Anomalous Condition of Ireland. 215 There will be a mixture of poverty in every human society till the end of time. "The poor you have always with you.' ""* But the Duke's argument implies that the numbers of the poor and the intensity of their privations are not diminished by the presence of the wealthy, and are not increased by withdrawing from among them the great source of expenditure. It is also to be noticed that when his Grace used that argument, a good deal of the misery existing in England was directly traceable to the Irish poverty caused by the Union. The poorer Irish, having no manufactures to employ their surplus hands at home, emigrated in shoals to England, where they lowered the wages of labour in the English market, and frequently dragged down the English. operative to the level of their own wretchedness. Had his Grace remembered this, he would perhaps have doubted the soundness of his anti-Repeal inference from the distress existing in certain English districts. The You Every political quack will supply his own nostrum. social diseases of Ireland are admitted on all hands. can scarcely find any man of any party who does not laugh to scorn Spring Rice's "giant-stride prosperity." It was available to call forth a parliamentary cheer, and for a parliamentary pretext for opposing Repeal; but it was the very hyperbole of audacious falsehood; it was too monstrous to endure in the real conviction of any human being. The social diseases, I repeat, are admitted on all hands. The condition of Ireland is professedly anomalous. There is the startling incongruity of an anti-Irish artistocracy enlisted against the just rights of the masses of the people. There is a vast ecclesiastical income still exacted from landlords, from whose rentals an amount in general exceeding the tithe-tax has been taken by the Land Act of 1881. There is a proprietary hating the land whence their wealth, their rank, and their social status are exclusively derived. There is a soil proverbial for its fertility, yet inhabited by the yearly diminishing remnants of a people whose poverty is declared by travellers to exceed all they ever had witnessed of human destitution elsewhere. There is productive power, which, if developed, and its fruits retained at home, could support in comfort a larger population than ever inhabited the island, yet which cither lies waste, or else is diverted from its natural and legitimate purpose-the support of the Irish people—to * Matt. xxvi. 11. swell the wealth and greatness of the neighbouring nation that has struck its fangs into our vitals. There is the spectacle of a people, who, plucked bare by the Union-drains of many years, and crushed to the dust by famine, were just at that juncture made the subject of new and enormous taxation to liquidate the liabilities of wealthy England. That all this leaven should not powerfully work for disaffection, no rational man could expect. We have various nostrums recommended by a multitude of political physicians. But it is not the absentee legislator, nor the cold, utilitarian political economist, nor the clever political speculator who can string together flippant paragraphs, nor the Cockney tourist who posts through Ireland to construct a marketable book from the salient traits which appear on the surface of society it is not one of these who can prescribe, or even comprehend, an adequate remedy. They have not the requisite knowledge of the people; and if they had, they have not the hearty sympathies which are requisite to render that knowledge available. Cold, self-sufficient dogmatisers too many of them are, viewing all that they see (and how little is that all!) through the medium of preconceived political theories, nine-tenths of which are inapplicable to the condition of the country. He whose intercourse with the people has been extensive and prolonged; who has mingled with his fellow-countrymen on terms of the most unreserved mutual confidence; who has seen the struggles of the oppressed against the tyranny that would grind them into powder; who has witnessed the anxious heavings of the nation's breast; who knows the intense sincerity and unalterable determination with which his compatriots are actuated; who witnesses the persevering efforts of the anti-Irish class to prevent the disenthralment of the people from their bondage; he who has seen the pernicious antagonism of the two great sections of the Irish nation, is compelled to trace the origin of Irish evils to English influence operating through an alien Legislature and anti-national prejudice, and to recognise in the Repeal of the Union the only possible cure for the social disease-the only possible guarantee against relapse. It is manifest that the bitter hatreds engendered by exclusive political institutions could not, in the present day, survive the restoration of the Irish Legislature. The class who are now infected with a vicious hatred of their country How to nationalise the Domestic Enemy. 217 would then become nationalised in spite of themselves. They could not help it. The preponderating pressure of the national sentiment, having a Legislature for its organ, would overcome their resistance. Their prejudices would be swept away in the national torrent. They would, despite some contortions and grimaces, be made auxiliary to the national prosperity and greatness. They would at last be amalgamated with the great mass of Irishmen. Nothing short of the Repeal of the Union can fulfil the requirements of Ireland. Imagine every minor boon conceded that the most liberal Whig-Radical could proffer; imagine tithes abolished, the franchises enlarged, the representation extended, the magistracy popularised, tenant-right conceded; yet, so long as Ireland possessed no Parliament, we should still have England's robber-hand in our pockets, abstracting our money for her own uses under the pretext of Imperial identification; we should still be impoverished by the drain of an absentee rental, computed to have often reached four millions sterling a year; our people would still be driven as if with flaming swords out of their own country by the colossal plunder of the means that should circulate at home for their support; we should still be subjected to a system devised to substitute cattle and sheep for the human inhabitants of Ireland; we should still remain degraded by the absence of that privilege without which man is a despised slave-the uncontrolled management of our own country for ourselves. Thus, if England were to give us everything else, yet, so long as she withheld from us our Parliament, we should be deprived of that which would be far more valuable than all the rest put together. The instinct of nationality cannot be rooted out of the Irish mind; if its eradication were practicable, it would have long since been effected. What, let us ask, is that instinct? What are its lessons? Here are the words of an authority who will at any rate be respected by many who are not wellwishers to Ireland: "It is by virtue of a providential design that the human species is found distributed in groups distinct by race and language, and established in certain definite territories, where each has contracted a certain unity of tendencies and of institutions, so that it does not trouble the habitation of another and suffers no interference with its own. God has shown what value man should attach to his nationality when, wishing to punish the Hebrew people, rebellious against warnings and chastisements, He inflicted foreign domination on them as the most terrible punishment of all The Christian idea does not admit that the social power should issue in the oppression of one individual by another. Conquest cannot legalise the domination of one nation over another, for force is powerless to constitute right." Whether the doctrines here enunciated were correctly applicable to the purpose for which they were employed by the author, I do not pronounce. But it is certain that as applied to Ireland they find a cordial echo in the minds of millions of our countrymen at home and in exile. The words I have quoted are taken from a letter addressed by Baron Ricasoli to the Pope, in August, 1861. Nationality is the principle which teaches us to take care of the interests of our own country, and to protect ourselves against the aggression of our neighbours. It is not a merely sentimental or romantic idea. It is eminently practical. It teaches us for instance, in Ireland, that the physical and mental gifts bestowed by the Creator on our country and on its inhabitants-the fertility of the island-the wealth which it produces the intelligence of its people-their industrial capacities, were clearly designed by the Divine Giver for the use and benefit of the Irish nation; and that the system is wicked and execrable which deprives that nation of the bounties of Providence; which expels them by the million from the despoiled land, and which grasps for the benefit of England the gifts bestowed by God upon the people whom a multiform, subtle tyranny has hunted into exile. The principle of nationality is the principle of self-protection against such monstrous wrong. It is in the spirit of a friend to the British Empire, not an enemy, that I quote from a very able New York letter in the Dundee Advertiser the following description of the progress of the Irish in America: "They are building up a mighty nation, and raising up an enemy for their hereditary foe, that will assuredly strangle her at some future day." England, in the day of her strength, may deride such predictions. Her scorn, however, is not wise. Despite the follies and blunders of Fenianism, and the crimes of some of its leaders, its animating principle will survive and acquire fresh strength with every shipload of emigrants landed from Ireland on the American coast. It is not reasonable to suppose that the Fenians will always be destitute of leaders How to make Ireland "loyal, proud, and happy." 219 of ability. A cause that enlists all the Irish in the United States must sooner or later furnish champions endowed with a formidable capacity for command. I leave to statesmen to consider the perils probably resulting from the fixed resentment that inspires the large and growing community of exiled Irish. There is an effectual mode of extinguishing that hatred. Let England deal with Ireland as Austria dealt with Hungary. Let her undo the hideous crime of 1800. Let our revered Sovereign open in Dublin the first session of the restored Irish Legislature, leaving thenceforth her faithful Irish subjects to possess their own country and develop for themselves its resources in accordance with the claims of justice and with the evident purposes of Providence -let our Queen do this, and Ireland, resuming the prosperous career which commenced in 1782, and which the Union interrupted, will become the right arm of the Empire --loyal, proud, and happy; contributing to the general prosperity in time of peace, and to the general defence in time of war. Let our Queen do this, and Irish disloyalty, deprived of its pabulum, will at once become a thing of the past. Mr. Gladstone is doing his utmost to produce that result. Every rational patriot on either side of the Channel should give him every possible support in his noble enterprise. CHAPTER XXII. THE YOUNG IRELANDERS COME PROMINENTLY FORWARD. True, my friend, as if an angel said it. Would that an angel's pealing voice were thine, Until thy words were rooted and imbedded Deep in every Irish heart as mine, Battling for our isle's regeneration. Still we know the future holds no chance, Hope, or prospect for this Irish nation, Save in trampling down intolerance— Trampling down the bigot's broils, that pandered This unchanging motto: DEEDS, NOT CREEDS. A NOTABLE event in the year 1842 was the establishment of the Nation newspaper. The proprietor and editor, Mr. (now Sir) Charles Gavan |