Disendowment of the State Church, Security of Tenure and other minor measures of relief, would doubtless mitigate some of the external symptoms of the national malady. But nothing short of the restoration of the Irish Constitution—of the exclusive government of the Irish people by the Queen, Lords, and Commons of Ireland-can reach the root of the disease. Kilcascan, November, 1867. ERRATA. At p. 59, line 24, for foundation read fountain. IRELAND AND HER AGITATORS. CHAPTER I. "For close designs and crooked counsels fit." ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL. AMONG the traditionary anecdotes of the Union struggle, it is told that when Lord Castlereagh visited Mr. Shapland Carew, the member for the county of Wexford, in order to offer him a peerage and some other more substantial advantages, as inducements to vote for the Legislative Union, Mr. Carew indignantly exclaimed: "I will expose your insolent offer in the House of Commons to-night; I will get up in my place and charge you with the barefaced attempt to corrupt a legislator." Castlereagh coolly replied: "Do so, if you will. But if you do, I will immediately get up and contradict you in presence of the House. I will declare, upon my honour, that you have uttered a falsehood; and I shall follow up that declaration by demanding satisfaction as soon as we are beyond the reach of the serjeant-at-arms." Mr. Carew, it is said, desired the noble Secretary of State to get out of his house with all possible expedition, on pain of being kicked down the hall-door steps by his footman. Castlereagh accordingly withdrew, but Carew did not execute his threat of exposing the transaction to the House. It were idle to speculate on the motives which induced him to practise that forbearance. The incident vividly illustrates the desperate and unprincipled determination with which the government and its tool pursued their object. The Irish aristocracy and gentry of that period were a race of men who lived high, drank hard, fought duels, and often pursued a career of reckless extravagance. These habits were generated by their situation, which rendered them, to a very considerable extent, the irresponsible monopolists of local power. They largely partook of the national taste for splen 1 dour and magnificence-a taste which, duly regulated, tends to adorn the land and to refine and civilize the people; but which, in the circumstances then affecting the upper classes in Ireland, ensnared its votaries into that wasteful and ruinous expenditure which threw so many of their number upon the worst expedients of political corruption to retrieve their shattered fortunes. The penal laws had worked a most disastrous separation of the people from the gentry. The dominant Protestant partythe jovial, fox-hunting, claret-drinking squirearchy-all looked down on the great mass of their Catholic countrymen as a totally inferior race of beings, intended by God Almighty for the inheritance of serfdom, and with whom it would be a degradation to suppose they could have the least community of interest. They were trained from the cradle to look thus scornfully on the Catholics. Contempt was a doctrine of their political bible. On the part of the Catholics, the moral consequences of the penal gulf that divided them from their more favoured countrymen, were various, according to the varying dispositions of men. There was, amongst some, the reaction of deep and deadly hate. Others were awed into a social idolatry of Protestants. I knew one most respectable and very wealthy Catholic merchant, who declared that when a boy at school, about the year 1780, he felt overwhelmed and bewildered at the honour of being permitted to play marbles with a Protestant schoolfellow. Every Protestant cobbler and tinker conceived himself superior to the Catholic of ancient lineage and ample inheritance. No wonder that there should have been offensive assumption on the one side, and rankling animosity as well as degrading servility on the other, when the law placed all the good things of the state in the hands of the few, and excluded the many from all participation in place, power, and emolument. The Protestant aristocracy of Ireland wanted that wholesome check, that strong guarantee of political honesty, which would have arisen from contact with, and representative dependence on, the people. A whole people never can be bribed. But the people-the Catholic masses of Ireland-were a political non-. entity for nearly the whole century. They formed no element of power-no ingredient in the speculating politician's calculations; a Lord Chancellor announced that the law of the land assumed their non-existence. And even after some of the restrictions on Catholics had been removed, the sentiment of Protestant contempt for Papists survived in full force, preventing that cordial coalition, that thorough mutual understanding between the two classes, which alone could have availed to defeat the ministerial assault on Irish legislative independence. The Protestant nobility and squirearchy, half-fearing and entirely despising their disfranchised countrymen, had for a long time looked upon themselves rather in the light of an English garrison occupying Ireland than as the legitimate aristocracy of the country. The notorious Dr. Patrick Duigenan, in a speech against the Catholic claims, delivered in the House of Commons, 4th February, 1793, said, "In truth, the Protestants in Ireland are but a British garrison in an enemy's country."* Yet, despite the colossal power of corruption, and the pernicious influence of religious bigotry, the very circumstance of their residing in, and making laws for Ireland, had begun to produce its natural results on the minds of her domestic rulers about the time of the American war; the spark of patriotism had ignited the Protestant heart, and blazed up with dazzling brilliancy in the memorable and successful struggle of the Irish Volunteers for free trade and constitutional independence in 1782. But-fatal error!-the Catholics were not incorporated into the constitution. Glorious and imposing was the superstructure, but it was fated to perish, because its foundations were too narrow to sustain its weight. It did not rest on the broad basis of the people. Yet the Catholics had done their best to assist in achieving the triumph of that period. Dr. Duigenan, in the speech already cited,† bears the following testimony: "The Catholics," he says, "not only mixed with Protestants in most of the Volunteer corps throughout the kingdom, were regimented, carried arms publicly, and learned military tactics, but they formed themselves into large and numerous corps, well armed, accoutred, and instructed in military exercise, and marched, and appeared in military array on all occasions as other Volunteers. I saw myself a corps of Dublin Volunteers, called the Irish Brigade, nineteen in twenty of which were Catholics, march through the city of Dublin, and close to the gates of the Castle, the residence of his majesty's lieutenant, along with other Volunteers, to be reviewed in his majesty's Phoenix Park!" Elsewhere in the same speech the Doctor *Speech, page 51. I possess the Doctor's oration in the shape of a pamphlet, published at the time. † Pages 23, 24. says, "Thousands of Irish Catholics carried arms during the season of volunteering without having procured any license whatever."* This evidence of the active part borne by the Catholics in the national struggle to recover the Irish constitution, occurs in a speech directed against the admission of the Catholics to any of the privileges of the constitution they had helped to establish. Sir Jonah Barrington, in recording the activity of the Catholics in the Volunteer organization, adds that they placed themselves under the command of Protestant officers.† The Protestant patriotism of 1782 was a gallant and a goodly display; yet it presented some anomalous features. There was in it a great deal real, and something illusory. It was a curious sight, that of men in arms to enfranchise their country, yet resolved to perpetuate the disfranchisement of the great body of its inhabitants; men in arms to assert the honour and dignity of Ireland, yet entertaining a cordial contempt for five out of every six of its people. In truth, the Protestants had been so long accustomed to omit the Catholics from their political arithmetic, that they had learned to look upon themselves-being then about one-sixth-as forming the sum-total of the Irish nation. The thunder of Grattan had not yet shaken the strongholds of their bigotry. Their ambition culminated in the establishment of a free constitution of whose political benefits they were to be the monopolists. Another anomaly was to be found in the fact that the bitterest enemies of Catholic Emancipation were sometimes the most strenuous champions of theoretic Irish independence. At a meeting of some of the friends of the Volunteer movement, held in their house in Grafton-street, which Flood, Grattan, and Bartholomew Hoare attended, Flood, whose hostility to the Catholic claims was inflexible, proposed to his confréres a plan of total separation from England. Grattan said, "If you persevere in your proposition, I certainly shall not oppose it here; but I shall quit this room, and proceed at once to the Castle-to my sovereign's Castle-and there disclose the treason, and denounce the traitor." Yet Flood, the separatist, could not tolerate the notion of emancipating the Catholics; whilst Grattan, the zealous friend of the Catholics, and the champion of a free Irish parliament in connexion with the British crown, denounced the ultra "Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation," chap. xvi. * Page 49. |