Ireland and the Irish.

ART. VI.-Ireland and the Irish.

1. England and Ireland. By JOHN STUART MILL, M.P.

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2. The Irish Church and Land Question. A Letter to the Honourable Chichester Fortescue, M.P. By EARL RUSSELL.

3. Contributions to an Inquiry into the State of Ireland. By LORD DurFERIN, M.P.

4. A Plea for the Celtic Race. By ISAAC BUTT, Q.C.

5. Tenant Wrong Illustrated; or a History of Kilkee in relation to Landlordism. By REV. SYLVESTER MALONE.

6. The Irish in America. By J. F. MAGUIRE, M.P.

7. The Irish Church. By W. GODKIN.

8. The Life and Letters of MacCarthy Mor; compiled from State Paper Office Documents. By DANIEL MACCARTHY.

9. The Fate and Fortunes of Hugh O'Neil Earl of Tyrone, and of Rory O'Donnel Earl of Tyrconnel. By REV. B. P. MEEHAN.

10. The Senchus Mor; Vol. 1. of the Ancient Laws of Ireland. Published by Royal Commission.

WITH

7ITH its second city quite lately in a state of siege, with the Habeas Corpus Act suspended for another year, and with prisoners, condemned to fifteen years' penal servitude, saying, as they leave the dock, "I hope to see the English Government overthrown before that time," Ireland must be admitted to be in a very strange and unsatisfactory state. We cannot call its present condition abnormal; for if the years since Strongbow's expedition, during which the country has been thoroughly quiet and well-affected, be reckoned up, they will be found to make a very small part of the period during which the connection between the two countries has lasted.

With the exception, perhaps, of Messene by the Spartans, there has never been a conquest so unsatisfactory, so discreditable to all concerned, as that of Ireland by England. The state of things is well expressed by M. de Lasteyrie, when he speaks of Ireland as a country, "Qui n'a jamais su se défendre, et qu'on n'a jamais su dompter." The native race has neither been extirpated, nor assimilated, nor made friendly, nor even thoroughly subjugated. "It was conquered too late (say some) after the remorseless thoroughness of early conquest had passed away." But surely, though the Norman and first English settlers were, times and circumstances considered, fairly humane, the wars of Elizabeth were as desolating, the fierceness of Cromwell's colonists was as unsparing, as anything recorded even of the Spaniards in Mexico. Those who are not familiar with Irish State Papers know very little of what went

The following paper expresses the views of an intelligent clergyman of the Church of England on one of the most perplexing problems of the present day. With those opinions, so far as they go, we are inclined to agree; but the subject is environed with so many difficulties on every side, that we confess ourselves unable to foresee how it may be satisfactorily settled.-Ed.

on in those days of violence.* They have read in their school histories the stock charges of treachery, cruelty, and disaffection heaped on the Irish by each successive compiler, but they have not cared to ask how it is that the nation got to deserve (if it really does deserve) this character. They have been told by their newspapers that "the Celt" is by nature what their school historians assure them the Irish have always been; but, if they live north of the border, they are met by the difficulty that a considerable body of " Celts," a good deal less mixed, probably, than any in Ireland, are found to be the very reverse of all that the Irish "Celt" is supposed inevitably to be. We have only to read the Queen's Highland Journal, to feel that race is not all-powerful in settling national characteristics. Those noble gillies, nature's true gentlemen, to whom her Majesty did not hesitate to trust her children-those men who stand on such a very different level from the English servingman-are really of the same blood as the Donegal peasant, perhaps as the Mayo cottier. Circumstances have told on the one for good, on the other far too unmixedly for evil, until now the difference between Highlander and Irishman is become so great that we are apt to forget the identity of the two in speech and race, and to lose sight of the truth that this chivalry which her Majesty recognised in her Highland gillies had its birth in Ireland; that there it was systematised, and became a bulwark against brute force, just as it did, much later, in Celtic France against the tyrannical feudalism brought in by the Teutons. It is not, then, that the work of conquering Ireland has been carried on in too gentle a spirit that it has failed to be done thoroughly. It is because England has never dealt with the work on a sufficiently broad scale. James I. shewed by his plantation of Ulster how the thing might be done; to have done it thoroughly would have been far easier two centuries before he began his settlement. But until Henry VIII.'s time the English Government seems to have been well content to leave Ireland to the mercy of the great Norman nobles and native chiefs, who, battling with one another whenever they had an excuse for so doing, owned a very precarious allegiance to the court of London. Conquer well once for all, and then leave people to settle down as best they can side by side; or else abstain from all attempts at subjugation, and, if you rule another people, rule (as we are now doing in India) with careful regard to their prejudices and peculiarities. These are the two rules of common sense; and in her dealings with Ireland,

"No one knows (says Mr Froude), unless he has worked through the Record Office papers, the atrocious things which were done by Elizabeth's English troops. It is always the same miserable story-violent and spasmodic cruelties, followed by the cashiering of the troops to tempt a new rebellion ; and then fresh cruelties . . . ."

Ireland never thoroughly Conquered.

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England has unfortunately been guided by neither. The force which she employed in Ireland was almost always miserably inadequate to anything like thorough conquest; and yet her pretensions to regulate the dress, habits of life, laws and customs of the whole people, were so sweeping that only an absolute ruler should have dreamt of setting them up. Hence two necessary results: dissatisfaction on the part of the Irish, who, knowing the weakness of the invaders, were aggrieved at their insolence; and hatred mingled with contempt on the part of the English settlers, who, a few in the midst of a hostile nation, felt that their only chance of holding their ground was to cling together and to keep the natives down, and, at the same time, to encourage among them those divisions which the new-comers laughed at while they profited by them. This is the origin of "the dominant caste -a name of evil import all through Irish history; and this "caste" has certainly not shewn any lack of remorselessness in carrying out its ends, or any special consideration for the people over whom it has tyrannised, and whom (not content with oppressing them) it has systematically vilified, until, as we said, it is impossible to open an English school history without finding a slur cast upon the character of what should long ago have been an integral portion of the British community. No wonder that Mr Mill in his latest work should tell us that Ireland in any other hands would have been far different from what it is, that any other European country would have succeeded far better than we have done. In no other European country has history been written in that unworthy spirit which too many English writers have adopted. Austrian histories are not full of abuse of the Bohemian or Hungarian character; French histories do not snarl at the peculiarities of the Gascon or the Lorrainer. "Give and take" in a kindly spirit seems understood and acted upon everywhere except in these islands, where even the grave historian Mr Froude, while point.ing out the pitiable mistakes of Tudor policy, the wicked machiavelianism of the king, and the incompetency of his deputies, actually calls these things Irish blunders, and accounts for them by saying that when a man went to live in Ireland he seemed to lose his head, and straightway to cease to be a respon sible being. This is certainly the most extraordinary way which we ever met with of explaining the tergiversations of a man like Lord Leonard Grey and the imbecility of a Skeffington. But, if historians are strangely undignified in their mode of writing about Ireland, newspapers are very much worse. The Saturday Review, naturally enough, scatters its barbed arrows at random; speaking the other day, for instance, of the wish expressed by the Dublin meeting, that Government should buy the railways, it is struck with admiration to find that "for once Irishmen are agreed on a plan, and that that plan is fairly common

sense. e." But it is certainly startling to find the Times, the accredited English paper all over the world, asserting (January 18) that "all Irishmen roll and slouch in their gait, never look you straight in the face, and always speak as if they had something in the background which they did not like to bring forawrd." And yet, we wonder that foreign nations should rate our "Irish difficulty "at more than its real value, and we smile at "the reams of foreign comment in which ignorance of the circumstances of England and Ireland is veiled under an appearance of philosophical disquisition." When the chief English newspaper writes, about once a week, in its usual insultingly flippant, and cruelly unfair way of Ireland, and when Punch vies with the Dublin Weekly News in aggravating the ill-feeling between the two countries by disgusting caricatures, it does not need much "semblance of philosophic disquisition" to prove that (although mixed juries may convict Fenian prisoners, and find Mr Sullivan and Mr Pigott guilty) things are not at all as they should be, and it is scarcely possible that any outsider can fail to be surprised at the strange way in which the English nation seems to take Irish disaffection as a matter of course. Fancy the effect of a series of Punch's cartoons, in which a "canny Scot" should figure in the way in which poor Pat figured, almost weekly, for a long while before and after the Manchester outrage. No, John Bull is not naturally ungenerous; but in studying Ireland and the Irish he has always looked at things through the glasses of the "dominant caste," and hence he has formed a very distorted notion of what an Irishman really is, and of what are the real wants and the true capabilities of the country. Hence, too, he is rather astonished, when he happens to be brought face to face with the Irish as they really are, to find that underneath all the noisy surface of disloyalty there is a solid stratum of quiet, good sense, for which, having grown to believe what he has been so industriously taught, he was hardly prepared, to give Irishmen credit. We have written at some length about this way of treating Irish matters, half in banter, half in bitterness, which is so sad a blot on the literature of the day, because we believe its effects are most injurious. It is one of those "sentimental grievances" at which it is so easy to smile, but which (as everybody knows) are felt, by nations even more than by individuals, with far greater intensity than material wrongs. Indeed, we are certain that a study of the Irish and American-Irish literature of the day would convince any one that this unwarrantable way of sneering at Ireland, this unworthy style of writing, due (as we said) to the misrepresentations of the "dominant caste," has tended more to keep the two peoples from amalgamating than any imaginary softness in the manner of the conquest, or even than any real want of

Sentimental Grievances."

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thoroughness in carrying it out. It has also tended to make the Irish what they are-i.e., certainly not what the English press represents them to be, but yet very inferior in many ways to what they might have been. People at last get to be what they are constantly being told about themselves; they believe that a certain line of conduct will be expected from them, and they act accordingly.

So much, then, for the allegation that the Irish are what they are because their conquerors have been too considerate. The case is precisely the reverse: it unhappily seemed to suit English policy rather to maintain a garrison in Ireland than to conquer the country outright; but this very want of thoroughness has led to that unkindness in manner of which we complain, and which we believe has frequently in English newspapers reached a point at which the law ought to have taken cognisance of it. Another remark, often made, is that Ireland suffers from not having had the advantage of passing under the Roman yoke. Whether this was an advantage or not, we believe is far more open to question than many people imagine; but the want, no doubt, accounts for certain differences between the way in which the English and Irish characters have developed. Whatever else England owes to the Roman conquest of Britain, we believe it owes to that conquest the degradation of its labouring poor, in many parts (despite the cry of "glorious AngloSaxon race") unquestionably the lineal descendants of those Britons who remained to be enslaved. Still, if Ireland was never brought under Roman rule, the same is true of Scandinavia, and of our own Scotland, to say nothing of the greater part of Germany. The fact is, not so much that Ireland has not gone through certain historical processes, but that Mr Mill is not far from the truth when he says his countrymen are conceited and unsympathetic, and unable to appreciate any excellence which is not cast in their own mould. England has not been, in the case of Ireland, a generous conqueror; and now she is far too fond of harshly scolding the Irish for faults which are. in a great measure due to her mismanagement. English statesmen, as well as English people, have always been sadly wanting in what it is the fashion to call "political imagination.'

We have placed this "sentimental grievance" first, because we are convinced that it has really more influence at the present moment than any other. Of course, within our limits, it is impossible to follow it out through all its branches, for it enters more or less into every relation of social as well as of political life. One more point we will notice, steadily pooh-poohed by England, passionately aimed at by Ireland-the development of national existence. There is an unsatisfied longing at the bottom of every Irish heart, a "crave," which is the strength of Fenianism, and accounts for a good deal of that negative sup