of a popular member of Parliament. Feargus's services were on that occasion very great. The truth is that no other man in Corkshire possessed the combination of qualities requisite to open the county at that period. It is usual with the Tory, and often also with the Whig landlords, to accuse the Catholic clergy of unduly influencing the tenant-farmers in their exercise of the franchise. The charge is retorted. Of the multitude of tenants expelled from their holdings it is commonly believed that a large number have been punished by eviction for voting at elections against the will of their landlords, and that, previous to the enactment of the ballot, the tenure of many who still occupied their farms depended on their obedience to the landlord's political commands. The accusers of the priests assumed that if the tenant were uninfluenced by any party, and wholly left to his own free choice, he would by preference give his vote to the landlord's candidate. Those persons forget that the natural sympathies of the priest and of the Catholic tenant-farmer are the same, and consequently that when the priest exhorts the elector to support the advocate of tenant-right, or of Repeal, he only exhorts that elector to act upon his own principles, and to do that which his real inclinations would lead him to do. By investing the humble elector with a vote the Constitution plainly supposes him to have a political opinion. But those who assume that the landlord should be the master of that vote, suppose, on the contrary, that the humble elector has got no political opinion; or else that if he has one, he should sacrifice it to the dictation of another man. If this were the real spirit of the Constitution it would have saved, before the introduction of the ballot, much trouble and much misery if the landlord, instead of driving his tenants to the hustings under terror of his wrath, had been empowered by law to tender, in his own person, as many votes as he had tenants on the roll of electors. Such a personage might have presented himself at the hustings, saying: "I give you twenty votes, or forty" (as the case might be), "for Mr. So-and-so." The tenants could have remained at home while their landlord did the voting for them; and they would have escaped the cruel alternative of being compelled to vote for some sturdy supporter of national wrongs, or of being exposed to the vengeance of, possibly, a spiteful and malignant tyrant. It would be grievously unjust to the landlords of Ireland English and Irish Electors contrasted. 151 to deny that there are amongst them many excellent men, who have always respected the electoral liberty of their tenants. But landlords of the opposite stamp were unhappily plentiful. The system of the ballot has sheltered the tenants in most cases from the dangers to which they were exposed under the system of open voting. The protection, however, is incomplete. Some landlords, knowing, or strongly suspecting, that their tenants would vote for a candidate distasteful to the ruling caste, have prohibited them from voting at all, under the ancient penalty of landlord displeasure. Looking back at the former system, it is interesting to recall the contrast between the English and Irish constituencies, as described a good many years ago in the House of Commons by the late Earl of Derby. He said that in England the rural tenants followed the command of their landlords with implicit submission; that they inquired for my lord's man, or the squire's man, and voted as their masters directed. In the towns venality was the dominant influence. In Ireland, however, notwithstanding the terrible and frequent exercise of landlord power, it was not so easy to drive electors like swine to the market. There was, and is, a much greater spirit of constitutional independence among the Irish electors than among their English brethren. They have more frequently voted, in proportion to their numbers, in accordance with their political preferences. Year after year they had seen before their eyes the bitter penalty of being politically honest; they had seen the old homesteads of their neighbours levelled to the earth and the miserable inmates turned adrift; they had seen that the crime of which this was the punishment, was the honest discharge of a trust committed to them by the Constitution, and yet great numbers of them persevered. There is in this gallant defiance of local tyranny something grand and high-souled. It stamps the brave peasants with the ineffaceable character of political integrity. They were willing martyrs for their country's freedom. Men who could thus perseveringly and readily incur the bitterest persecution for the sake of principle, stand infinitely higher in the moral and intellectual scale, and are infinitely more capable of the duties of self-government than a people who surrender the Constitutional trust of the franchise at the dictation of another's will, or for the sordid and dishonest consideration of pelf. Of course there have been in Ireland, as elsewhere, many instances of corrupt voting, some of which are recorded in this volume. But the Irish electors, taken as a whole, have displayed true nobleness of character, and at no time more conspicuously than in the general election of 1826, when the forty-shilling freeholders defied the utmost wrath of anti-Catholic landlords and agents, and gave their support to the candidates who were pledged to sustain O'Connell in his struggle for Catholic Emancipation. For this honest and spirited discharge of their electoral duty they were disfranchised by Sir Robert Peel. At the present time the prevalence of electoral corruption in England has compelled the Government to introduce a Bill (46th and 47th Victoria) "for the better prevention of corrupt and illegal practices at Parliamentary elections." Instances of scandalous traffic in the franchise were elicited by commissions appointed in 1880 to inquire into the extent of the evil. Commenting on these revelations, the London Spectator said: "It is not too much to say that they (the Commissioners) have revealed the existence of constituencies in which the mass of the electors were mere hirelings, and the man who gives an honest vote is a noteworthy person. Even when this extreme has not been reached, and the open transfer of votes for money is still avoided, the evidence shows that the more indirect forms of bribery are practised upon a truly heroic scale."* "There is no sign whatever," says the Times, "that Sandwich and Gloucester and Canterbury are shocked in any way at the exposure of their own demerits. Men come forward with a smile and a smirk to tell the Commissioners that they have taken bribes from both parties, or that they have put their votes up for sale and have given them to the highest bidders, or have promised them and had the money for them, and have not given them. Their belief seems to be that the common laws of morality are suspended while an election is going on, and that proceedings for which in ordinary times a man would be sent to prison are quite honest at election times. It is in vain that the Commissioners attempt to set up another standard. It is much if they can succeed in putting a damper on each joke as it arises. The next barefaced disclosure of fraud or corruption is taken for as good a joke as ever, and is as certainly and as heartily laughed over."+ * Cited in the Nation, 23rd October, 1880. + Ibid. Electoral Corruption. 153 In its issue of the 23rd of October, 1880, the Nation quotes some items of the evidence : "At Macclesfield 'voting is frankly treated as a matter of business.' Prices ranged from 3s. 6d. to 15s. a vote. Out of £2,000 distributed by a prominent manager on one side, only £100 is admitted to have been legally spent, while another manager, on the other side, took each voter who came to him into a dark pantry and there made the best bargain he could. Out of every six voters, certainly four, and probably five, voted as they were paid."" I have referred to the late Lord Derby's assertion that in England the rural electors generally followed their landlords to the hustings. Apart from bribery, and with reference solely to the landlord influence over electors in England, it must, however, be admitted that the English voters have not the same reason for opposing their landlords that the Irish voters too often have. Whatever be the political party of the English candidate, the elector may be certain at the present day that he is zealous for the honour and power of England. Whig, Tory, or Radical, he will equally desire to uphold the glory of the British Lion. But in Ireland the Nationalist elector has been frequently called on to vote for a candidate zealous only for the servitude and subjugation of his country; eager to revile and disparage her creed and her people; flippant to announce (as Lord Wicklow did in the days of O'Connell's agitation) that there is not in Ireland the material for self-legislation. He is called on to vote for some person whose political convictions originate in the false, degrading, calumnious, self-stultifying principle that the land of Swift, and Grattan, and Malone, and Flood, and Hussey Burgh, and Burke, and Sheridan, and Bushe, and Foster, and Plunket, and O'Connell, and many other men whose names shed lustre upon human intellect, is inhabited by a race incapable of making laws to govern themselves. The soul of the Irish peasant instinctively spurns the impudent libel on his country. There cannot be a cordial community of feeling between the peasantry and the landlord class until the owners of the soil learn to regard their native land with sentiments of just respect; until they learn to rejoice in Ireland's honour, to take pride in Ireland's fame, and to feel every insult to their country as an indignity inflicted on themselves. CHAPTER XV. NATIONAL COUNCIL CONVENED BY O'CONNELL IN 1833. Each voice should resound through our island; And I'd rather be shot Than surrender the rights of our Island." LYSAGHT'S Anti-Union Song. O'CONNELL suggested, in December, 1832, to the members who were pledged to the Repeal of the Union, the expediency of meeting in Dublin to discuss various matters connected with Irish legislation. Between thirty and forty of them assembled in January, 1833, under the denomination of the National Council. The first meeting took place at Home's Hotel, in College Green, directly facing the principal front of our old House of Commons. The proximity was suggestive of some mournful recollections, associated, however, with some high resolves and hopes. The forms of a legislative assembly were strictly observed by the National Council. The first day was chiefly occupied in the examination of Michael Staunton, the able proprietor and editor of the Dublin Register, on the grievous fiscal wrongs which the Union enabled England to inflict upon this kingdom. On the subsequent days the members met in the Great Room of the Corn Exchange, Burgh Quay; there were a strangers' gallery and a bar, admission to which was charged the parliamentary price of two-and-sixpence. O'Connell's object in bringing together this embryo Parliament, was partly to present to the people of Ireland the spectacle of their own legislators deliberating on Irish affairs in the capital of their native land; to habituate the members to home service; and thereby to excite both the representatives and the represented to continuous energy in the great national enterprise. "The cork," said the Dublin Evening Post, "was flying out of Feargus's high-bottled eloquence;" and at the National Council, as also upon some other public occasions in the capital, Feargus well sustained the reputation he had acquired in the South, of a ready, rattling speaker. In Parliament he was not so successful. True, he talked away in the House with his customary fluency; but he failed to impress the public with any strong faith in his senatorial wisdom. He amused the Legislature with local anecdotes, |