How well Germany remembers her debt of gratitude to those early Irish monks was most eloquently expressed at the great German Catholic Congress at Dusseldorf, less than a year ago. A pilgrimage of the delegates to Keiserswerth to visit the grave of St. Suitbertus, the first Irish monk who spread the light of faith and learning in that land. During this pilgrimage Cardinal Fischer delivered an eloquent discourse on the brotherhood of nations in faith and spoke feelingly on the debt of Catholic Germany to the missionary monks of Ireland.
The one egregious thing which the reading of English history teaches is the English historian’s palpable inability to be candid and unbiased when he comes to deal with Ireland and the Irish. With the true-born Englishman this innate prejudice against his neighboring island and her people comes to him as a heritage of many ages. It is deep-rooted in his very nature and is nourished and fructified by his inordinate vanity and super-consciousness of his own real or imaginary superiority. The average Englishman believes himself and his little islanders to be divinely endowed with prerogatives and powers to govern the rest of the world in their own way. He goes about it in a supercilious, patronizing sort of fashion as though he were conferring an unspeakable kindness on the governed, even while he is shooting or bayoneting him into submission to his law.
The very fact, unnatural as it is, that the Englishman believes himself right and just in all this inhumanity should seem at least to be some palliation of his offences. But failing utterly to make the thus governed see his treatment of them in any such “kindly light” he governs them the more.
John Bull is, in fact, about the only ruler in the governing business who seems not to have yet learned that a people who are least governed are best governed. He has exploited his monarchical powers on about every continent and ocean of the globe with more or less success. The more heroic and manly was the resistance of a smaller country and weaker people to his invasions the more he misrepresented and traduced them in his press and on his platforms. England’s main purpose in this has even been to lower, even abase the countries and peoples which she has thus assailed, in the estimation of other nations. Nothing can be more offensive to the delicate sensibilities of truth and justice than the false show of benevolent unselfishness with which England has embarked upon her campaigns of conquest. She has ever been conspicuously, unmercifully cruel to her Irish subjects in their protests against her oppression. There is scarcely any limit to the extremes into which an individual or a nation’s vanity may lead them. England’s claiming Irishmen of great distinction in arts, arms, statesmanship, and the like to be real Englishmen is probably the most absurd case in point.
But it was left to the Scotch historian, David Hume, to most falsely and malevolently chronicle the dominant characteristics of the Irish people. He was, of course, writing English history from the then English standard viewpoint, at the time when the American colonists were about to rebel against the intolerable tyranny of George III. The Sons and Daughters of Liberty were, in fact, holding their meetings under the old Liberty tree in Boston at the very time Hume was writing his most false annals of Ireland and the Irish. Hearing of Jerry O’Brien’s capture of the British schooner Margaretta, in Machias Bay, several months before the Battle of Bunker Hill, no doubt intensified Hume’s dislike of the Irish. Nor does that “flavor of the old classical culture of Scotland,” pervading his work extenuate in the least the enormity of his falsehood. Nay, the very fact that he must have known better—he to whom was given as a historian “first rank among English writers,”—makes his offence against intellectual integrity all the more despicable. And yet it has been by just such means as this that England has, throughout the past ten centuries, succeeded in keeping the greater part of the rest of the world more or less ignorant of the real characteristics and acquirements of the Irish.
On page 99, Vol. 1, of Hume’s History of England, writing of the “State of Ireland—1172,” he says: “The Irish from the beginning of time had been buried in the most profound barbarism and ignorance....”
Now, with Hume’s wide knowledge of the civilized world, it can scarcely be believed that he wrote in real ignorance of the general status of the Irish people. His classical culture and profound erudition must certainly have enabled him to know the real facts in the case. He could not have so closely surveyed and studied the past history of “the Irish” without knowing that for centuries before the time of which he wrote, Ireland had excelled England in culture “to a very marked degree.” It had, indeed, been the custom for ages for the better class of Englishmen to not only send their sons to Ireland but to go themselves for their education, that they might learn Irish Gaelic, so that by means of it they might study Greek and Latin. “The fame of these early Irish schools,” says Dr. Douglas Hyde in his Literary History of Ireland, page 220, “attracted students in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries from all quarters to Ireland, which had now become a veritable land of schools and scholars.” English, French and German princes flocked to Ireland to reap the benefits of the better educational advantages there than were to be had in their own countries. King Alfred of Northumbria, who was educated in Ireland, had been so pleased with the Irish ways that he ever after “aided and abetted the Irish in England in opposition to Wilfred, who opposed them.”
HONORABLE JOHN B. O’MEARA,
Of St. Louis.
Ex-Lieutenant-Governor of Missouri, and
Vice-President of the Society for Missouri.
But the brilliant Irish scholar, Johannas Scotus Erigend, finally went over to England for the sole purpose of establishing at Oxford University the beginning of classical learning on English soil. He was also summoned to France by King Charles the Bold to lay the foundation of the classics in his kingdom. Yet for more than a century after the classics had been established at Oxford, well-born Englishmen continued to send their sons to Ireland, where the older seats of such learning offered more effective advantages for such studies. Nor was it for the study of the Humanities alone that they were sent. The arts of writing, illuminating and music were also taught with the success that is made possible only by centuries of cultured experience.