Falstaff’s reckoning at Dame Quickly’s becomes a moderate score in comparison with this!
I spent half an hour again in the muniment-room at Kilkenny Castle, where, in the Expense-Book of the second Duke of Ormond, I found a supper menu worthy of record, as illustrating what people meant by “keeping open house” in the great families of the time of Queen Anne.[Note [L.]]
Taking a train early in the afternoon, I came on here in time to dine last night with Mr. Rolleston of Delgany, an uncompromising Protestant “Home Ruler”—as Protestant and as uncompromising as John Mitchel—whose recent pamphlet on “Boycotting” has deservedly attracted so much attention on both sides of the Irish Sea.
I was first led into a correspondence with Mr. Rolleston by a remarkable article of his published in the Dublin University Review for February 1886, on “The Archbishop in Politics.” In that article, Mr. Rolleston, while avowing himself to be robust enough to digest without much difficulty the ex officio franchise conferred upon the Catholic clergy by Mr. Parnell to secure the acceptance of his candidates at Parliamentary conventions, made a very firm and fearless protest against the attempt of the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel to “boycott” Catholic criticism of the National League and its methods, by declaring such criticism to be “a public insult” offered, not to the Archbishops of Cashel and Dublin personally, or as political sup porters of the National League, but to the Archbishops as dignitaries of the Catholic Church, and to their Archiepiscopal office. The “boycotting,” by clerical machinery, of independent lay opinion in civil matters, is to the body politic of a Catholic country what the germ of cancer is to the physical body. And though Mr. Rolleston, in this article, avowed himself to be a hearty supporter of the “political programme of the National League,” and went so far even as to maintain that the social boycotting, “which makes the League technically an illegal conspiracy against law and individual liberty,” might be “in many cases justified by the magnitude of the legalised crime against which it was directed,” it was obvious to me that he could not long remain blind to the true drift of things in an organisation condemned, by the conditions it has created for itself, to deal with the thinkers of Ireland as it deals with the tenants of Ireland. His recent pamphlet on “Boycotting” proves that I was right. What he said to me the other day in a letter about the pamphlet may be said as truly of the article. It was “a shaft sunk into the obscure depths of Irish opinion, to bring to light and turn to service whatever there may be in those depths of sound and healthy;” and one of my special objects in this present visit to Ireland was to get a personal touch of the intellectual movement which is throwing such thinkers as Mr. Rolleston to the front.
We were five at table, Mr. Rolleston’s other guests being Mr. John O’Leary, whose name is held in honour for his courage and honesty by all who know anything of the story of Ireland in our times, and who was sent a quarter of a century ago as a Fenian patriot—not into seclusion with sherry and bitters, at Kilmainham, like Mr. Gladstone’s “suspects” of 1881—but like Michael Davitt, into the stern reality of penal servitude; Dr. Sigerson, Dean of the Faculty of Science of the Boyal University, and an authority upon the complicated question of Irish Land Tenures; and Mr. John F. Taylor, a leading barrister of Dublin, an ally on the Land Question of Mr. Davitt, and an outspoken Repealer of the Union of 1800.
I have long wished to meet Mr. O’Leary, who sent me, through a correspondent of mine, two years ago, one of the most thoughtful and well-considered papers I have ever read on the possibilities and impossibilities of Home Rule for Ireland; and it was a great pleasure to find in the man the eleva tion of tone, the breadth of view, and the refined philosophic perception of the strong and weak points in the Irish case, which had charmed me in. the paper. Now that “Conservative” Englishmen have come to treat the main points of Chartism almost as commonplaces in politics, it is surely time for them to recognise the honesty and integrity of the spirit which revolted in the Ireland of 1848 against the then seemingly hopeless condition of that country. Of that spirit Mr. O’Leary is a living, earnest, and most interesting incarnation. He strikes one at once as a much younger man in all that makes the youth of the intellect and the emotions than any Nationalist M.P. of half his years whom I have ever met. No Irishman living has dealt stronger or more open blows than he against the English dominion in Ireland. Born in Tipperary, where he inherited a small property in houses, he was sent to Trinity College in Dublin, and while a student there was drawn into the “Young Ireland” party mainly by the poems of Thomas Davis. Late in the electrical year of the “battle summer,” 1848, he was arrested on suspicion of being concerned in a plot to rescue Smith O’Brien and other state prisoners. The suspicion was well founded, but could not be estab lished, and after a day or two he was liberated. From Trinity, after this, he went to the Queen’s College in Cork, where he took his degree, and studied medicine. When the Fenian movement became serious, after the close of our American Civil War, O’Leary threw himself into it with Stephens, Luby, and Charles Kickham. Stephens appointed him one of the chief organisers of the I.E.B. with Luby and Kickham, and he took charge of the Irish People—the organ of the Fenians of 1865. It was as a subordinate contributor to this journal that Sir William Harcourt’s familiar Irish bogy, O’Donovan Rossa[26], was arrested together with his chief, Mr. O’Leary, and with Kickham in 1865, and found guilty, with them, after a trial before Mr. Justice Keogh, of treason-felony. The speech then delivered by Mr. O’Leary in the dock made a profound impression upon the public mind in America. It was the speech, not of a conspirator, but of a patriot. The indignation with which he repelled for himself and for his associate Luby the charges levelled at them both, without a particle of supporting evidence, by the prosecuting counsel, of aiming at massacre and plunder, was its most salient feature. The terrible sentence passed upon him, of penal servitude for twenty years, Mr. O’Leary accepted with a calm dignity, which I am glad, for the sake of Irish manhood, to find that his friends here now recall with pride, when their ears are vexed by the shrill and clamorous complaints of more recent “patriots,” under the comparatively trivial punishments which they invite.
In 1870, Mr. O’Leary and his companions were released and pardoned on condition of remaining beyond the British dominions until the expiration of their sentences. Mr. O’Leary fixed his residence for a time in Paris, and thence went to America, where he and Kickham were regarded as the leaders of the American branch of the I. R. B. He returned to Ireland in 1885, his term of sentence having then expired, and it was shortly after his return that he gave to my correspondent the letter upon Irish affairs to which I have already referred. He had been chosen President of the “Young Ireland Society” of Dublin before he returned, and in that capacity delivered at the Rotunda, in the Irish capital, before a vast crowd assembled to welcome him back, an address which showed how thoughtfully and calmly he had devoted himself during his long years of imprisonment and exile to the cause of Ireland. Mr. William O’Brien, M.P., and Mr. Redmond, M.P., took part in this reception, but their subsequent course shows that they can hardly have relished Mr. O’Leary’s fearless and outspoken protests against the intolerance and injustice of the agrarian organisation which controls their action. In England, as well as well as in Ireland, Mr. O’Leary spoke to great multitudes of his countrymen, and always in the same sense. Mr. Rolleston tells me that Mr. O’Leary’s denunciations of “the dynamite section of the Irish people,” to use the euphemism of an American journal, “are the only ones ever uttered by an Irish leader, lay or clerical.” The day must come, if it be not already close at hand, when the Irish leader of whom this can be truly said, must be felt by his own people to be the one man worthy of their trust. The thing that has been shall be, and there is nothing new under the sun. The Marats and the Robespierres, the Barères and the Collots, are the pallbearers, not the standard-bearers of liberty.
Towards the National League, as at present administered on the lines of the agrarian agitation, Mr. O’Leary has so far preserved an attitude of neutrality, though he has never for a moment hesitated either in public or in private most vehemently to condemn such sworn Fenians as have accepted seats in the British Parliament, speaking his mind freely and firmly of them as “double-oathed men” playing a constitutional part with one hand, and a treasonable part with the other.
Yet he is not at one with the extreme and fanatical Fenians who oppose constitutional agitation simply because it is constitutional. His objection to the existing Nationalism was exactly put, Mr. Rolleston tells me, by a clever writer in the Dublin Mail, who said that O’Connell having tried “moral force” and failed, and the Fenians having tried “physical force” and failed, the Leaguers were now trying to succeed by the use of “immoral force.”
Dr. Sigerson, who, as a man of science, must necessarily revolt from the coarse and clumsy methods of the blunderers who have done so much since 1885 to discredit the cause of Ireland, evidently clings to the hope that something may still be saved from the visible wreck of what has come, even in Ireland, to be called “Parnellism,” and he good-naturedly persisted in speaking of our host last night and of his friends as “mugwumps.” For the “mugwumps” of my own country I have no particular admiration, being rather inclined, with my friend Senator Conkling (now gone to his rest from the racket of American politics), to regard them as “Madonnas who wish it to be distinctly understood that they might have been Magdalens.” But these Irish “mugwumps” seem to me to earn their title by simply refusing to believe that two and two, which make four in France or China, can be bullied into making five in Ireland. “What certain ‘Parnellites’ object to,” said one of the company, “is that we can’t be made to go out gathering grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. Some of them expect to found an Irish republic on robbery, and to administer it by falsehood. We don’t.”[27] This is precisely the spirit in which Mr. Rolleston wrote to me not long before I left England this week. “I have been slowly forced,” he wrote, “to the conclusion that the National League is a body which deserves nothing but reprobation from all who wish well to Ireland. It has plunged this country into a state of moral degradation, from which it will take us at least a generation to recover. It is teaching the people that no law of justice, of candour, of honour, or of humanity can be allowed to interfere with the political ends of the moment. It is, in fact, absolutely divorcing morality from politics. The mendacity of some of its leaders is shameless and sickening, and still more sickening is the complete indifference with which this mendacity is regarded in Ireland.”