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 ( 
 
GREAT BRITAIN, AMERICA, 
 AND IRELAND. 
 
 A R E PLY, 
 
 lY 
 
 GOLD WIN SMITH, D.C.L. 
 
 (Reprinted, with additions and corrections^ from the " Princeton 
 
 'Review" for Nov.^ 1882.J 
 
 HUNTER, ROSE & COMPANY, 
 
 1882. 
 
GKEAT BRITAIN, AMERICA, AND IRELAND. 
 
 ri'^HE friendly union of English-speaking people throughout the 
 -L world is an object not merely of diplomatic interest. That 
 union is now all but complete. The old quarrel with George III. 
 and Lord North is dead and buried ; scarcely a trace of it lingers 
 among native Americans, even in Fourth-of-July orations ; the 
 House of Brunswick has done everything that royalty could do 
 to cement the reconciliation; and if aristocratic dislike of repub- 
 licanism is not extinct, it is silenced, or finds a voice only in some 
 organ of decrepitude. Intercourse between America and Eng- 
 land grow apace ; intermarriage among their citizens increases ; 
 sympathy becomes stronger, and shows itself on all great national 
 occasions ; common interests multiply ; the fusion of science, 
 literature, the churches, is complete ; international reviews are 
 set up, and the periodicals of each country circulate largely in the 
 other ; wherever the American and the Englishman meet, on dis- 
 tant shores and in face of common peril, it is felt that blood is 
 thicker than water ; Westminster Abbey hears the funeral ser- 
 mons and receives the effigies of the great men of both divisions 
 of the race. Great Britain, if she has hitherto given umbrage by 
 her overweening power, is not likely to continue the oftence ; for 
 though her sun is still far from its setting, the shadows of her day 
 of Empire begin to lengthen, and she will probably in the future 
 excite in her otf'spring less of jealousy than of the affection which 
 attaches to the parent of their race, the foundress of their institu- 
 tions, and the custodian of their historic monuments, tombs, and 
 fanes. To the existence of perfect amity, and a union as entire 
 as the severing Atlantic will permit, almost the sole impediment 
 is now the anti-British feeling of the Irish in the United States. 
 This, apparently, is the main source of all that is hostile to Great 
 Britain in the attitude of American diplomacy, in the action of 
 the American Legislature, or in the language of the American 
 
6 
 
 Press. To entangle the two sections of the Anglo-Saxon race in 
 a quarrel is the constant and avowed object of Irish machinations. 
 That the Government of the United States will deliberately make 
 itself the organ of Celtic enmity in an Old World quarrel is not 
 to be feared ; it has refused to open the door for war by recalling 
 Mr. Lowell at the dictation of the Irish ; but if the Fisheries 
 Question or any other question should breed a dispute, in a bal- 
 anced state of American parties, there is no saying what the Irish 
 vote may do. 
 
 An eminent member of the New York Press, Mr. E. L. Godkin, 
 for whose pen I entertain the greatest respect, and who is sure 
 always to command attention, writing in the Nineteenth Century, 
 maintains that the most fundamental of the facts in the case be- 
 tween England and Ireland has been overlooked by British states- 
 men, of whose sagacity he has evidently formed rather a low esti- 
 mate. English hatred of Ireland and Irishmen is, according to 
 him, the root of the mischief, and the feeling, being more than 
 reciprocated by the Irish, is, in his opinion, so insuperable an im- 
 pediment to union that separation is the only hopeful course. 
 Mr. Godkin's paper appears as an American view of the Irish 
 Question. It is, however, that of an Irish-American, and one who 
 plainly sympathizes with the emotions of his kinsmen toward* 
 Great Britain. I am an Englishman, and in controverting his 
 arguments I may be equally moved by national feeling on the 
 other side. But I can say for myself that I have been, as a jour- 
 nalist, the steadfast opponent of British aggrandisement, and dur- 
 ing the ascendency of Jingoism bore my share of the honourable 
 obloquy which was cast on counsels of morality and moderation. 
 My position is much the same as that of an American who opposed 
 the Mexican war, abjured the maxims of an unscrupulous patriot- 
 ism, but was loyal to the Union. Nor am I likely to be inordin- 
 ately rapacious on behalf of a country in which it is not probable 
 that I shall ever set foot again. If I understand my own feelings, 
 I care more for the relations of the English-speaking communities 
 in the two hemispheres than I care for any special object of the 
 Mother Country's ambition. I may add that though Mr. Godkin 
 cites me in a way which makes me appear to be one of the tra- 
 du3ers of Ireland, I have written on Irish History and Character 
 
 
 \ 
 
in a spii*i which has won me the friendship of some of the best 
 and most patriotic of Irishmen, including one whom all regret, the 
 late Dr. Russell, of Maynooth. 
 
 Mr. Godkin speaks of Ireland and the Irish indiscriminately ; 
 so do writers in general ; but there is a distinction which it is 
 most important at once to mark and constantly to bear in mind. 
 Disaffection prevails only in the three Celtic and Catholic prov- 
 inces — Leinster, Munster, and Connaught. Ulster, which, having 
 been colonized from Scotland, is mainly Teutonic and Protestant, 
 continues all the time prosperous, contented, obedient to the law, 
 and attached to the Union. Yet the political relations of Ulster 
 to Great Britain are exactly the same as those of the rest of the 
 island. 
 
 What are the proofs adduced by Mr. Godkin of the general 
 existence in English breasts of this insolent dislike of his com- 
 patriots which he deems so fatal a bar to union, and which seems 
 to have entered like iron into his own soul ? He begins with 
 perfect candour by admitting that the sentiment has, in a credit- 
 able way, been kept out of sight by Englishmen in public writing 
 and speaking about Ireland, as well as excluded from influence in 
 legislation. Surely a sentiment which can be entirely suppressed 
 both in public utterance and in important Action, and this in face 
 of a torrent of delirious abuse poured by Irishmen on England, 
 is hardly strong enough absolutely to defy the softening power 
 of time, especially in minds capable of such self-control as the 
 suppression proves. Should we not rather say that as such sup- 
 pression is impossible to a nation whose organs are a popular 
 assembly and press, if a sentiment finds no expression, it cannot 
 really exist ? But, says Mr. Godkin, Punch in its caricatures 
 represents the Irish as savages and Thackeray did nothing with 
 so much gusto and success as ridicule Irishmen. Punch, I sup- 
 pose, like Harper's Weekly and Puck, represents Irishmen as 
 savages when they act like savages, as some of them unhappily 
 do, but not otherwise. Ireland herself, if my memory does not 
 deceive me, generally appears in Punch in rather a pathetic 
 guise. As to Thackeray, I should have thought that he had done 
 nothing with half so much gusto and success as ridicule English 
 snobbery ; and really in his picture of " The O'Mulligan " I can 
 
8 
 
 see no more venom than in Skakespeare's picture of Fluellen. It 
 Mr. Godkin asks who are the principal propagators of the comic 
 idea of Irish character in fiction, he will find, I believe, that they are 
 Miss Edgeworth, by descent and domicile an Irishwoman, though 
 born in England, and the Irishman Mr. Lever. On the other 
 hand, the melodies in which Moore has presented Ireland in her 
 pathetic aspect have ^een among the most popular of poems 
 among Englishmen, while their author was the spoilt child of 
 English society in his day. 
 
 Of the social prejudices of the richer class in England there are 
 no mirrors more perfect than the great public schools. I was at 
 Eton, about the most typical of those schools, and I declare that 
 while there are other prejudices the existence of which I remem- 
 ber clearly enough, I search my memory in vain for the slightest 
 trace of a prejudice against Irish boys. I can say the same thing 
 with regard to Oxford, where I never heard it breathed that an 
 Irish student was socially or academically at any sort of disad- 
 vantage. There may have been jokes against Irishmen as there 
 are against Scotchmen and Welshmen, as there are against John 
 Bull, but in these there was no sting. I cannot pretend to know 
 e great world of London society as well as I know the little 
 worlds of Eton and Oxford, yet I feel sure that there also, if the 
 self-esteem of an Irishman is hurt, he owes it not to his national- 
 ity, but to something in himself. Nobody ever objects to inter- 
 marriage with an Irish family, or regards Irish blood as a ground 
 for blackballing at a club. That the labouring classes of England 
 cherish no very bitter sentiment against their Irish compeers has 
 been proved by a crucial and even cruel test. They have suffered 
 the bread to be taken from their mouths, their condition to be 
 howered, their efforts to improve it hindered, and themselves in 
 large numbers to be supplanted and driven to emigrate by the 
 torrent of pauperism annually poured in upon them from the land 
 of the philoprogenitive and unthrifty Celt, almost without utter- 
 ing a murmur of discontent. Not a finger has been raised 
 against the Irish immigration which is the bane of the British 
 artisan. 
 
 That Irishmen have their full share, and even more than their 
 full share, of all the honours of the United KiDgdom, Mr. Godkin 
 
9 
 
 frankly acknowledges. He may add that they have their share, 
 and rather more than their share, of the places in the Indian 
 Civil Service, while their kinsmen are shouting for the downfall 
 of the Empire. What then is the ground of complaint ? Why, 
 that the honour in each case, though conferred upon an Irishman, 
 is not conferred upon him as an Irishman, but as an Englishman, 
 the Briton, in his arrogance, mentally " annexing " every Irishman 
 of mark. There ought, it seems, to be a special form for patents 
 of peerage and knighthoods, designating the recipient as of Irish 
 blood, though I suspect that supersubtle acrimony would soon 
 discover in this an insidious mark of disparageraement. A still 
 more intricate process will be required when Irish titles such as 
 " Duke of Connaught " and " Royal Irish " are given as marks of 
 honour. Lord Gough is one of a list of Irish worthies named by 
 Mr. Godkin, as instances of what most people will probably regard 
 as a somewhat metaphysical wrong, and an insufficient cause for 
 the dissolution of an empire. In the Phoenix Park at Dublin, 
 close to the residences of the Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Sec- 
 retary, close also to the spot where Lord Frederick Cavendish and 
 Mr. Burke were murdered, stands the equestrian statue of Lord 
 Gough. It is not easy to see how recognition of a man's merits 
 as a citizen of the United Kingdom, and of his special connection 
 with Ireland at the same time, could be more clearly signified 
 than by making him a peer of the Imperial Parliament and put- 
 ting up his statue in an Irish park. That " England has failed to 
 make provision to satisfy the cravings of Irish vanity " may be 
 true. It would be impossible to make such provision, even if 
 vanity were not, as it is, insatiable. The very suggestion seems 
 to me as full of contumely as anything that ever was said of Ire- 
 land. Proper provision, and the only possible provision, has 
 surely been made for the reasonable pride and self-respect of 
 Irishmen when every place of honour in the empire has been 
 fairly and freely thrown open to their merits. But the fact is 
 that, in Mr. Godkin's eyes, nobody is a genuine Irishman who is 
 not a Nationalist and an enemy of the Union ; and the real bur- 
 den of his complaint will be found to be that the British Com- 
 monwealth does not confer places and honours upon those who 
 re avowedly hostile to its existence. He rehearses a long roll of 
 
T 
 
 10 
 
 heroes, — Wellington, Castlereagh, Canning, the Lawrences, Gough, 
 Nicholson, Roberts, and Wolseley, — of the credit for whom he 
 says Ireland has been robbed by England. But what is to be 
 said of the men themselves ? Have they all doffed their nation- 
 ality in deference to British prejudice, and become renegades for 
 the sake of preferment ? " Irishmen," says Mr. Godkin, " have, it 
 is true, been freely admitted to the service of the Government 
 and have earned some notoriety as persistent and successful place- 
 hunters." Does the phrase apply to Wellington, Canning, the 
 Lawrences, and the rest ? Does it apply to all the Irishmen who 
 are or have been Ministers of State, Privy Councillors, Peers, 
 Bishops, Viceroys of India, Governors of Colonies, Ambassadors ? 
 Does it apply to the Chancellors and Judges of Ireland ? Sup- 
 pose an Englishman had called all the Irishmen who ever attained 
 Imperial honours " persistent and successful place-hunters," what 
 an outcry would there have been ! Nothing, apparently, will 
 satisfy Mr. Godkin short of the reception of the Disunionist lead- 
 ers into the Imperial Government. He does not see " why the 
 confidence of the Birmingham electors should be a better reason 
 for putting Mr. Chamberlain in the Cabinet than the confidence 
 of the Irish people for putting Mr. Parnell or Mr. Sexton in it."^ 
 If Mr. Parnell and Mr. Sexton really enjoy the confidence of the 
 Irish people, it is curious that they should find it necessary, for 
 the purpose of maintaining their ascendency, to have recourse to 
 a system of murderous terrorism and to the aid of the Fenians of 
 New York. But Great Britain surely may reasonably say that 
 she will admit to her councils men who are morally reeking with 
 the blood of her loyal citizens, ?»nd who have conspired with her 
 foreign enemies for her destruction, when the American Republie 
 or any other nation not lost to honour shall have done the same. 
 It is hard, says Mr. Godkin, that the Irish nation, of all nations^ 
 in the world, should be judged solely by reference to its poorest 
 class, and that the small farmer, the farm labourer, and the small 
 shop-keeper should be taken as the types of the whole people. 
 Hard indeed ! But is this not exactly what the framer of the 
 indictment himself does ? Does he not cut off from Irishry not 
 only all the men of mark, but all the more educated classes, wha 
 are now unionist, or at least opposed to revolution, and confine 
 
 '■ 
 
11 
 
 nationality to the Fenians and Land Leaguers, the followers of 
 O'Donovan Rossa and Parnell ? 
 
 In regard to the " mental annexation " grievance, he thinks 
 that Americans can sympathize with the Irish, inasmuch as they 
 are constantly insulted in English society by an analogous mani- 
 festation of British self-conceit. Tlioy find themselves taken for 
 Englishmen and addressed as such, by way of " subtle but inten- 
 tional compliment," and as " evidently the most seductive tiattory 
 which an Englishman thinks can be administered." I venture to 
 surmise that sometimes the subtlety is on the side of the person 
 who fancies himself Hatterod, and that the stolid Englishman is 
 cither making i perfectly honest though perhaps maladroit remark^ 
 or has simply fallen into an error. I do not myself know a native 
 of Philadelphia or Baltimore by his pronunciation or by any other 
 outward sign from an Englishman, and I niight talk to him for a 
 whole evening without discovering the truth. An inauspicious 
 fancy has plaj^ed over the wh-Z-j of this subject, and makes its 
 nfluence felt, I submit, even in Air. I.-^wcU's pungent essay " On 
 Act Certain Condescension in Foreigners," which to Mr. Godkin 
 appears fraught with instructive facts. Americans who have 
 lived long in London cease to be haunted by these suspicions. 
 
 Has not Mr. Godkin himself inadvertently takuii an eminent 
 citizen from Ireland and annexed him to England in styling Mr, 
 Philip Bagenal " an English traveller " ? Bagenal is a well-known 
 Irish name, and in the last century was borne by the member for 
 the county of Carlow, who proposed a grant of public money to 
 Grattan for his services in the assertion of Irish independence. I 
 doubt, therefore, whether England can be said to stand convicted 
 by her own confession when Mr. Philip Bagenal declares that the 
 low place in the social ladder taken in America by the mass of the 
 Irish emigrants is due to the influence of British calumny. How 
 is it possible that uneducated and unskilled labourers coming into 
 a community which is pre-eminently one of education and of 
 skilled industry should take any but a low place till they had 
 undergone a training for something higher ? 
 
 Irishmen must expeci to be judged, like the rest of us, by their 
 deeds. When they do well they will receive praise, and in over- 
 flowing measure, if they have had to contend against disadvan- 
 
■MM 
 
 12 
 
 tages. When they do ill, they will be blamed, with due allow- 
 ance for the extenuating circumstances of their case. When they 
 become the agents or the slaves o* a dark and sanguinary system 
 of terrorism ; when they commit a long series of cold-blooded and 
 most hideous murders ; when they butcher the husband with the 
 wife and children clinging to their knees ; when they deliberately 
 shoot down women and slaughter boys ; when they burn the 
 houses of widows ; when they mutilate helpless cattle and cut off 
 the udders of cows ; when instead of condemning the assassin they 
 applaud, abet and harbour him ; when they outrage civilization and 
 humanity with their dynamite ; when, children of misfortune 
 themselves, they cruelly trample on the unhappy negro ; when 
 they requite the hospitality of the American Kepublic by abetting 
 the slave-owner in his assault upon its unity, rising in concert 
 with him to resist the draft at the most perilous crisis of the civil 
 war, and perpetrating in the streets of New York the same hor- 
 rors which they perpetrate in Ireland, — we shall not refrain from 
 giving utterance to the feelings of nature,even though it should cost 
 us the integrity of our empire. Nor can we be constrained to call 
 the Irish good citizens where they follow blindly in the train of 
 political sharpers, and form the army of violence or corruption, or 
 ascribe to them independence of character where they remain the 
 slaves of wirepullers and priests. If, of late, some strong things 
 have been said against them, it must be borne in mind that the 
 deeds of the Irish Terrorists are not like those of the Carbonari, or 
 even those of the Nihilists, dark, bloody, and such as society to 
 l^reserve itself must repress, yet within the pale of political crime. 
 Never was the assassin's dagger sheathed in a breast which had 
 less merited the blow than that of Lord Frederick Cavendish, and 
 the savage brutality of the act shocked the civilized world. But 
 the murder of the Joyce family was worse than that of Lord 
 Frederich Cavendish and Mr. Burke, and yet in some circuinstances 
 of atrocity even this yielded to crimes which have made less noise. 
 In the English correspondence of the New York Tribune the other 
 day, there was an account of the murder of John Leahj', of 
 Killamey. Leahy, according to the correspondent, was a quiet 
 inoffensive man, advanced in years, who took a piece of meadow 
 land from which a tenant had been evicted and paid rent for it» 
 
13 
 
 At midnight fifteen armed men broke into his house and dragged 
 him out of bed. His wife threw herself upon his body and 
 entreated the assailants to kill her and spare his life. They 
 pushed her aside, dragged hi^n into the kitchen, forced him to 
 kneel before them, and demanded if it was not true that he had paid 
 his rent. He could not deny it. They then asked if there was 
 any whiskey in the house, and the wife said they should have the 
 keys and anything they wanted, if only they would not shoot her 
 husband. But shoot him they did, even while she was clasping 
 him in her arms. Three men were called upon to fire in turn, 
 being addressed by different numbers, three, twelve, and fourteen, 
 and the old man was left to breathe his last, murdered because he 
 had leased a meadow and paid rent for it. So far as men of this 
 character were concerned, there was no difficulty in believing the 
 private accounts, which, in contradiction to the public, told us that 
 the murder of Lord Frederich Cavendish was hailed with general 
 exultation, and that the corpse was hooted at its departure from 
 Dublin. That the commission of these outrages is the only way 
 of waking the House of Commons into activity about Irish griev- 
 ances is a plea in meeting which I find it hard to suppress indigna- 
 tion. The worst of the outrages were committed after the pass- 
 ing of the Land Act, the very worst after the passing both of the 
 Land Act and the Arrears Act ; almost the whole of them, I 
 believe, after the appointment of the Irish Land Commission 
 (July, 1880). In those neat and rose-covered cottages of England 
 the delight of the artist's eye, where poverty struggles hard by 
 cleanliness and neatness to keep up the appearance of respect- 
 ability, the pinch of want has been hardly less severe than in the 
 Irish cabin. The English labourers combined under the leadership 
 of Joseph Arch for the improvement of thoir condition ; their 
 movement has been successful, and I am not aware that it han 
 been sullied by a single crime. 
 
 Nor are the Irish outrages palliated by the grandeur of their 
 object. What the tenant farmers who compose the Land League 
 seek is not the nationalization of the land, but the appropriation 
 of it to themselves, they being in man}' cases merely casual occu- 
 pants, and in some cases occupants in consequence of previous 
 evictions. Their aim is simply to repudiate the payment of rent. 
 
' 
 
 14 
 
 to oust the proprietor and to take his place, which having been 
 effected they would sell the land, sub-let it if they pleased, and 
 deal with it in all respects as the proprietor deals with it now. 
 They have not the slightest intention of giving a rood to their 
 farm labour 3rs, of whom there is a large number, and to whom they 
 often prove hard masters. Still less do they intend that the land 
 shall be restored to the tribe. I believe I was among the first to 
 point out that the tradition of tribal ownership is a factor in the 
 sentiment of the question ; but it is a factor in the sentiment and 
 nothing more. Let a man who traces his pedigree to the Tribe 
 ask a Land Leaguer for his share of the tribal land and the Land 
 Leaguer will give him six feet of it. 
 
 No doubt, when Englishmen and Scotchmen are provoked be- 
 yond measure by the conduct and the language of the Irish, they 
 sometimes give vent to their exasperation, and in violent terms ; 
 if they are hot-tempered and free of speecli, they say that Ireland 
 is not worth what she costs, and that they w^ish she could be 
 towed a thousand miles off or swallowed up by the sea. But 
 these outbursts are very different from settled hatred and con- 
 tempt. 
 
 The hatred felt for England by the Irish in the United States 
 amounts, says Mr. Godkin, to frenzy, and proves by its intensity 
 that the feud is internecine, and that the breach can never be 
 healed ; to which he might perhaps add that frenzy is neither a 
 cool judge of the facts of a case nor so wise a counsellor that the 
 American people can prudently surrender to it the guidance of 
 their national policy. But Mr. Godkin's view seems to be limited 
 to that which is immediately around him. If he will do us the 
 honour to visit Canada he will find that here the feeling is compara- 
 tively weak. I am told th.. t it is comparatively weak in Australia 
 also. In New York and Boston it is fostered and inflamed by the 
 assiduous arts of Tammany politicians angling for the Irish vote, 
 and of Fenian dynamite-mongers who subsist upon the fund. 
 When the Fenians twice invaded Canada, not a single Irish Can- 
 adian lifted a finger in aid of them or gave them any overt sign of 
 welcome. I must leave it to Americans to say whether, when the 
 Irish prosper and become settled in comfortable homes, their ac- 
 tive sympathy with Fenian enterprises does not begin to abate. 
 
15 
 
 Now a word by way of general reply to Mr. Godkin's view of 
 the political case and prospect. The three Celtic and Catholic 
 provinces of Ireland are the ill-starred Brittany or Calabria of 
 the United Kingdom. The people have been kept economically, 
 socially, and politically in a backward state by untoward in- 
 fluences of situation, soil, and climate, by aboriginal weaknesses 
 of character, by calamitous accidents of history, and by the Roman 
 Catholic religion. They are being gradually and painfully brought 
 up to the level of the more advanced civilization, and trained to 
 constit\itional self-government, though the process of education 
 is interrupted from time to time by recurring outbreaks of tribal 
 anarchy, which call for the adoption of temporary measures of re- 
 pression in order to prevent the people from ruining their own 
 prospects and free institutions at the same time. Even in the 
 United States, Irish lawlessness has sometimes given birth to 
 emergencies of a smaller kind. The difficulty is enormously in- 
 creased I)}' the prevalence of political incendiarism, which has now 
 become a trade, plied by adventurers in America as well as in 
 Ireland itself, whose object is not to further practical improve- 
 ment but to keep alive disaffection. 
 
 The .situation of Ireland is unhappy, because while nobody can 
 look at the two islands on the map and mark how they lie rela- 
 tively to each other and to the continent without seeing that their 
 destinies are knit together by the hand of nature, the channel 
 which separates them has been wide enough hitherto to estrange 
 them and prevent the smaller island from partaking in the pro- 
 gi-ess of the larger, though improved steam navigation is now do- 
 ing its work. Of the soil no small portion is mountain or bog, 
 while the climate is generally too wet for the profitable raising of 
 cereals, so that the most important industry is cattle-breeding, a 
 fact apparently fatal to that vision of the patriot, a peasant pro- 
 prietary with small farms. A large population can be maintained 
 only on the potato, and as the people multiply recklessly, failures 
 of that piecarious crop have bred famines, to the sufferers by 
 which, 1 believe it may be said, Great Britain has ministered re- 
 lief, both in the way of public grant and of private subscription, 
 with no iiiggardly hand. A happier mode of depletion has of late 
 years been found in emigration, though that remedy has been 
 
16 
 
 opposed by priest and demagogue alike ; and a number of Irish 
 certainly larger than the present population of the island, finds 
 subsistence in the British Colonies or in the United States, and 
 denounces British tyranny for robbing them of a country in which 
 they could not possibly have found bread. As Ireland raises only 
 130,000 tons of coal, while she imports two millions, she caimot 
 herself be a manufacturing country ; but a million and a half of 
 her people at least find employment in the manufacturing cities 
 of Great Britain, where their political character is the same as it 
 is in the cities of the United States. Some other sources of wealth, 
 such as fisheries or quarries, might be opened, the beauties of the 
 coast might attract the dwellings of opulence, and a larger meas- 
 ure of prosperity might be attained, if outrage would cease and 
 investment could become secure. In the last forty years the 
 number of cattle had doubled, pauperism had decreased ninety 
 per cent., and the amount of money in savings-banks and other 
 banks of deposit had become very large, and while the marine 
 suburbs of Dublin were attesting by their extension the growth 
 of wealth, when a bad season, causing local distress and rendering 
 many of the poor tenants incapable of paying the rents, the rate 
 of which in their desperate competition for the land they had 
 raised against themselves, brought on an agrarian agitation. Po- 
 litical incendiarism, Irish and American, pounced upon the move- 
 ment for its own purposes, and the result has been an outbreak 
 of murderous anarchy which has had the usual effect on commerce 
 and the material prosperity of the country. 
 
 I am not one of those who believe that the defects of races are 
 congenital or ineradicable ; I regard them as the offspring of un- 
 propitious circumstance, which more propitious circumstance may 
 remove. But whatever the cause may be, whether it be an undue 
 prolongation of the clan organization, or any other primeval acci- 
 dent, certain it is that the Celt, while gifted with a lively sociability 
 and many graces, is politically weaker than the Teuton, and less 
 capable of self-government. America sees this as well as Great 
 Britain. Mommsen, who is a neutral in the Irish Question, con- 
 cludes his portrayal of the Celtic character with the harsh words 
 " politically useless." The frenzy of hatred which Mr. Godkin 
 himself ascribes to his compatriots, and the frantic language in 
 
17 
 
 are 
 un- 
 
 iCCl- 
 
 lity 
 less 
 eat 
 on- 
 >rds 
 kin 
 in 
 
 which it finds vent, are signs not of force but of weakness, and 
 for that very reason may not be so lasting as Mr. Godkin thinks. 
 Is it very " pedagogic " to hold that the Celt, in his progress to- 
 wards self-government, requires to be supported and sometimes to 
 be saved from his " frenzy" by a stronger arm ? In the quality 
 of independence it is impossible to doubt that the Irish Celt is 
 wanting ; for he allows himself to be bullied and fleeced from his 
 cradle to his grave by priests and political swindlers, whose ex- 
 actions are no small drawback on his chances of improving his 
 material condition. I have said all along, and the demeanour of 
 the neighbourhood after the Joyce murder confirms me in the 
 belief, that on the present occasion the mass of the people were the 
 victims, and not the agents, of the Terror, and that the blow which 
 struck Terrorism down would set the people free. 
 
 The Roman Catholic religion has produced in all countries the 
 same eflfect upon the character and the material condition of the 
 people. The church may be the door of salvation, but it is not 
 the oracle of intelligence or thrift. Nor has aptitude for self-gov- 
 ernment been anywhere found in conjunction with such a belief 
 as that of the Irish, in the miracles wrought by plaster taken from 
 the church of Knock. This may be said without denying that 
 honour and sympathy are due to the Roman Catholic priests who 
 were the spiritual guides and comforters of the Irish peasantry 
 during centuries of darkness and distress. The British Govern- 
 ment has introduced into Ireland an excellent system of national 
 education, which, unless all analogy misleads us, could never have 
 been introduced by the clergy. I would invite Mr. Godkin, beiore 
 he uses unmeasured language of censure, to compare the condition 
 of Ireland in this respect with that of any other country at all 
 similarly circumstanced in which the Roman Catholic priesthood 
 has equal sway. For French Canada a British and Protestant 
 partner has done pretty much what Great Britain has done for 
 Ireland, In Spain, Southern Italy (at least till yesterday), and 
 Mexico, no extraneous influence intervening, we have seen what 
 the natural tendencies of Catholicism were. The Scotch High- 
 landers were in much the same condition as the Irish before Pres- 
 byterianism extended its influence to the Highlands. 
 
18 
 
 That the course of Irish history has been most unfortunate, and 
 that the greatest allowance is to be made on this account for any- 
 thing that may be amiss in Irish character, no writer, I believe, 
 has taken greater pains to show than I have. The two main foun- 
 tains of calamity, whose bitter waters have not yet ceased to flow, 
 were mediaeval conquest and th > religious wars of the Reformation, 
 for neither of which is any living Englishman more responsible than 
 he is for the events of the glacial period. 
 
 The conquest of Ireland was not English but Norman. It 
 was a supplement of the Norman conquest of England, both in 
 its aspect as an enterprise of military ambition and as a religious 
 crusade undertaken at the instigation of the Papacy for the pur- 
 pose of bringing a schismatic church more completely under the 
 dominion of Rome. It was doubly invited by the Irish them- 
 selves, the clergy having stretched out their hands to the Anglo- 
 Norman ecclesiastics for aid against the impious aggressions of 
 the chiefs, while Dermod, one of the chiefs, called in the fatal help 
 of Strongbow to avenge his personal quarrel. It killed, so far as 
 we can see, nothing of much value or promise, since the Church, 
 the organ, and the sole organ, at an earlier period, of a preco- 
 ciously brilliant civilization, had been trampled down by the bar- 
 barism of the clans whose anarchic conflicts filled, and would 
 probably long have continued to fiU, the scene. Mr. Godkin, 
 I think, can hardly be serious in setting it down as one of the 
 wrongs of Ireland that history will not recognize the primeval 
 glories of Tara's Halls : it would be paying his race a poor com- 
 pliment to suppose that they loved to be fed on blarney. Unluck- 
 ily, while the Norman conquest of England was achieved by a 
 king whose power suspended the anarchic tendencies of feudal- 
 ism, and was thus rendered complete, the conquest of Ireland was 
 left to private adventure under the auspices of feudal lords, the 
 consequence of which was that the conquest of Ireland remained 
 incomplete, and instead of a national aristocracy, destined after- 
 wards to coalesce with the people, gave birth to a military colony 
 or pale, between which and the natives who occupied the rest of 
 the island there raged for centuries a deadly war of race, after- 
 wards aggravated by a war of religion. 
 
19 
 
 In the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
 ries Celtic Ireland was involved as a member of the Catholic Con- 
 federacy, and, being weak and remote from her allies, she met the 
 usual fate of the dwarf who goes to war as the companion of the 
 giant. But she aided to the utmost of her power the attempt of 
 the Catholic kings to extirpate Protestantism and liberty with 
 the sword and the stake. She co-operated with the fitters-out of 
 the Armada, she massacred the Protestants in 1645, she furnished 
 soldiers to the persecuting armies of Louis XIV., she conspired 
 with James II. against civil and religious liberty. The Protest- 
 ants, after their narrow escape from the conspiracy, bound down 
 the Catholics with cruel disabilities. The Catholics of the Con- 
 tinent, meanwhile, were burning Protestants alive ; and toleration 
 advancing with the eighteenth century, had begun practically to 
 mitigate the penal code before the auto-da-fe had ceased to be per- 
 formed. An Irish army in the se^-vice of the Pope made the last 
 stand against Italian independence, and public education in the 
 United States is even now not wholly free from disturbance or men- 
 ace on the part of the Irish Catholic Church. 
 
 Perhaps the blackest portions of this disastrous history are the 
 restrictions imposed, before the Union, on Irish commerce, because 
 these were the offspring of mere selfishness, unredeemed by any 
 zeal for a principle. But they belonged to the general era of 
 protection, when the whole of Europe was possessed with that 
 economical heresy, and when nobody found fault with Chatham, 
 the champion of colonial liberty, for saying that he would not 
 allow a colony to manufacture a nail for a horseshoe. Since the 
 Union, England has opened to Ireland, with perfect freedom, the 
 richest and best market in the world, which a severance of the 
 Union would put in her ])ower, in case of unfriendly relations, 
 again to close. 
 
 The abolition of the Irish Parliament in 1800 I cannot regard 
 as a substantial wrong, though it was done in the worst possible 
 way. What that Parliament was, the Nationalist Sir Jonah 
 Barrington has told us, and Mr. Godkin cannot question the 
 truth of the description, though he thinks it disingenuous in us to 
 refer to it without saying that the English Parliament was as 
 The bad. British Parliament, however, though vastly in need of 
 
'!iji!l 
 
 20 
 
 reform, was nothing like as bad as that of Ireland : it would 
 never have sold its own existence and that of the nation as the 
 Parliament of Ireland did. Mr. Godkin himself tells us that 
 the Irish Parliament ** had only an idle, dissolute, and bigoted class 
 behind it." The reason for not believing that it would, like the 
 British Parliament, have improved with time, is the doom which it 
 brought on itself. After twenty years of corruption, profligacy , 
 and violence, its career closed in a hideous war of races and relis:- 
 ions, in which it morally expired, nothing remaining between 
 the country and the bloodiest anarchy but the military power of 
 England. Pitt ought to have recognized the fact, and instead of 
 buying with money and peerages the votes of scoundrels who had 
 practically nothing but themselves left to sell, and thereby in- 
 curably tainting the transaction, to have done what Cromwell 
 under similar circumstances did, and simply declared Ireland 
 united to Great Britain, 
 
 The British nation obtained for itself self-government by the 
 Reform Bill of 1832, before which the Parliament had been nom- 
 inated by an oligarchy, not elected by the people. It fully im- 
 parted its recovered liberties to Ireland, who received her full 
 share of representation, and towards whom from that hour legis.- 
 lation, whatever may have been its shortcomings, has been uni- 
 formly animated by a spirit of liberality, of kindness, and of 
 remorseful anxiety to atone for the wrong-doings of the past. I 
 well remember the emphasis with which a great French states- 
 man, "who, though friendly enough to England, was no Anglo- 
 maniac, asserted and repeated the assertion that the conduct of 
 England to Ireland for thirty years had been admirable. This 
 was before the disestablishment of the Protestant Church. If there 
 is any fact on +he other side, let it be pointed out. Coercion there 
 has been, when anarchy broke out, but never, I suspect, coercion 
 so vigorous as that which followed the Irish rising in New York. 
 In an old country where the party of reaction is still strong, pro- 
 gress is slow ; it is slow for Great Britain as well as for Ireland : 
 but it has been faster for Ireland than for England : Ireland had 
 her national system of education some time before England had 
 hers ; the State Church of Ireland has been abolished and perfect 
 religious equality established, while in England the State Church 
 
21 
 
 still exists ; and in regard to the Land Question, the most momen- 
 tous of all, changes have been made by successive Acts of Pax'lia- 
 ment, in the interest of the tenant, far in advance of anything that 
 has been done for the tenants in England, and such as would not 
 be possible in the United States, where legislative breaking of 
 contracts and sponging out of debts already due is precluded 
 (wisely and righteously, as I believe) by a fundamental law. For 
 disestablishment Mr. Godkin denies to Parliament any credit on 
 the ground that the Irish people had never entered the churches 
 which were disestablished; but on consideration he will find that 
 beneath this stricture there lurks what the scoffers call a char- 
 acteristic product of the Irish mind. 
 
 Mr. Godkin seems to think that Ireland might have been con- 
 tented if she had been put on the same footing with regard to 
 legislation as Scotland. She is on the same footing as Scotland. The 
 House of Commons makes by its rules no special arrangement for 
 the benefit of the Scotch delegation. But the Scotchmen are not 
 bushwhackers : they are solid, shrewd, and serious people : they 
 choose to work parliamentary institutions rather than to wreck 
 them; and by simply comlming, where combination was necessary, 
 in their special interest, and acting cordially on all other matters 
 with their colleagues, they have got everything which with any 
 approach to unanimity they desired. Nothing hinders the Irish 
 members from going into caucus on any Irish question but their 
 own fierce dissensions, which the House of Commons did not create 
 and cannot heal. 
 
 The last move of the Irish members, at least of the Fenian 
 section of them, which I would beg leave to remind Mr. Godkin 
 hardly numbers more than thirty, has been a deliberate and 
 avowed attempt to wreck Parliament by obstruction, for the pur- 
 pose of bringing about Disunion. Would the people of the United 
 States bear with tameness the attempt of a party, say, of "unre- 
 constructed" Southerners, to wreck Congress in the same way for 
 the purpose of renewing Secession? Is not the British Parliament 
 in repressing obstructionists by the cl6ture, by suspension, or by 
 any other measure that may be needful, defending the very life 
 of representative government? I do not trust much to the cl6ture, 
 nor can I help thinking that in forcing on the House with the 
 
22 
 
 4 
 
 party whip a form of it to which the convictions of the majority 
 are notoriously opposed, the Ministry is doing what is impolitic 
 and wrong ; but nobody will be gagged who makes an honest and 
 loyal use of his power of speech. 
 
 In regard to administration, Mr. Godkin thinks the case is as 
 bad as in regard to legislation ; the government of Ireland, he 
 avers, has been for the last eighty years the worst in Europe — 
 worse than that of Spain, of Naples, of the Italian provinces of 
 Austria, of the Christian provinces of Turkey. Once more I would 
 call attention to the fact that Ulster is a part of Ireland. But even 
 with respect to the Celtic provinces, apart from agrarian or dis- 
 unionist agitation, and the temporary measures of repression 
 which they entail, can Mr. Godkin's sweeping statement be sus- 
 tained ? Nobody taxes the Government with corruption or with 
 violence; the practical administration is almost entirely in the 
 hands of Irishmen, though, as we saw in the case of Mr. Burke, 
 their Irishry does not save them from assassination; the law is 
 the same as that of England, and substantially the same as that 
 of the United States; the judiciary is learned, respectable and 
 pure; if jury trial does not work well, it is because, like repre- 
 sentative government, it has been given to the people in advance 
 of their real fitness; the fiscal system is free trade; there are very 
 good public schools, with every reasonable safeguard for conscience ; 
 the police is excellent, and Mr. Godkin is mistaken in imagining 
 that, as a general rule, life and property are insecure, for statistics 
 will show him that the average of ordinary crime is low. That 
 the Government has not for the last fifty years resorted to excep • 
 tional measures, except when, and so long as, they appeared 
 necessary for the repression of lawlessness, that it has never 
 shown the slightest desire to encroach permanently on liberty, I 
 am as firmly convinced as I am of any fact in history. It is pre- 
 posterous to brand as despotism the force which a commonwealth, 
 threatened with civil w.ar, puts forth to save itself from disruption, 
 and which twenty years ago was put forth on the most gigantic 
 scale by the United States. 
 
 Mr. Godkin complains that, while the Lord Advocate of Scot- 
 land is always a Scotchman, the Chief Secretary for Ireland is 
 not an Irishman. The Lord Advocate is a law officer, who must 
 
23 
 
 »cot- 
 d is 
 
 lUSt 
 
 be versed in the local law of Scotland. The Attorney General 
 for Ireland is always an Irishman ; and so is the Chancellor. That 
 Irishmen were excluded from the Chief Secretaryship because 
 English members of Parliament did not like to do business with 
 them, I never heard ; what I have heard is that the Govern- 
 ment would gladly take an Irishman if they could find one whose 
 appointment would not be insufferable to the opposite party in 
 Ireland. I remember the time, even if it is now past, when it 
 was with difficulty that men of opposite parties in Ireland c^uld 
 be brought to meet each other at dinner. Lord Naas was an Irish- 
 man, as well as Chichester Fortescue, and Sir John Young was 
 connected with Ireland. It is news to Chichester Fortescue's 
 friends that he does not wish to be regarded as representing his 
 country ; he has especially identified himself with all Irish ques- 
 tions. But he is not a Disunionist, and, therefore, in Mr. Godkin's 
 view, he is not an Irishman. 
 
 Mr. Godkin indulges his Nationalist sympathies in a bitter and 
 somewhat personal attack on the late Chief Secretary, Mr. Fors- 
 ter. What is certain is that Mr. Forster was not sent to Ireland 
 as an emissary of English hatred. I have quoted, in a lecture to 
 which Mr. Godkin refers, to testimony borne by Mr. A. M. Sulli- 
 van, a moderate Home Ruler, to the self-devotion shown by Mr. 
 Forster as an envoy of the English Relief organization in Ireland at 
 the time of the great famine. In that ministration he must have 
 seen a great deal of the people and their grievances : he has in his 
 own constituency at Bradford a large Irish element ; and he is in 
 daily contact with leading Irishmen of all parties at Westminster, 
 so that his lack of knowledge could hardly have been the reason 
 for giving him the post any more than his lack of good will. To 
 tax him, of all men, with a tendency to despotism will appear to 
 all who have watched his public career the most preposterous in- 
 justice. He had to deal not with a constitutional agitation which 
 he, like all other Liberals, would have respected ; but with an at- 
 tempt of the American Fenians, in combination with a Terrorist 
 organization in Ireland sustained by the Fenian fund, to kindle 
 the flame of civil war. He did no more than was necessary to 
 prevent civil war from breaking out ; that object he effected with- 
 out shedding a drop of blood, for which, by the way, he was pri- 
 

 24 
 
 vately derided as a " Quaker " by men who were openly siding 
 with the Irish against him, and denouncing him for resorting to 
 Coercion. I happened to be in Ireland at the crisis, and can tes- 
 tify that, in the opinion of the coolest and most competent ob- 
 servers, the allegiance of the people was being transferred from 
 the government of the Queen to that of the Land Leaguers and 
 Terrorists. Mr. Godkin might think this not a bad thing. But Mr. 
 Forster's duty was to stop it, and this he could do only by strik- 
 ing down the Land League government. If the particular meas- 
 ure adopted was not the best, the responsibility does not rest on 
 him alone ; for the Prime Minister personally announced the ar- 
 rest of Mr. Parnell to an applauding multitude at Guildhall. The 
 most abundant proof can be furnished from the organs of his 
 Fenian adversaries that assassination, as well as revolution, was 
 their game. Himself daily threatened by assassins, he lost neither 
 nerve nor good humour. His speech at Tullamore, by the " peda- 
 gogism " of which Mr. Godkin is greatly exasperated, was highly 
 praised at the time by men who, at all events, are no " pedagogues," 
 and who ought to be tolerable judges of anything relating to Ire- 
 land. It was not a stump oration, but the address of a responsi- 
 ble ruler to ignorant peasants who were being incited by conspira- 
 tors to the commission of fearful crimes. If Americans would not 
 have liked its tone of authority, still less would they have liked 
 to do the things which made its tone appropriate. Mr. Forster 
 has his enemies in England as well as in Ireland, and I cannot 
 help thinking that Mr. Godkin's invective against him is partly 
 an echo of theirs. If his policy was not entirely successful, this 
 was partly due to the action of enemies who were cutting its sinews 
 from behind, and waving over his Lead a signal flag to the public 
 enemy. It is only to be hoped that this party had no sympathy 
 in the Cabinet. No sooner had Mr. Forsier been thrown over, 
 and the reversal of his policy proclaimed, than a new Coercion 
 Act, more stringent than his, was brought in. He did his best in 
 a dangerous post for England, and justice will be done him by his- 
 tory. 
 
 To Mr. Godkin it evidently appears an absurdity verging upon 
 impudence to say that the same hands which have given Ireland 
 the Land Act are ready to give her any rational and feasible 
 
25 
 
 measure of Home Rule. Yet nothing is more certain than that at 
 the moment when all legislation was arrested by Obstruction, the 
 Liberal leaders were about to propose an extension of local self- 
 government, in which Ireland would have had her share. A 
 Grand Committee of the House of Commons for Ireland is a plan 
 which has -sometimes presented itself amongst the possible solu- 
 tions of the Irish problem. The objections are, first, the difficulty 
 of making Grand Committees work at all under the party system, 
 unless the majority of the Committee is of the same party as the 
 majority of the House; secondly, the awkwardness of assigning 
 the local affairs of Scotland and Ireland to Grand Committees, 
 and leaving the affairs of England to the House at large; thirdly, 
 the heterogenous character and mutual hostility of the elements, 
 Catholic and Orange, of which the Grand Committee for Ireland 
 would be composed; lastly, what is most serious, that, as institu- 
 ti /IS are apt to take their practical bent from the circumstances 
 under which they are established and the hands into which they 
 first fall, a Grand Committee for Ireland established at the pres- 
 ent crisis and composed at the outset of the present Irish mem- 
 bers would almost certainly be turned into an engine of secession. 
 I have often wished, though I fear the difficulty of fulfilling the 
 wish is too great, to see Parliament hold an occasional session in 
 Dublin, both for the purpose of informing itself more thoroughly 
 about Irish questions and for that of letting the people see their 
 government and paying homage to national feeling. But there 
 is the will, if the way can be found, to make any concession com- 
 patible with the preservation of the legislative union, the strain 
 upon which would be eased by the extension of local self-govern- 
 ment. That the legislative union should be deserted by British 
 statesmen is not conceivable, far removed as we are from the 
 Commonwealth. On both sides of the Atlantic, party has its evil 
 and ignoble exigencies ; it has already betrayed England into pay- 
 ing blackmail to Terrorism when a single hour of a patriotic Par- 
 liament would have abashed rebellion and at once put an end to 
 the peril. There is a section of the English politicians which, 
 partly under the influence of the Irish vote, has throughout 
 screened and virtually abetted the Terrorists, and which would 
 perhaps under the same influence be willing, for the purpose of 
 
m 
 
 26 
 
 retaining power, to tamper with the integrity of the Union. But 
 I cannot believe that this party will be allowed to prevail: if I coul 
 I would almost as soon be a Mexican as an Englishman. To give 
 up a part of the United Kingdom and to allow it to be made the 
 seat of a hostile power which would have offshoots and outposts 
 m every British city where there is an Irish colony, as well as in 
 the United States, is surely a folly and a dishonour to which even 
 the r<)cklessness of faction can never make a nation stoop. An 
 American protectorate of Ireland, which some people propose, 
 will be possible after a conquest of Great Britain by American 
 arms, as a Franco-British protectorate of a Southern confederacy, 
 which was also projected, would have been possible after a con- 
 quest of the United States by the arms of France and England. 
 Let American statesmen judge for themselves what interest they 
 and their country have in giving Irish Catholicism a new basis 
 and a stronger fulcrum for its operations against the fundamental 
 principles of Anglo-American institutions. 
 
 " Part in peace," is Mr. Godkin's advice to Great Britain and 
 Ireland. The same advice was tendered in another case, and was 
 rejected with the best results not only to the nation immediately 
 concerned but to humanity. Yet Slavery was at least as sharp 
 and estranging a line of division as any which exists between the 
 Irish Celts and the other people of the United Kingdom, with 
 whom in fact, both in England and Scotland, the Irish Celts are 
 largely blending. If the Irish Celt is irreconcilable he is doomed ; 
 for a high civilization assailed with dynamite and the Thug-knife, 
 though from constitutional scruple and sensibility to scandal it 
 may hesitate to strike, will be compelled to strike at last. But 
 the Irish Celt is not irreconcilable. Mr. Godkin, as has been said 
 before, has in his eye only the cities of the United States where a 
 fire fanned by politicians and conspirators is blazing and crack- 
 ling among thorns. Where it is left to itself the feeling is not nearly 
 BO strong. Upon the Catholics of the upper classes in Ireland the 
 Liberal policy of half a century has told, and they are now, 
 almost without exception, opposed to revolution. The most emin- 
 ent of them are decided Unionists. The Protestant gentry have 
 always been on that side. Mr. Pamell is one of the smaller 
 gentry, but there is a distance which he is said pretty distinctly to 
 
27 
 
 mark, between him and any of his followers who, let me repeat,, 
 muster less than thirty in the House of Commons. Movements 
 without any leaders of the higher class have seldom^been successful. 
 There have been many notable conversions from the revolutionary 
 ranks ; among them Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, formerly editor of 
 the Nation, D'Arcy McGee, who was murdered by the Fenians, 
 and, I believe, I may add the great poet of the movement, the 
 writer of " Who fears to Speak of '98? " Mr. Godkin predicts that 
 the bitterness of the Irish will increase instead of dimini'shing; 
 with their prosperity and education ; such facts as have fallen 
 under my own notice point rather the other way ; but of this at 
 all events I feel sure, that if the oratorical and literary expression 
 of a vindictive sentiment increases with prosperity and educa- 
 tion the tendency to fly to arms does not. A common language 
 is a great assimilating force ; and though it is true (and I have 
 myself more than once pointed it out as a dangerous feature of 
 the present situation) that in the course of this protracted struggle 
 a popular literature steeped in Disunionism has grown up, this 
 literature is of a coarse character and will certainly be superseded 
 in time by the hi£;her, which breathes sentiments of the opposite 
 kind. Mr. Godkin may have noticed that the police, which is almost 
 entirely composed of Irishmen and largely of Roman Catholics, has 
 remained perfectly true to the Government; the brief dispute which 
 occurred the other day about the rate of pay being one of those 
 exceptions which prove the rule ; and it has seldom happened that 
 where poptdar feeling has been very intense a native police, or 
 even a native army, has escaped infection. Nay, furiously seces- 
 sionist as the utterances of the Parnellite members of Parliament 
 are, there is some reason for surmising that these gentlemen se- 
 cretly value their seats in the Imperial House of Commons, and 
 that the fear of losing a position which they affect to abhor has 
 had something to do with their recent display of comparative 
 moderation. Nothing could be more fraught with Irish frenzy 
 than a letter which at the commencement of the Land League 
 agitation was published by one of our Irish Catholic prelates in 
 Canada ; but the same prelate has just been recounting, with the 
 greatest complacency, his gratifying reception at the British 
 Court. For Irish sentiment, of which I desire to speak with 
 
I j 
 
 ifiiiii 
 
 28 
 
 hearty sympathy and respect, there is room, as there is for Scotch 
 sentiment, within the Union. 
 
 The fact is that the political revolution, though to Mr. Godkin, 
 -who is in the midst of the Fenians, it seems the principal move- 
 ment, has ever since 1798 been extremely weak. It has never 
 been able to generate a particle of military force ; its appearances 
 in the field have always been the merest flashes in the pan. 
 The agrarian movement, which touched the pockets of the people, 
 has alone been really strong. Hence, among the political con- 
 spirators it has always been easy, as the New York Evening Post 
 remarked the other day, to find any number of spies and informers ; 
 while among the agrarian conspirators, the object being sub- 
 stantial and the feeling really intense, mutual fidelity has been 
 strict. The present movement, so far as the people of Ireland are 
 concerned, is almost purely agrarian, though the agrarian quarrel 
 is no doubt in some degree envenomed by antipathy of race and 
 religion. Only from its alliance with the Land League does 
 Fenianism derive any strength, beyond the agencies of Terrorism 
 purchased with its own funds. The real centre of political insur- 
 rection, as well as the main source of its supplies, is not in Ireland 
 itself but in New York, where one of the leaders told us the 
 other day that his motto was " dynamite first, last, and all the 
 time." American Fenianism appears to be compounded in pro- 
 portions, which it is difficult to determine, of Irish sentiment, 
 Nihilism, and the tendency of certain active spirits to live, not by 
 the sweat of their brows, but by the collection and administration 
 of political funds. The chief of the whole, and the destined 
 regenerator of his race, is described in a biographical notice which, 
 if I guess rightly, is the work of a well-informed writer, as hav- 
 ing wandered through various callings and enterprises, including 
 an unsuccessful attempt at journalism and two unsuccessful 
 attempts at saloon-keeping, before he took to Dynamite. He and 
 one of his principal associates were the other day publicly accusing 
 each other of peculation, lying, and treachery, in language of 
 Celtic fervency, and probably without any breach of veracity on 
 either side. I should like to see the native American who 
 believes that the Skirmishing Fund is going to give good govern- 
 ment and happiness to Ireland. Mr. Godkin in forecasting the 
 
29 
 
 jusing 
 
 character of a s&^ar^Ui Irish government admits that it would pro- 
 bably be markod by a diminished tenderness to individual rights 
 and a greater tendency to submit to the exercise of arbitrary 
 power. In ether words, it would be a relapse into barbarism. 
 
 That the troubles of Ireland are at an end I do not affect to be- 
 lieve. They will not be at an end till Parliament sets faction 
 aside and shows patriotic spirit in dealing with a public peril. 
 Such a policy as that embodied in the Arrears Act is successful for 
 a time only. By the events of the last two years the respect of 
 the people for contracts and law must have been severely shaken, 
 the security of property impaired, and capital frightened away. 
 It is not unlikely that the next general election may send, instead 
 of twenty or thirty, sixty or seventy Fenians to the House of 
 Commons, and the attempt to wreck Parliament may be renewed, 
 with perhaps still more practical encouragement from English 
 members owing their seats to the Irish vote. Still if we look back 
 not for two years only, but for half a century, we shall see that 
 progress has been made towards a just, beneficent, and voluntary 
 Union. The present relapse, serious as it is, «eems to owe its 
 dangerous character not to causes operating in Iieland itself so 
 much as to the machinations of American Fenianism, which have 
 prevented the subsidence of the agrarian agitation. American 
 Fenianism has been greatly developed of late, but it depends on 
 subscriptions, the stream of which can hardly flow forever. 
 
 For my part, I repeat with confidence, what I said before. 
 ' Settle the Land Question, and that which alone lends strength to 
 political discontent, to conspiracy, to disunion, will be gone. Pas- 
 sion will not subside in an hour, but it will subside, and good 
 feeling will take its place. The day may come when there will 
 be no more talk of England and Scotland governing Ireland well 
 or ill, because Ireland, in partnership with England and Scotland, 
 will be governing herself, and contributing her share to the com- 
 mon greatness and the common progress ; when the Union will be 
 ratified not only by necessity, but by free conviction and good 
 will ; when the march of wealth and prosperity will no more be 
 arrested by discord, but the resources of the Island will be devel- 
 oped in pence, and the villas of opulence perhaps will stud the 
 lovely shores, where now the assassin prowls and property cannot 
 
*) i 
 
 30 
 
 sleep secure ; when the long series of Liberal triumphs will be 
 crowned by the sight of an Ireland no longer distracted, disaffec- 
 ted, and reproachful, no longer brooding over the wrongs and suf- 
 ferings of the past, but resting peacefully, happily, and in unforced 
 union at her consort's side. The life of a nation is long, and 
 though by us this consummation may not be witnessed, it may 
 be witnessed by our children.' 
 
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