness to the old faith. This was imputed to them as a crime, and became the pretext for still more grievous persecutions. If they were resolved to be Irish and Catholic, England was not less resolved that they should be outlaws and beggars. They were to have no bread or potatoes, or cabins that would keep out the rain, so long as they persisted in singing the bold anthem and acknowledging the supremacy of the pope. The history of Ireland is in great part the history of her wrongs; for a long time to come, doubtless, it will be a history of suffering; and if those who write of her find that they are placing before their readers pictures of death, exile, persecution, beggary, famine, desolation, violence, oppression, and of every form of human misery, they are but describing the state to which her conquerors have reduced her.

But there are special reasons for dwelling upon the wrongs of Ireland. For three hundred years the Irish people themselves and their faith have been held responsible, wherever the English language is spoken, for the crimes of England. The backwardness of Irish industry, and the seeming want of energy of the people in improving their condition, are habitually imputed by statesmen and public instructors to a peculiar indolence and recklessness in the Celtic race, fostered and encouraged by what is supposed to be the necessary influence of the Catholic religion.

The Irish are probably not more Celtic than the French, who assuredly are not excelled in thrift and industry by any other people. There is no country more Catholic than Belgium, nor is there anywhere a more prosperous or laborious people. Irishmen themselves, it is universally admitted, are hard workers in England, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia—wherever, in a word, the motives which incite men to labor are not taken from them; and yet the popular prejudice on this subject is so flattering to Anglo-Saxon and Protestant pride that it remains in the public mind like a superstition, which no amount of evidence can affect. In a former article we have attempted to trace some of the causes to which the poverty and misery of Ireland must be attributed, and we shall now continue the investigation. During the three centuries immediately following the Conquest the country was wasted by wars, massacres, and feuds, carried on by the two armed nations, which fiercely contended for the possession of the soil. The Anglo-Norman colony, entrenched within the Pale, and receiving constant supplies of men and money from the mother-country, formed a kind of standing army, ever ready to invade and lay waste the territories still held by the native population. The Irish people, in self-defence, and also with the hope of driving the invader from their shores, turned their whole attention to war. All the pursuits of peace were forgotten, and the island became a camp of soldiers, who, when not battling with the common enemy, turned their swords against one another. In such a state of society no progress was possible. Then came three centuries of religious wars to add more savage fierceness to the war of races. Under Elizabeth, James I., Cromwell, and William of Orange the whole country was confiscated. The Catholics were driven from their lands, hunted down, their churches and monasteries were burned or turned over to Protestants, their priests were martyred or exiled, their schools closed, their teachers banished, their nobles impoverished; and to make this state of things perpetual the Penal Code was enacted. To this point there was complete harmony between the home government and the English colony in Ireland. But England has rarely poured out her treasure or her blood for other than selfish and mercenary motives. She therefore demanded, as the price of her assistance in crushing the Irish Catholics, that the commerce and industry of Ireland should be sacrificed to her own interests. The House of Commons declared the importation of Irish cattle a public nuisance. They were then slaughtered and salted, but the government refused to permit the sale of the meat. The hides were tanned. The importation of leather was forbidden. The Irish Protestants began to export their wool; England refused to buy it. They began to manufacture it; an export duty, equivalent to prohibition, was put on all Irish woollen goods. They grew flax and made linens; England put a bounty on Scotch and English linens, and levied a duty on Irish linens. Ireland was not allowed to build or own a ship—her forests were felled and the timber sent to England. The English colonies were forbidden to trade with her; even the fisheries were carried on with English boats manned by Englishmen. By these and similar measures Irish commerce and industry were destroyed. Nothing remained for the people to do but to till the soil. In this lay the only hope of escaping starvation. But they no longer owned the land; it was in the hands of an alien aristocracy, English in origin and sympathy, Protestant in religion. The Catholic people, without civil existence, were at the mercy of an oligarchy by whom they were both hated and despised. These nobles owed their titles, wealth, and power to the violence of conquest, and, instead of seeking to heal the wounds, they were resolved to keep them open. In France and in England the Northmen were gradually fused with the original population. They lost their language, customs, almost the memory of their cradle-land. Even in Ireland a considerable portion of the Norman conquerors became Irish—Hibernis hiberniores. But this partial assimilation of the two races was effected in spite of England, who made use of strong measures both to prevent and punish this degeneracy, as it was termed. Had the union between the Irish and the Normans not been prevented by this violent and interested policy, a homogeneous people would have been formed in Ireland as in England, and the frightful wrongs and crimes of the last seven hundred years would not have been committed.

But the interests of England demanded that Ireland should be kept weak and helpless by internal discord; and she therefore used every means to prevent the fusion of the two races. The “Irish enemy,” ever ready to break in upon the settlements of the Pale, was the surest warrant of the loyalty of the English colony to the mother-country, whose assistance might at any moment become essential to its very existence. The native population, on the other hand, was held in check by the foreigner encamped in the land. Had the Irish and the English in Ireland united, they would have had little trouble in throwing off the yoke of England. It was all-important, therefore, that they should remain, distinct and inimical races. All intercourse between them was forbidden. Their inter-marriage was made high treason. It was a crime for an Englishman to speak Irish, or for an Irishman to speak English. The ancient laws and customs of the Irish were destroyed, and they were denied the benefits of English law. As yet the English and the Irish professed the same religious faith; but now even this powerful bond of union was broken. Enemies on earth, they looked to no common hope beyond this life. Three centuries of persecution and outrage followed, during which the Catholic Irish were reduced to such a state of misery and beggary that the only thing which remained in common between them and their tyrants was hate.

Here we have come upon the well-spring of all the bitter waters that have deluged Ireland. The country is owned and governed by a few men who have never loved the country and have always hated the people. Throughout the rest of Europe, even in the worst times, the interests of the lords and the peasants were to some extent identical. They were one in race and religion, rendered mutual services, gloried in a common country, and shared their miseries. The noble spent at least a part of the year on his estates, surrounded by his dependants. Kind offices were interchanged. The great lady visited the peasant woman in her sickness, and the humanities of life were not ignored. Elsewhere in Europe the great land-owners, whether lay or ecclesiastical, were, with rare exceptions, kind to the poor, indulgent to their debtors, willing to encourage industry, to advance capital for the improvement of the land, and thus to promote their own interests by promoting those of their tenants. The privileged classes were not wholly independent of the people. If they were not restrained from wrong-doing by love, they were often held in check by a salutary fear.

But nothing of all this was found in Ireland, where the landlords were in the unfortunate position of having nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the people. They lacked all the essential conditions of a native aristocracy. Their titles were Irish, but all their interests and sympathies were English. They were the hired servants of England, and they were not paid to work for the good of Ireland. They drew their revenues from a country to which they rendered no service; they were supported by the labors of the people whom they oppressed and hated; and they rarely saw the land from which they derived their wealth and titles, but lived in England, where they found a more congenial society, and were not afflicted by the sight of sufferings and miseries of which they knew themselves to be the authors. If the people, maddened by oppression or hunger, revolted, the Irish landlords were not disturbed; for an English army was at hand to crush the rebellion, which was never attributed to its true cause, but to the supposed insubordination and lawlessness of the Irish character. In England there existed a middle class, which bridged over the chasm that separated the nobles from the peasants, and which rendered the aristocracy liberal and progressive by opening its ranks to superior merit wherever found; but in Ireland there were only two classes of society, divided the one from the other as by a wall of brass. The authority of the Protestant oligarchy over the Catholic population was absolute, and they contracted the vices by which the exercise of uncontrolled power is always punished. To the narrowness and ignorance of a rural gentry were added the brutality and coarseness of tyrants. The social organization prevented the infusion of new blood which had saved the English aristocracy from decay and impotence, and the general stagnation of political and commercial life in Ireland had the effect of helping on the degeneracy of the ruling caste. Everything, in a word, tended to make the Irish landlords the worst aristocracy with which a nation was ever cursed; and, by the most cruel of fates, this worst of all aristocracies was made the sole arbiter of the destinies of the Irish people, of whose pitiable condition under this rule we have already given some account.

We turn now to consider the causes which have brought a certain measure of relief to the people of Ireland; and we must seek for them, not in the good-will or sense of justice of Irish or English Protestants, but in circumstances which took from them the power of continuing without some mitigation a policy which, if ruinous to the Irish people, was also full of peril to England.