.'*.
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UNIVERSITY OP.
CALIFORNIA
IRISH NATIONALISM.
a
IKISH NATIONALISM:
AN APPEAL TO HISTOEY.
BY THE
DUKE OF ARGYLL, K.G., K.T.
LONDON:
JOHN MUERAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1893.
lOAN STACK
LONDON :
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
6XAMFOKD STKEET AND CUAUIKG OUOSib.
CONTENTS.
FAGB
CHAPTER I.
IRISH HISTORY BEFORE THE EXPEDITION OF HENUT II.,
IN A.D. 1172.
An example — The accusation against England — Alleged con-
quest of Ireland — Suzerainty not government — Evidence of
Irish writers — The English invited — An erroneous assertion
— Early Irish culture — A momentary monarchy — Who
destroyed it — Early Irish annals — Deepening barbarism —
The Irish Celtic Church — Irish authorities — Pinglish
barbarism compared — Ireland's golden age — Cause of Irish
anarchy — Irish apologies for Ireland — The Irish made
xnemseives ••• •*• ••• %%» ••• •••
CHAPTER II.
EFFECTS OF SUZERAINTY OF ENGLAND OVER IRELAND.
English Colonists degraded— Contrast with Scotland — Same
danger in Scotland — Anglo-Normans in Scotland — Irish
dread of government — English government powerless —
Daniel O'Connell's speech— O'Connell's erroneous assertion
— Irish hatred of law — Tlie English barons Ersefied —
Adoption of Irish customs — Irish intertiibal wars^ Ireland
made the Anglo-Iiish — The Latin Church ... ... 41
'&'
292
VI CONTENTS.
CHAPTER III.
EFFECT OP NATIVE IRISH LAWS AND USAGES.
PAGB
Contradictory charges — Irish tribalism — Septs intensely aristo-
cratic — Clans were not tribes — Intensified inequalities-
Irish feudalism — Evidence of Professor Sullivan — Irish
gradations of rank — Irish form of wealth — Irish property in
land — Evidence of ancient books — Alleged communal
ownership — Dr. Sullivan on ownership — Irremovability was
bondage — Bondage to the soil — Removability was personal
freedom — Laws of succession — laterest of poorer classes —
Evils of native customs — Irish inconsistency ... ... 70
CHAPTER IV.
HISTORY CONTINUED FROM A.D. 1172 TO THE END OP THE
FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
Right of England — Irish analogy in Scotland — Scots' invasion
of Ireland — Devastation of Ireland — Lasting ruin — English
law in Ireland — Statutes of Kilkenny — English action
diverted — Expedition of Richard II. — Supremacy of the
Irish — Irish support House of York — ^Poyning's law —
Necessity of Poyning's law — Condition of Ireland ... 110
i
CHAPTER V.
IRELAND UNDER THE TUDORS DOWN TO THE DEATH OP HENRY VIII.
The Geraldine rebellion — Results of Irish Home Rule — Testi-
mony of native annals — Dr. Richey's confessions — Results
of native institutions — Ersefied Englishmen — Irish in-
trigues with foreigners — Policy of Henry VIII. — Some law
a necessity — Military weakness of England — A demand for
England — Religion not yet concerned — Irish not Papal —
Barbarism of native clergy ... ... ... ... 139
CONTENTS. VU
CHAPTER VI.
THE EPOCH OF CONQUEST AND COLONISATION.
Irish land rents — Condilion of tenants — Irish confiscations — The
PAGE
Catholic queen — Queen Mary's plantations — Queen Eliza-
beth — Shane O'Neill's rebellion — The Catholic conspiracy
— Tyrone's rebellion — England's case stated ... ... 168
CHAPTER VII.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Inevitable antagonisms — Philosophy in history — Ireland not
governed by England — Comparative intolerance — Short
period of English rule — Physical condition of Ireland —
Instincts of dominion wholesome — England in permanent
danger— The penal laws — Reality of danger — Two motives
balanced ... ... ... ... ... ... 189
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY — ECONOMIC CAUSES.
Economic effects of penal laws — The commercial system — Irish
protectionism — An Irish folly — Ruinous effects — Those
effects traced — Continuity of vicious policy — Irish incon-
sistency — An Irishman's evidence — Hereditary survivals —
Penal effects of an Irish custom — Survival not degradation
— The potato — Irish famines — Combination of causes ... 213
CHAPTER IX.
CONCLUSIONS,
Geographical position — Barbarous agriculture — Irish subletting
— Irish education — Rebels of 1798 — Position of government
— Dates in the rebellion — Catholic emancipation — Abstract
principle not admitted — Irish history re-read — Sentence of
Edmund Burke ... ... ... ... ... 245
IRISH ]SrATIO]^ALISM :
AN APPEAL TO HISTORY.
-•o*-
CHAPTER I.
IKISH HISTORY BEFORE THE EXPEDITION OF
HENRY II., IN A.D. 1172.
History has fared ill in many hands. But in no
hands has she ever fared worse than in those of party-
leaders. When they engage her as their maid-of-all-
work, she sinks to the level of a very slattern. Truth
in the hands of a casuist ; — morals in the hands of the
proverbial Jesuit; — facts in the hands of a special
pleader, — all these combined are but a feeble image of
the fate of history when it is put to use by professional
politicians. And when this position is held by any
man who is, or finds it convenient to assume the
character of an Ethnogogue, then the corrupting
influence is aggravated to an intense degree. No
element, or influence, that can vitiate knowledge or
pervert judgment is left unemployed. The merely
f B
2 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
dull and unobservant eye that sees nothing on either
side of one narrow line of vision — this is the commonest
influence of all. But passions of all kinds come in
to play their part, and to convert mere misconception
into the most violent misrepresentation. The least
disparaging image to which a party politician can be
compared, who uses history as one of the tools in his
trade, is that of a legal Advocate pushing to its
utmost extremes, in favour of his client, the acknow-
ledged licence of the Bar. How far that licence may
legitimately go has never been settled, and is perhaps
incapable of definition. Certain it is that both the
suppressio veri and the suggestio falsi are among the
legitimate and ordinary weapons of the calling. Lord
Brougham once said that an Advocate has nothing
whatever to think of except the interests of his client.
That there are some vague limits assigned to this
doctrine, by professional opinion, may be true. I
recollect a famous case in which the Counsel for a
murderer went so far as to indicate another person
than his client, who, so far as the evidence went, might
possibly be the criminal. In this he was held to have
gone too far, and his conduct met with general con-
demnation. On the whole, however, the licence of the
Bar is thoroughly understood ; and it is so understood
just because it is reasonably held to be an absolute
necessity in the interests of society. But though a
jury may be occasionally misled, nobody is really
deceived. Nobody is expected to believe that a
CH. l] an example. 3
Counsel is really presenting either facts or arguments
in their true relation. No such understanding how-
ever exists, or ought to exist, in the case of statesmen
and politicians. They have no professional duty or
right to be unscrupulous, or passionate, or even care-
less and one-sided in dealing with history. The
interests of society do not demand from them any
sacrifice of the strictest regard for truth in any of its
forms, and especially for historical truth. On the
contrary, the public interest, as regards political
questions, is bound up with the most faithful truth-
fulness in using the records of the past. That there
is a very large element of opinion in the presentation
and interpretation of historical facts is undeniable.
But this only renders it all the more incumbent on
Statesmen to deal as completely and fairly as they
can, at least with the facts to be quoted, or referred
to, in support of political contentions. Moreover,
this duty rises in the scale of obligation in proportion
as those contentions may affect the vital interests
of any political society with which we may have
to do.
I make these observations with express reference to
the use which Mr. Gladstone, since 1885, has made of
history, on the Irish Question. I hold that use to have
been little better than one long tissue of passionate
misrepresentation. Having expressed this opinion
strongly on a late occasion — in referring to his
language as " inflated fable " — when addressing an
4 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
American audience,* I have been most properly
challenged by Mr. Gladstone in his reply to make it
good by definite evidence and quotation. My object
in these pages is to take up that challenge.f In doing
so I will follow Mr. Gladstone's own reference to the
materials which he specifies as legitimate for the
purpose of testing his contentions. These materials
are, first, " A series of utterances which fill a moderate
volume," meaning, I presume, the whole body of his
speeches and writings since 1885 ; and second, these
utterances as specially represented in a particular
volume, lately published under the truly descriptive
and significant title of " Special Aspects of the Irish
Question." t " Special " they are — in a very high
degree. This volume, extending over three hundred
and seventy pages, contains ten separate papers, all
of them interlarded more or less extensively with
arguments and assertions purporting to be historical,
and one of the ten (No. III.) is expressly entitled
" Lessons of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century."
Its *' special aspect " is that which represents all the
ills that Ireland has suffered as being due entirely to
the conduct and government of England.
Now, there are two different and almost opposite
senses in which this accusation may be made. It may
mean that England is responsible for all the ills of
* North American Review, August 1892.
t Ibid., October, 1892.
X J. Murray. 1892.
CH. I.] THE ACCUSATION AGAINST ENGLAND. 5
Ireland because site never put forth her full strength
to complete the conquest of the island, and to impose,
effectually and universally, her own more civilised
system of law upon its people : — that she tolerated, as
she ought not to have done, the long continuance and
the desolating effect of native customs which oppressed
and impoverished the people : — and that she was even
tempted by dangers arising from time to time, to enter
into partial alliances with some one or more of the
savage factions which were always tearing at each
other's vitals in that country. In this sense the accusa-
tion against England does, at least, represent a real,
although a very partial " aspect " of the truth. It
ascribes the ills of Ireland primarily to causes of native
origin, and only secondarily to England as having by
negligence failed to apply a remedy which, it is
assumed, was easily within her power ; and as having
indirectly aggravated those causes by occasional
complicity.
The other sense in which the accusation against
England may be made, rests upon assumptions directly
opposite : — upon the assumption, namely, that *' seven
centuries " ago, in 1 172, she did conquer Ireland effec-
tually ; — that she did establish a foreign law alien to
the happier customs of its native people ; — that before
this conquest Ireland had been comparatively a happy
and prosperous nation ; — that English rule was so
effectively established as to be the one great cause
and fountain of all their subsequent distress ; and
6 ' IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. t.
that the native laws and usages of Ireland cannot be
charged with any part, or at least any serious share, in
her long centuries of pain.
This last is the sense — the "special aspect" — in
which the accusation is made by Mr. Gladstone. It
is in this sense that he presses it with all the vehe-
mence of Counsel holding a brief for the prosecution —
and, as I hope to show, with an audacity both in
the statement and in the suppression of facts, which
exhibit, in their very highest development, at once
the utmost dexterity, and the utmost licence, of the
Bar.
The first step he takes is to lay down the funda-
mental assumption needed for his purpose by a bold
and confident assertion implying that there was an
effectual conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century
by Henry II. Without this assumption the accusation
against England, in the second of the two senses above
defined, cannot, of course, for a moment be sustained.
But upon that assumption the accusation may be at
least plausible. Accordingly, Mr. Gladstone makes
the assertion in perhaps the extremest form in which
it has ever been expressed. " Ireland," he says, " for
more than seven hundred years hag been part of the
British territory, and has been, with slight exceptions,
held by English arms, or governed, in the last resort,
from this side of the water." * Notwithstanding the
characteristic dexterity of the qualifying words, " in
Aspects," p. 109.
« u
CH. I.] ALLEGED CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 7
the last resort " — which may mean anything or
nothing, — and are obviously intended as a bolt-hole
of escape, — there need be no hesitation in at once
pronouncing this sentence to be a broad and palpable
perversion of historical facts. Looking at it both in
the natural meaning of its words, and in its place in
the general context of the whole paper, there can be
no doubt that it is intended to assert that Ireland
was conquered by Henry 11. in 1172, very much as
England had been conquered by the Duke of Nor-
mandy a little more than a hundred years before. The
whole aim and effect of the sentence is to assert the
full responsibility of England for all the domestic
government and condition of Ireland from that time
forward.
My very first contention here is that there is
no excuse whatever for this fundamental assertion, —
unless it be the very superficial fact that in many
histories the transactions of 1172 are often, for short-
ness, called, or referred to as, the " Conquest of
Ireland." But there is no real dispute whatever
about the true nature of those transactions in them-
selves. Henry II. did not conquer Ireland. He did
not even pretend to do so. He did not fight a single
battle on its shores. Any little fighting that took
place at all had been accomplished a year and a half
before his expedition by a few adventurous knights,
who were invited by a native Irish chief or kinglet,
to assist him in domestic war. In one single fray
8 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
those knights, themselves half Celts from Wales, had
" clashed with their fiery few and won." Henry 11.
had nothing whatever of this kind to do. He came,
indeed, with great military pomp. But he came
simply to receive, as a Feudal Sovereign, the homage
of a great number of Irish Tribes and Chiefs, all of
whom, with one solitary exception, were willing to
become his feudal vassals.* The Irish did not dispute
his title. It came from an acknowledged authority.
The universal consent of Christian Europe, — however
absurd it may seem to us now, — had then assigned to
the Popes or Bishops of Rome, a large and indefinite
power and right to confer the dignity and the prero-
gatives of Sovereignty or Feudal suzerainty at their
will. For four hundred years at least — ever since the
greatest man of the Middle Ages, Charlemagne, had
been crowned by the Pope with the Imperial crown, —
this power and right of the Roman Pontiffs had grown
up as an acknowledged doctrine. Henry II. did not
even take the title of King at all. He took the title
of Lord of Ireland, which continued to be the legal
title of the Kings of England till the reign of Henry
Vlll.t And this distinction was by no means in those
days a distinction of form only. It is an ignorant
notion, indeed, that in the twelfth century the Feudal
Sovereigns of any territory made themselves neces-
sarily, or even usually, responsible for the domestic
* Professor Stokes' "Ireland and the Anglo-Norman Church,"
p. 134. t Ibid., p. 136.
CH. I.] SUZERAINTY NOT GOVERNMENT. 9
government administered within it. That govern-
ment was, of necessity, left to those by whose hands
its powers had been acquired, and with whom it was
an essential part of the Feudal system, that it should
remain. Founded entirely upon usages and customs
varying more or less in every country — those usages
being themselves again absolutely controlled by the
universal conditions of a state of society which was
from top to bottom military — the domestic rule exer-
cised over the mass of the people by vassal and local
chiefs, rested everywhere in Europe on the paramount
necessity of obedience on one side and of protection
on the other. The interference of mere Suzerainty in
the affairs of ordinary life, was simply impracticable.
It could not possibly arise until, in the course of
centuries, the idea of a strong central government and
of an Imperial jurisprudence had been developed. To
talk of Ireland being " governed," even " in the last
resort," by the King of England in the twelfth century,
or in several succeeding centuries, is a grotesque
anachronism indeed.
Fortunately, there is no dispute about the facts
which Mr. Gladstone thus perverts. The very spirit
of Irish national feeling itself, even when expressed
in the most temperate and legitimate forms, has
always led Irishmen to emphasise those facts which
distinguish between the Conquest of England by the
Duke of Normandy in the eleventh century, and the
claim of Sovereignty over Ireland which was estab-
10 IRISH NATIONALISM. [CH. i.
listed by Henry II. in the twelfth. When it suits
their purpose Irish orators have always denied a
conquest. Mr. Gladstone has had many opportunities
of knowing this ; and one of the most remarkable of
these was in 1834, some two years after he entered
the House of Commons. On the 22nd of April of
that year Daniel O'Connell, — of whom he now speaks
effusively in this volume as equal in greatness, as an
Irishman, to Burke or Wellington, — made a memorable
speech in that House in favour of a repeal of the
Union. Its very first passages were devoted to an
emphatic argument that Ireland had never been con-
quered by England, and that the title to dominion
over Ireland had never been acquired by the sword.
"No title by conquest or subjugation:" — '*No title
of subjection was acquired by battle : " nothing had
happened that "jurists would consider as giving any
claim to England to say that there had been submission
on the part of the Irish people as subjects," or, " above
all, recognition of them as being subjects " on the part
of England herself, — such were the repeated declara-
tions of O'Connell in that elaborate address.* The
same language is still almost unanimously held by all
Irishmen who treat the question historically, whether
they belong to the Eepeal party, or to the number of
those who desire to maintain the Legislative Union.
Thus, the late Professor Eichey, of Dublin, in his
excellent work, " A Short History of the Irish People,"!
Mirror of Parliament," vol. ii. p. 1188. f Dublin, 1887.
* a
CH. I.] EVIDENCE OF IRISH WRITERS. 11
— full as it is of Irish patriotic feeling — says of the
common phrase, ** Conquest of Ireland by England,"
that it is "an expression in every way incorrect."*
Still more emphatic testimony is given to this view by
a yet living writer, whose spirit is so intensely Irish as
to border on what must be considered as extravagance.
For Mr. Prendergast, in his chapter f on the earlier
Plantations of Ireland, speaks of the native Celts of
Ireland as " a people of original sentiments and insti-
tutions, the native vigour of whose mind had not been
weakened by another mind ; '* t and he goes so far in
his patriotic enthusiasm as to exclaim, ** Had the Irish
only remained honest pagans, holding, no matter who
might tell them to the contrary, that true religion
was to hate one's enemies, and to fight for one's
country, Ireland perhaps had been unconquered still."
Yet this is the Irish writer who — in condemning a
later phrase, " the Irish enemy," as applied to the
native Irish — gives us the following true and striking
account of the reputed " Conquest " of 1172 : — " Now
the * Irish enemy ' was no nation in the modern sense
of the word, but a race divided into many nations or
tribes, separately defending their lands from the
English barons in their immediate neighbourhood.
There had been no ancient national government dis-
placed, no national dynasty overthrown. The Irish
* P. 128.
t Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland " (1870), pp. 1-48.
X Ibid., p. 11.
12 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
had no national flag, nor any capital city as the
metropolis of their common country, nor any common
administration of the law ; nor did they ever give a
combined opposition to the English. The English
coming in the name of the Pope, with the aid of the
vJs, Irish bishops, and with a superior national organisa-
/^ tion, which the Irish easily ieGOgmsed,jwere_aecepted
hu the Tri sh. Neither King Henry II., nor King John,
^. ever fought a battle in Ireland." *
This short and pregnant passage is taken from the
work of an enthusiastic Irishman, published twenty-
seven years ago, before the smoke of our present con-
troversy had arisen to obscure the view. It is, perhaps,
the purest bit of truth that is to be found in all the
angry literature of Irish history. It shines like a gem
" of purest ray serene." With one slight qualification,
which the author himself would probably admit, it is
not only accurately true in all that it directly says,
but in every line and almost in every word, it is
full of further suggestions of truths as important as
those which it expressly affirms. The English were
" accepted " by the Irish : — so it says. Let us ask —
in what capacity were they accepted? And the
answer must be that they were accepted in two special
capacities. First, the English King was " accepted "
as Feudal Sovereign of Ireland according to the
ideas and usages of that time ; and secondly, English
knights and barons were " accepted " as settlers
* " Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland" (1870), p. 28.
CH. I.] THE ENGLISH INVITED. 13
domesticated and naturalized in Ireland, also accord-
ing to the ideas and usages of that age. It was an
age of roving adventurers all over Europe. In accord-
ance with one of the commonest of all its habits, the
English knights were invited as allies, came, and were
accepted as settlers in the country, taking by bargain,
by feats of arms, and by marriage, their natural place
and rank in the pre-existing system of Irish Chiefry.
And this last kind of acceptance was chronologically
the first. The plantation of Norman soldier-colonists
had begun before the coming of Henry II. And it
began not only with acquiescence on the part of the
Irish, but with active solicitation on the part of some
of them. The Chief of one of the many septs, or
*' nations," into which Ireland was then divided —
divided with a depth of cleavage which it is difficult
for us now even to conceive, — had invited the entrance
and the aid of the Norman element. Intermarriage
had taken place. And with intermarriage had come
also the holding and the guaranteed inheritance of
territory as the inducement and reward of military
service and of military alliance. Thus the Anglo-
Normans and Gallo-Normans from Wales, had been
firmly planted in Ireland, and had been accepted as
husbands and as sons, and as holders and as inheritors
of all the power that belonged to Irish Chiefs, before
the expedition of Henry II. Hence we see that Mr.
Prendergast's phrase — " accepted by the Irish " — is
not only accurate, but is true with a fullness of meaning
14 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
which it needs much explanation to exhaust. The
Norman element had been already not only accepted,
but had been specially invited, and that amalgamation
and " Ersefication " of the Norman colonists had begun
which was one of the most determining features in all
that followed.
But this is not all. The truthful and significant
sentence above quoted from an intensely Irish his-
torian, not only thus gives us a true account of the
transactions of 1172, and a true indication of all that
they involved for the future, but it takes us back
into a still older history, and lets in a tlood of light
on what had gone before. Why was it that the
Norman King was so easily " accepted " as Feudal
Sovereign over Ireland? Why had it been that
Norman knights were invited, accepted, and adopted
as sons and brothers in Ireland ? Because, says Mr.
Prendergast, their " superior national organisation '*
was " easily recognised by the Irish." But in what
did the comparative inferiority of the Irish consist?
In what degree, and to what extent did it exist ? How
great and how evident must it have been to admit of
such a frank confession — such a ready submission to a
manifest superiority? How was it that this alleged
" conquest " of Ireland came about so noiselessly — so
naturally — with so little sound of arms, — with only
one short clash of battle ? What was the previous
condition of things which made such events possible ?
It is when we ask these questions that Mr. Glad-
CH. I.] AN ERRONEOUS ASSERTION. 15
stone's perversion of history comes out in all its
breadth and depth. In the same year in which he
wrote the " Lessons of Irish History," * — on May 12,
1887, — he addressed a Nonconformist party in London
at a luncheon, and in pursuance of the argument
now before us, he declaimed as follows : — " But who
made the Irishman ? The Irish, in very old times
indeed, if you go back to the earlier stages of Chris-
tianity, were among the leaders of Christendom. But
We went in among them : We sent among them
numbers of our own race. These were mixed with
the Irish, and ever since our blood has been mixed
with theirs there has been this endless trouble and
difiSculty." t Here we have the key-note of the
" Special Aspects " struck at once. And the special
methods are as remarkable. There is, in the first
place, a complete oblivion, or a clever omission, of the
many centuries which intervened between the really
creditable age of the Irish Church, and the coming of
the Normans. There is, in the second place, a com-
plete misconception, and consequent misrepresentation,
of the nature of that " leadership in Christendom "
which in one sense, and in one great work, had really
at one time belonged to Irish Celts ; there is, in the
third place, a dexterous confounding of later events
which were separated by many hundred years ; there is,
in the fourth place, an absolute suppression of all the
relevant and notorious facts respecting the condition
Aspects," p. 109. t Times, May 12, 1887.
« It
16 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. i.
into which Ireland had fallen between the "leader-
ship of Christendom " and the advent of the Norman
colonists. Let ns see how some of these matters stand.
So far as Ireland was concerned, the " earlier stages
of Christianity " must be reckoned as having begun
about A.D. 450. It is not true that at any much
earlier date than this the Irish Celts were Christian
at all. The British Celtic Church began long before
the Irish. British bishops were members of some of
the great Councils of the middle of the fourth century.*
Whatever infiltration of Christianity had percolated
into Ireland before the fifth century seems to have
come directly from contact with Roman Christians.
The claim for Ireland as regards the " earlier stages of
Christianity " is at best a loose oratorical exaggeration
in keeping with all its context. But from the middle
of the fifth century a well-established Celtic Christian
Church did exist in Ireland, which took a memorable
share in spreading the faith of Christ among
heathen races, not only in their own island, but
especially in Scotland and elsewhere in Western
Europe. This is true, and in itself alone it is an
imperishable glory. But unfortunately it does
stand quite alone. The Celtic Church carried in its
hands, indeed, the precious seed of Christian belief.
But it carried that seed in the most earthy of all-
earthen vessels. It had about three hundred and fifty
* « Ireland and the Celtic Church," by Professor Stokes (1885),
p. 11.
CH. I.] EARLY IRISH CULTURE. 17
years of at least external peace for the development
of all its powers (450-795). It developed a rude art
in painting, illumination, and metal work. It had
also a peculiar literature of its own. Even as to
these there has been much absurd exaggeration.
They were remarkable not for the time, but for the
locality. T hey pale a feeble and ineffectual ligh t
b eside the splendid literature and art ni ihp, o.mn-
tempora ry Eoman p poplp^ it^jj^ mrpn nf fho I? omnni nod -
natives oF Britain . But as compared with other
iribes, whom the Komans justly considered as bar-
barians, the Irish Celts had a truly native and a
very curious culture. There was a genuine literature
of its kind in the native language. But this
literature is chiefly valuable for the light it casts
upon the utter sterility of the Celtic Church as
regards any good influence on the economic condition,
or on the social state, or on the political organisation
of the people. This is all that we have to do with
here. We are not discussing gold filagree work, or
the copying and rude illumination of manuscripts.
We are discussing the state of Ireland in those social
and political conditions which determine the comfort
and real welfare of a people.
It is literally true that the heathen Danes, who
began their invasions of Ireland in the year a.d. 795,
and were finally defeated in 1014, did more, during
these two hundred and nineteen years, to establish
the beginnings of commerce, of wealth, and of the
18 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
civilisation which depends on these, than the Celtic
Church or people did during all the centuries of
their previous, or of their subsequent and separate
existence. Even when they first came as heathen
rovers they were far in advance of the Celts in
the matter of house-building, one of the surest tests
of comparative civilisation. There is not, at the
present day, one single town of any importance in
Ireland which does not owe its origin to the Danes.
" The cities," says Professor Kichey, " built by the
Danes, altogether differed from the temporary con-
structions of the Celtic tribes: thev were at once
garrisons and emporia, well fortified, and capable of
defence." Trade and commerce began with them,
and the Danes continued in possession of the towns
which they had created even after they had been
driven from possible reclamation of the bogs and
woods of the rest of Ireland. Dublin, Wexford,
Waterford, Limerick, etc., were all originally, and
always continued to be, Danish cities.* During all
this time — nearly two hundred years of the domi-
nation of a race which was still largely pagan,
over, at least, a great part of Ireland — the native
Irish hardly ever, — even for a moment — intermitted
their own internecine tribal feuds, and never scrupled
to ally themselves with the heathen Norsemen
whenever it was in the slightest degree convenient
to do so. This is the account of a thoroughly
* Ridley's " Short History," p. 110.
CH. I.] A MOMENTARY MONARCHY. 19
Irish historian, but of one who is faithful to historic
truth. "The chiefs," says Professor Stokes, "were
murdering and plundering one another, and every one
of them ready to sell his country to the northern
invader, if only he himself could he thus secure of a
temporary triumph." * And not only is this true, but
it is also a memorable fact that when one tribal chief,
more fortunate thaa others, did really win an important
victory over the common enemy in a.d. 968, he was,
within six years, treacherously slaia by a conspiracy
of his rival compatriot chiefs.| It is a further fact that
when his brother, the celebrated Brian, did prosecute,
very nearly to success, the same great enterprise of
founding a united and a native Irish kingdom, he
was again encountered in his last battle near Dublin,
in 1014, by a factious and unpatriotic alliance between
Danes and native Irish. Nor is it, again, a less
characteristic fact that his death, even in victory, was
followed by an immediate outburst of native inter-
tribal and internecine strife. Within three days of
the death of King Brian, his only surviving son was
assailed by the remnant of his father's army, and
every hope, or prospect, or even the very idea of a
united Irish nation under one government, was
dissipated for ever in continuous storms of internal
war. Of no other people in Christendom could it be
said in those days, that a triumph and a victory over
heathen invaders was a misfortune to themselves,
Celtic Church," p. 268. f " Short History," p. 114.
« u
20 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. i.
because of the very fact that it left them face to face
with their own vices. Yet this is the verdict of one
of the very best of modern Irish historians. " Such,"
says Professor Richey, " was the end of the battle of
Clontarf, in which, if the foreigners were defeated, a
far greater disaster fell upon the Irish people, and the
real victory was won by anarchy over order." *
It was the truly indigenous constitution of Irish
society — unchecked and even stimulated by the similar
constitution of the Celtic Church, — that alone seems
to have been the curse of Ireland at this memorable
epoch. There may be some hyperbole in the lan-
guage of the Irish Chronicler who describes the great
things done, or undertaken, by the native Celtic King,
Brian, in the brief period — some fifteen years — dur-
ing which he held ^* the chief sovereignty of Erinn "
— the churches and sanctuaries he built, — the teachers
and professors he engaged, — the books he brought
from beyond the seas, — the bridges and roads he made,
— the fortresses he built or strengthened. Monks
were easily pleased by any ruler who conferred favours
on what was called the Church. But, in spite of
possible exaggeration, there seems to be good his-
torical evidence that Ireland really had then a fair
opportunity of starting on a new path — such as had
been entered upon, and followed to glorious results,
by many other European nations. And what hindered
her ? It certainly was not the " we " of whom Mr.
* " Short History," p. 124.
CH. I.] WHO DESTEOYED IT. 21
Gladstone spoke with such effusive, but also such
cheap, and vicarious, humility. For be it noted that
this great opportunity was opened to Ireland more
than half a century before the Normans had landed
even in England, and more than a whole century and
a half before the " we " had crossed the farther
channel into Ireland.
The question, therefore, may well be asked — What
had the Irish been doing all that time? And what
was the cause of their not taking that great " occasion
by the hand " ? What again says the Irish historian ?
He says that it was the very excellence of King
Brian's government that made it hateful to his coun-
trymen. " A truly national government of this
description found its bitterest enemies among the
provincial chiefs, who longed to restore anarchy, and
were willing to league with the foreigner for that
purpose." * And now, when Danish power was broken
down, what the Irish Tribes and Chiefs did was to
fight with each other in perpetual and ferocious wars.
" Upon the Celtic nation fell ruin and disorder." And
so, from the date of Brian's death in 1014 to " our "
arrival in the person of Strongbow, in 1170 — or for a
period of one hundred and fifty-six years — "Ireland
was a chaos in which the chiefs of the great separate
tribes struggled to secure a temporary supremacy." f
** The Irish Nation was in the condition of social and
political dissolution." Few of the kinglets ever
* " Short History," p. 116. f Ibid., p. 125.
22 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
reached their thrones except by crime. Few died a
bloodless death. If such a state of things could
continue, "the world would relapse into worse than
ancient barbarism." *
Now, let it be observed that there is, and can be no
dispute about these facts. They are authenticated by
a cloud of witnesses — not only by many honest Irish
historians of our own day, like Dr. Kichey and Mr.
Prendergast, but by a kind of testimony which — in
anything like the same authenticity and detail —
exists nowhere else in Europe. In the Irish Annals
we have evidence which is said to rest on written
documents probably as old as the second century of
our era, and to embody, at least, good oral traditions
of a much earlier date.f One old Irish Annalist, who
seems to have been a critic in his own time, very
modestly sets aside all records later than B.C. 305,
but seems to regard true contemporary history as
beginning at that date.J From the year A.D. 664, at
all events, the records are verified by minute accuracy
in the narrative of solar eclipses ; and there seems to
be no reasonable doubt of the perfect genuineness
and authority of these remarkable Annals for several
hundred years earlier. We have therefore in the
Irish Annals a photographic picture taken in the
* "Short History/' p. 127.
t "Annals of Ireland," " The Four Masters/' vol. I. Introduction,
p. liii.
X Ibid., p. xlvi.
CH. I.] EARLY IRISH ANNALS. 23
light of Irish self-consciousness — giving us an excellent
idea of what Irish society was for nearly a thousand
years before the Norman invasion.
Now it is, to say the least, remarkable that Mr.
Gladstone, in his search after an answer to the
question, " Who made the Irishman ? " never quotes
those very Irishmen who tell us most about their own
early national, or rather tribal, education. I do not
recollect ever seeing in any of Mr. Gladstone's many
speeches or writings, one single quotation from, or
even allusion to, the most authentic and detailed
account that is possessed by any European people, of
their own early life. I am not surprised. The Irish
Annals are ugly reading for him, and for all who try
to make out that England has ** made the Irish.'*
For what is the picture which those Annals present ?
Let us take the second entry. " The age of Christ 10.
The first year of Carbre the Cat-headed, after he had
killed the nobility, except a few who escaped from
the massacre in which the nobles were murdered by
the Attacotti." Three nobles had escaped from that
massacre, and as to these it is added with a genuine
touch of true Irish humour, " it was in their mothers'
wombs that they escaped." All the nobles were killed
except three who escaped, and these were babes
unborn ! And who were the Attacotti ? The expla-
nation reveals, here too, a much forgotten fact. The
native Irish " Scoti " had been themselves invaders,
and held Ireland by no other title than conquest.
24 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
The "Attacotti" are believed to have been the
remnant of the older and conquered race — also Celtic
— and we are told in a note that they " were treated
as a servile and helot class by the dominant Scoti." *
Thus all the elements that "made the Irishman"
were even then in full play from the beginning of
the Christian era at least, or about twelve centuries
before Mr. Gladstone's " we " had anything to do
with Ireland.
But let us pass on to a later date — after a con-
temporary literature had certainly begun, — and take
another entry in this sad journal: — "The age of
Christ 227. The massacre of the girls at Cleonfearta
(in Munster) by Dunlang, King of Leinster. Thirty
royal girls was the number, and a hundred maids
with each of them." j The progress here indicated
is singular. From the earlier entry we should gather
that women at least were spared in Irish broils. Two
centuries later we find that they were massacred with-
out mercy. Much later we find again that they were
regularly summoned to serve in war, and were seen
tearing each other's breasts with reaping-hooks. And
so on — and on — and on — for eight centuries. These
Annals contradict absolutely Mr. Gladstone's monstrous
misrepresentation that from the "earlier stages of
Christianity" the Irish were among the leaders of
Christendom, "till We went in among them." In any
sense which has the most distant bearing upon the
Annals," vol. i. p. 96. f Ibid., p. 115.
* a
CH. I.] DEEPENING BARBARISM. 25
social condition, the peace, welfare, prosperity, — or
any shadow of a hope from the political institutions —
of the Irish people, the assertion is not only " inflated
fable " destitute of any historical foundation, but it is
the direct opposite of the truth. Even after the
establishment of Christianity about a.d. 450, for six
hundred years, at least, this barbarous condition had
been going from bad to worse. Nor must we forget
that this steady and continuous decline had gone on
notwithstanding long contact, and perfect familiarity
with, the high civilisation of Koman Britain. Hundreds
and even in some cases, thousands of Eoman coins,
have been found in Ireland, — coins of the first and
second centuries. For some centuries the Irish were
continually attempting to conquer Britain. For ten
years in the middle of the fourth century they are
said to have at least partially succeeded, till beaten
and expelled by Theodosius in 369.* It cannot be
said, therefore, that isolation alone, so far as mere
knowledge is concerned, was the cause of the long
continuance of Irish barbarism. They had seen what
civilisation was, and what government meant. And
having seen both, the Irish chiefs returned to their
own country as chaotic as before, and as incapable of
laying even the rudest foundations of civilised con-
dition among their own people.
But even these facts, striking though they be, are an
inadequate exposure of Mr. Gladstone's " inflated fable "
* Stokes, "Celtic Church," p. 17.
26 mSH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
that the introduction of a foreign element into Ireland
in the twelfth century, was the ending of her time of
peace, and the beginning of her time of troubles. Not
only is this absolutely contradicted by the evidence of
history, but the converse proposition can be clearly
established — that the only elements of civilisation
which did exist in Ireland when the Normans came to
settle, were foreign elements which had already secured
an earlier footing in the country. And one of those
elements was no less important than that superior
organisation of the Christian Church which elsewhere
had grown up in Christendom out of the necessities of
its position in contact with the heathen world. The
Irish Danes were the cousins of the French and Ens:-
o
lish Normans ; and they had been settled in Ireland
for some three hundred and fifty years before the
coming of Strongbow. Not only were they the founders
of all the commercial cities of Ireland, but they were
the main instruments in the reconstitution of her
Church. Whatever may have been the achievements of
the Missionaries of that Church when removed from
the local influences of their own race and country, as
at lona and at Lindisfarne, nothing can be clearer than
that, in its own country, it can hardly be said to have
had any civilising influence at all. Its organisation
was unlike anything that existed elsewhere in any
part of the Christian world. It had no parochial
clergy ; it had no territorial bishops. Its so-called
monastic bodies had none of the characteristics we
CH. I.] THE IRISH CELTIC CHURCH. 27
are accustoraed to associate with the name. They
were tribes like the other purely secular tribes around
them — hereditary castes animated with all the passions
which raged throughout the land ; and actually taking
part in the cruel and ferocious wars to which these
passions led.
It may well seem incredible, but it stands on
the firmest historical evidence that, more than two
hundred years after St. Patrick had established the
Celtic Church in Ireland, its so-called clergy were
regularly bound by the customs of the country to
take part in all the wars of the chief or tribe under
which they lived. And when we consider what those
wars were — that there was not one single aim or object
which could be dignified by the name " political," —
that they were wars of mere plunder, slaughter, and
devastation, — we may conceive what the degradation
of Christianity must have been, and how completely,
in this form, it was divorced from all the influences
which, elsewhere in Europe, made it the precious
seed-bed of civilisation. Accordingly, when the Danes
of Ireland became largely converted to Christianity
in the tenth century, they did not owe their conver-
sion to the native Celtic Church. They hated
that Church and despised it as not less barbarous
than its laity. They were converted by agencies
which came not from Ireland but from England,
and they established their connection at once, not
with the old Irish ecclesiastical centre of Armagh
28 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
but with the sees of Canterbury and Eome. It was
they who established the first Bishopric of Dublin.
And they did this no less than one hundred and
thirty years before the invasion of Henry II., and
even twenty-two years before the Norman Conquest
of England. In like manner it was the Danes again
who established the sees of Waterford and Limerick ;
and through the ecclesiastical influences which were
thus firmly established in Ireland, a conquest was
won over her native Church far more real and
effective than that which Henry II. even tried to
accomplish in her political condition.
We must not allow any modern prejudice to hide
from us the real significance and true interpretation
of the great triumph which had been thus won in
Ireland long before the invasion of the Fitzgeralds,
by the earlier invasion of the English and Latin
Church. Two very different currents of feeling have
combined to misrepresent and misconceive this far
more real and earlier conquest. One of these currents
has been the feeling of Irish patriotism, which has
clung to the supposed glories of an indigenous
Church. The other has been the desire of some
Protestants to see in that Celtic Church an anti-papal,
and even a non-episcopal stage of ecclesiastical
organisation. Between these two influences and a
widespread ignorance of what Irish life really had
been under that native Church, the part played by
inflated fiction has been riotous indeed. There are,
CH. I.] IRISH AUTHORITIES. 29
however, plenty of honest Irish historians who give
us all the facts. Besides the irrefragable evidence
of the contemporary Annals we have such excellent
modern historians as Professor Eichey, Professor
Stokes, Professor Sullivan, Professor O'Curry, and Mr.
Prendergast. Every one of these writers is animated
by the purest spirit of Irish patriotism, and in
detail they not only give us the facts, but occa-
sionally express themselves strongly on the fright-
fulness of the picture which they themselves present.
But they shrink most sensitively from any similar
language when used by writers who are not Irish,
and they enter pleas of mitigation which are
generally quite irrelevant. Thus Professor Stokes
reminds us quite truly that at least as regards some
of the centuries when Irishmen were always fighting
with each other. Englishmen were fighting with each
other too. He reminds us, further, that Chroniclers
and Annalists in early times did not think of recording
much else than wars ; and that the omission of other
subjects may thus convey an erroneous general im-
pression. There is some truth in this plea as regards
the general character of early Chroniclers, but it is
very little true as regards the Irish Annalists. It is
one of their peculiarities that they are full of specimens
of poetry and song, which give us very vivid glimpses
indeed of the sentiments, pursuits, and opinions of the
time. Moreover, even if the Annalists were defective
in their account owing to their mere omission of other
30 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
aspects of Irish life, we have other sources of infor-
mation against which no such supposed deficiency can
be charged. Among the treasures of ancient Celtic
literature in Ireland there are some,: — and one espe-
cially, known as The " Book of Leinster," which is a
collection of narratives, tales, and traditions of Irish
life, — which go back to its supposed heroic age.*
The picture of life and manners which they all
present is precisely the same as the picture presented
by the later Annalists of the Middle Ages. The
longest and most elaborate of the tales is called the
" Cattle-Spoil of Cuailuge," a place now called Collon
in Louth. It narrates wars of the second century,
and by its very title proclaims the immemorial same-
ness of those wars with all its desolating successors.
But even if it were true that war and war alone is
prominent in all those ancient documents, merely
because it attracted most prominent attention in a
rude age, this consideration has nothing to do with
the peculiarities of the Irish case. It is not the
fact of wars — even the most savage wars — being waged
by Irishmen that is singular. Neither is it the mere
fact of the long persistent continuance of those wars
— that alone distinguishes her history. It is the
utterly useless and worse than useless character of
those wars, in which they stand alone. Oat of war
all modern nations have been made. Out of the Irish
wars no nation did, or ever could, emerge. They
* "National ManuscrijDts of Ireland," vol. ii. pp. xxvi.-xxx.
CH. I.] ENGLISH BARBARISM COMPARED. 81
were purely destructive. There was not one organic
or reconstructive element in them. Englishmen who
are enlightened have no objection to being told by
others, or to confessing for themselves the fact, that
their ancestors passed through a stage af barbarism.
The late Professor Freeman was an intense English-
man. He was proud of the very name. Speaking
of the Angles and Saxons when they landed in Britain
in the middle of the fifth century (449), he says, " We
may now be thankful for the barbarism and ferocity
of our forefathers." *
Here we have the statement of a fact, and the
expression of a sentiment. The fact is stated because
it is the duty and the pleasure of an historian to
»peak the truth. The sentiment is justified by this
— that the savagery and barbarism of the tribes
who made the English people was a barbarism
full of noble elements. Their wars were ferocious,
but they fought for things worth fighting for. They
were re-constructive, not purely destructive. In
all their contests, whether with the Celts whom
they almost exterminated, or whether among them-
selves, they contended for true conquest — dominion —
settlement — not for mere plunder, devastation, and
ravage. This is the fundamental difference between
their barbarism and savagery, and the corresponding
barbarism of the Celts in Ireland. We have only
to look at the practical results to see all that this
* " Norman Conquest," vol. i. p. 20.
32 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
contrast involved. Within a hundred and fifty years
of their landing in Britain the Anglo-Saxons had con-
quered the whole country from the Solent to the
Forth, and from the Channel to the Severn. They
had founded kingdoms in the full sense of that word —
political communities with well-established principles
of government, of industry, and of law. Within
another period of three centuries and a half they had
consolidated these kingdoms into one central monarchy,
highly civilised. Christian, and to some degree even
Imperial. During all these centuries the Celtic tribes
in Ireland had not made one single step towards any
such results. On the contrary, they had sunk con-
tinually from bad to worse, and their interminable
wars were mere savao:e raids on each other's territorv,
destructive alike of peaceful industry and of the very
beginnings of political organisation.
As to the Celtic Church nothing can be more
thoughtless than to allow our Protestant feelings
against the Eoman See, or our interest in an ancient
organisation which was independent of it, to blind
us to the real condition of the early Irish Church.
Professor Stokes speaks of the "ecclesiastical chaos
which reigned in the Celtic Church " * in the
early part of the eleventh century before the Anglo-
Norman Bishoprics were established. It never had
exercised, even in its golden age, the smallest
influence in civilising the habits or institutions of
* " Celtic Church," p. 324.
CH. I.] Ireland's golden age. 33
the Irisli people. That golden age lay in the sixth
and seventh centuries. But the annals of those
centuries show no pause in the revolting repetition
of bloody feuds, with plunder, murder, and devastation.
It is indeed recorded, far on in the seventh century,
that the Clergy of Ireland procured for themselves an
exemption from the obligation of '* hosting,'* that is,
of taking a personal part in those interminable and
ferocious tribal wars. But as to any influence in
preventing them, we hear nothing of it, and we have
good reason to know that even personal participation
in them, though not compulsory, continued to be
frequent if not habitual. The truth is, that the
Celtic Church was in all social and political matters
identified with the Celtic people. They were con-
tinually identified even in actual offices and functions.
In the ninth century Phelim, King of Munster, was
at once Abbot, Bishop, and King. He ravaged
Ulster and murdered its monks and clergy.* The
same authority tells us that the Bishops of Armagh
were just as bad.j
It is most curious to observe how even the most
honest Irish historians are swayed either by a local
patriotism, or by Protestant feeling on the supremacy
of the Koman See, in their language about the
native Celtic Church. Thus, even Professor Stokes,
liberal and enlightened as he is, in his history
of that Church goes out of his way to censure St.
* *' Celtic Church," p. 199. f Ibid., p. 200.
D
34
IRISH NATIONALISM.
[CH. I.
Patrick for having in the fifth century accepted the
authority of the Pope; an act which the Professor
stigmatises as a "betrayal of the liberties of his
country." Yet, in his capacity of historian of the
Anglo-Norman Church in Ireland, when he has
occasion to tell us in what those liberties consisted,
and in what they resulted, he is far too honest to
suppress the truth. Then indeed — when thus facing
another way — he does not mince his words in describ-
ing what the Celtic Church had come to be " when,"
as Mr. Gladstone expresses it, " we went in." He
points out that so far as dogma or ritual, or even
the nominal supremacy of the Pope, were concerned,
there was nothing whatever to distinguish between
the two Churches, or to justify any special sympathy
with the Celtic rather than with the Anglo-Norman.
Yet he tells us that they hated each other with as
perfect a hatred as that which has ever divided Pro-
testant from Catholic, or Orangeman from Nationalist.
Nor does he leave us in any doubt as to the com-
parative merits, religious, social, and political, of the
indigenous Irish, as compared with the foreign or
Anglo-Norman element. He represents the Celtic
Church as having become utterly corrupt. "Celtic
monasticism," he says, " was played out. It had
done its work and was now corrupt." The so-called
" Culdees," or God's servants, had " only the name
and nothing of the reality ; " and then, summing up,
he says, ^^The work of the Church of Kome in the
CH. l] cause of IRISH ANARCHY. 35
twelfth century was that of a real reformation : and
in no department was that reforming work more
needed than in sweeping away, in Scotland and in
Ireland alike, that Culdee system which had lost its
primitive power, and was good for nothing save for
the purposes of ecclesiastical plunder and degrada-
tion." * .
But this is not all. Professor Stokes is far too
honest as an historian to conceal the cause and
nature of this corruption any more than he conceals
the extent and existence of it as a fact. He identifies
it with that one great feature in their character which
was purely and characteristically Irish : namely, the
close and inseparable connection with the septs, clans,
and tribes into which Celtic society had been always
divided in Ireland. Bad as the Celtic ecclesiastical
communities had become in morals — ** useless, corrupt,
lax and easy-going in discipline " f — this was not
altogether peculiar to them. But in one matter they
stood alone — their full participation in the fierce
passions and deeds of violence of the septs against
each other. It was they who carried on this spirit
from generation to generation, even after the higher
organisation of the Anglo-Norman and Catholic
Church had extended itself over all the more civilised
parts of Ireland. They lived on with a pestilent
survival in the north and west, almost down to
* " Anglo-Norman Church," p. 355.
t Ibid., p. 357.
36 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i.
the period of the Eeformation. Speaking of the
thirteenth century, Professor Stokes says, "The
monasteries were as completely tribal institutions,
bound up with certain septs, and hated by other
hostile septs, as they were in the seventh and eighth
centuries. There was not the slightest reverence for
a monastery as such. The tribes venerated — some-
times, but not always — the monasteries belonging to
their own patron Saint, or their own tribe. But the
monasteries of a hostile tribe, or of a different Saint,
were regarded as fair game for murder, plunder, and
arson." * The dues which the Celtic Abbots most
delighted to gather from the people were arms, battle-
dresses, war-horses, and gold. " A fierce, passionate,
bloodthirsty spirit was universal.'* The most sacred
places in Ireland, connected with the early Chris-
tianity of Ireland, such as Clonmacnoise, Ineseleraun,
and Derry, were plundered and burnt over and over
again, and always by native Irishmen, such as the
O'Currys, the O'Donnells, the O'Neills, and the
O'Briens. Nor does Professor Stokes fail to note
the weird and fateful continuity of this Irish savagery.
He relates an example of a bloody fight between
Celtic Abbots and Bishops, so late as the middle
of the fifteenth century. One Bishop, with his son,
two brothers, and two sons of his Archdeacon, were
all slain. On this. Professor Stokes exclaims, "How
thoroughly Celtic the whole thing !' How it reminds
* « Anglo-Norman Church," pp. 363, 364.
CH. I.] IRISH APOLOGIES FOR IRELAND. 37
US of what we read, seven or eight hundred years
earlier, when the monasteries of Durrow and Clon-
macnoise, with their retainers, tenantry, and slaves,
used to join in deadly battle! Yet this episcopal
warrior died sixty years after AVickcliffe, and but
forty years before Luther was born." *
This is a retrospect — eight hundred years from 1450
— which takes us back to the so-called " golden age "
of the Irish Celtic Church; and Professor Stokes, in
another passage, pursues this clue of continuity in the
opposite direction down to our own time. Casting his
eye — not backward, from the fifteenth century for
eight hundred years, but — forward from the ninth cen-
tury, for a thousand years, he traces this continuity of
character as having had its roots in ages when no
foreigner, not even the naughty Danes, had any in-
fluence upon it. Referring to the charge, which he does
not deny, against the Irish, that they are even in our
own time comparatively indifferent to human life — to
" their agrarian murders — to their fierce faction fights "
— he does not hesitate to ascribe all these to an here-
ditary surviv9,l of the taint which was conspicuous in all
the centuries of which he wrote.f It is not necessary
for any of us to adopt this view either as a full expla-
nation, or as any adequate excuse. Other causes may
have added their contribution, just as most assuredly
other pleas must be used in mitigation of censure, if
* " Anglo-Norman Church," p. 369.
t " Celtic Church," pp. 200, 201.
38 IRISH NATIONALISM.' [ch. i.
Ethics are to hold their ground at all in our judgments
of human conduct. It is enough for my purpose here
to point out that it is the explanation offered by an
Irishman writing in his character as an historian, and
yet writing in a spirit of the warmest sympathy with
early Celtic institutions.
Whatever may be the value of the doctrine of
an hereditary taint, either as explanation or as an
excuse, it is quite certain that the essential property
of matter which physicists call "Inertia," is like-
wise a property of mind as we know it in ourselves.
It is that property in virtue of which any motion
or movement imparted, tends to run. on unchanged
for ever — unless, and until, it is changed — checked,
accelerated, or diverted — by the intervention of
some external force. It is in virtue of this property
that early customs and habits of life in any people
become so ingrained as to be almost indelible — only
to be reformed by new and compelling causes being
brought to bear upon them. It is thus that streams
of water, in some countries, cut their own channels so
deep that nothing can divert them except a complete
break up of the physical 'geography of the land
through which they run. And so it is that, in the
case of Ireland, we have the fact proved by the most
unquestionable evidence of history, that her exemption
from foreign conquest, at least up to the twelfth
century, had left her people to have their character
and habits determined by purely indigenous institu-
CH. I.] THE IRISH MADE THEMSELVES. 89
tions. Up to that date, at all events, therefore, Mr.
Gladstone's passionate question, " Who made the
Irishman?" can be answered in no faltering voice.
Celtic customs, Celtic ideas, Celtic Institutions,
operating unchecked through more than a thousand
years, in Mr. Prendergast's words, '* uncontaminated
with another mind " — these made the Irishman what
the Anglo-Normans found him. And on the evidence
of the same historic facts, frankly acknowledged by
the same author, we can affirm farther that when the
Anglo-Normans did "go in," they effected an easy
entrance, because of that "superior national organi-
sation " which the Irish themselves could not fail to
recognise. Nor is this all. On the accumulated
evidence of Irish Annalists and modern historians, we
know that this acknowledged superiority of organi-
sation extended to everything that makes the
difference between barbarism and civilisation, as
distinguished from mere learning or an aptitude for
some of the decorative Arts. It was an immense
superiority in arms, in all the useful arts, in laws, and
in religion. To conceal, or to slur over these facts,
still more to deny and to contradict them, is a be-
trayal of historic truth. And when such denial is
made in the spirit of mere political passion, it deserves
some much severer name than " inflated fiction." At
all events, we now see that Mr. Gladstone starts with
all he has to say on the famous " seven centuries " so
often thrown in the teeth of England, with a
40 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. T.
tboroiiglily perverted view of the pre-established
forces and coDditions with which England has had to
deal, and it will not be difficult to show that the
same tone of vicious misrepresentation characterises
all he says on later times.
( 41 )
CHAPTER IL
EFFECTS OF SUZERAINTY OF ENGLAND OVER IRELAND.
So far, then, we have a clear answer to give to the
inflated fiction implied in Mr. Gladstone's question,
" Who made the Irishman ?" Not for seven hundred
years — which is the stereotyped phrase for the sup-
posed period of English Government — but for the
immense period of 1170 years, from the Christian
era to the landing of Henry IL, we have a tolerably
clear account of the native Irish Celts. During that
long lapse of time, — unlike almost all the other
nations of modern Europe, — they were never con-
quered. The Romans did not conquer Ireland, as
they conquered England and Scotland up to the line
of the Forth and Clyde. The Danes did not conquer
it, as they did a large part of England and finally
the whole. The Danes conquered bits of it — and in
return they only did for the Irish Celt what he had
never done for himself, — they founded all his im-
portant cities. They founded all his commerce. They
refounded, also, and effectively reformed his Church.
42 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii.
Neither were the Irish conquered by the tardy and
transitory Norman invasion of the twelfth century.
For another long period of time they were left to their
own devices, — in all domestic matters practically un-
controlled.
** More than four centuries " is the time specified
by Professor Richey as the interval which elapsed
before anything like a real conquest was effected.
JFour hundred and thirty-three years — from 1170 to
1603 — is the time he means. In the last year of
Queen Elizabeth's reign the last of the Old Irish
Chiefs were subdued, and fled. " The flight of
the Earls " is a well-known epoch in Irish history.
During all this time we have the light of the native
Annals. The continuity is perfect. It is a continuity
of horrors — sometimes a little better, sometimes a
little worse, but always in its essential character,
and in its immediate causes, absolutely unchanged.
England had far less power of reforming the domestic
laws, usages, and ideas of the people than she now has
of changing the habits and manners of Central Africa.
The same writer. Professor Eichey, has well explained
the impossibility of any effective conquest of Ireland
during any of those centuries. The country was
covered with impassable bogs and impenetrable
forests. English Sovereigns had no standing armies.
They had their own troubles to attend to — their wars
with France — their own disputed successions. The
cost of feudal levies was enormous, and practically
CH. II.] ENGLISH COLONISTS DEGRADED. 43
prohibitory. Where there is no effective power there
is no real responsibility. But more than this: such
indirect responsibility as could alone exist in those
centuries was discharged in vain when the action it
took, and which alone it could take, was met by
insuperable causes of resistance and reaction. And
this is precisely what took place. The English
Colonists assumed, like fish, the colour of the ground
on which they had come to live. The typical boast
of the first and most powerful among them — the
Geraldines — came to be that they were " more Irish
than the Irish." Under such conditions the beneficent
influences of conquest, or even of colonisation, by a
stronger race, and of that " higher organisation "
which Mr. Prendergast tells us was "easily recog-
nised " by the Irish, had no chance of working out
the effects which they produced all over the rest of
Europe. All the weapons of England, even those of
the highest kind, were thus broken in her hands.
The fine and the famous saying of Kome, that she
" took captive her barbarian captors," may be literally
applied with a terrible inversion of meaning to the
pretended conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century.
She took captive with her barbaric customs the rising
civilisation of her invaders. That rising civilisation
not only ceased to be developed, but became blighted
on her soil. It may even be said, perhaps, that it
made her own old savagery worse than it had been
before. It added an element of persistence and of
44 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii.
strength which threw off with fierce disdain, as foreign
and intrusive, every attempt on the part of England
to teach her "purer manners, nobler laws." Those
nobler elements in the Celtic character itself, which
had always existed, and which we all recognise,
did indeed survive as germs — but they were never
developed. They were shut up, as before, in the
cells of ecclesiastics, and absolutely divorced from all
civilising power, or even influence on the social habits
or political institutions of the people. Some linger-
ing love of learning, a strong natural vein of poetry,
and a genuine turn for curious forms of art, apparently
indigenous — all these lived on — with no other effect
than, perhaps, lending some additional charm to a
national sentiment which had no central rally ing-point,
and no definite political ambition to give it any con-
structive power. We have only to compare the results
of the Anglo-Norman colonisation of Ireland with the
contemporaneous Anglo-Norman colonisation of Scot-
land, to see the true causes of amazing difference. In
Scotland — at least in the lowlands of Scotland — the
Norman settlers found an ancient Teutonic civilisation
well established — one which had been founded, first
on Koman conquest, and then on Anglo-Saxon occupa-
tion. Professor Freeman insists upon it with emphasis
that the suzerainty of the Anglo-Saxon Kings of
England over Teutonic Scotland up to the Forth had
been long established. There is much debate on this
point. But it does not concern us here. What is certain
CH. II.] CONTRAST WITH SCOTLAND. 45
is that Teutonic — or, as we now call it, Lowland — Scot-
land before the Norman Conquest of England had been
at one time simply part of one of the Kingdoms of the
Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy — the Kingdom of Northum-
bria. Freeman's contention that in the succeeding
century — the tenth — it had accepted the suzerainty of
the consolidated English " Empire " is — to say the least
of it — open to much dispute. It is said that for the iirst
time in 828, King Ecgbehrt, who had begun as King
of " Mercia " alone, appears in the title of a charter
as Rex Anglorum, King of all the Angles in Great
Britain.* In 924 King Edward, son of the great
Alfred, is alleged to have become King and Over-
Lord of the whole of Britain, and the enthusiasm of
this intensely English writer, Professor Freeman,
asserts that " from this time to the fourteenth century
the Vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of
the public law of the Isle of Britain."! Scottish
historians, quite as learned and much less excitable,
have shown clearly enough that this is an assertion
which cannot be sustained. And "it is well to be
thus reminded that the spirit of exaggeration, due
to what may be called a provincial patriotism, is to be
found in an English, as well as in Irish, historians.
The late Mr. Robertson, in his standard work, the
" History of the Early Kings of Scotland," J has
* Freeman's " Norman Conquest," vol. i. p. 40.
t Ibid., p. 61.
X Vol. i. p. 69 ; and vol. ii. Appendix.
46 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii.
effectually disposed of the pretensions put forward
by the later Kings of England to a feudal sove-
reignty over Scotland, But Kobertson does not
deny — on the contrary, he carefully states — that, so
far back as the seventh century, both Pictish and
Scottish Kings were, for a time at least, tributary
to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumberland.
Province after province in Scotland was subdued by
the Angles, until in 670 the Anglian King took the
step of appointing a Pictish Bishopric of the Picts
with the seat of the See on the Forth. But a tremen-
dous defeat by the Picts and Scots in 684 showed the
unbroken vitality of the incipient Scottish Kingdom,
and not less the rapid advance which the Angles had
made in founding a still more powerful monarchy, as
well as in spreading their own Teutonic race and
civilisation. All these facts establish the contention
here maintained, that mere suzerainty, in the early
Middle Ages, was not necessarily, or even usually such
'u, condition of dependence as to prevent the free
development of separate and independent political
institutions.
But political institutions, in order to be developed,
must first exist, at least in germ. In Scotland they
had long existed not in germ only, but in well-
planted growths. In Ireland they did not exist at all.
Hence a perfect explanation of the different results in
the two countries upon the chameleon nature of the
Norman settlers. In Scotland the divided tribes and
CH. II.] SAME DANGER IN SCOTLAND. 47
races, long before tlie Norman Conquest of England,
had begun to aggregate. The nucleus of a central
monarchy had been formed, and formed, too, by a
wonderful and still mysterious revolution round the
axis, and in the name, of the Scoti — an Irish Celtic
tribe. The peculiar receptivity of the Normans was,
therefore, in Scotland, brought into immediate contact
with something which was really worthy of being so
received, — something which, by assimilation with their
own strong and manly nature, could strike its roofs
downwards, and spread its branches upwards in the
light of a glorious day. Yet even in Scotland, we did
not altogether escape the Irish danger. Those colonists
of Norman blood — and they were many — who pushed
forward beyond the central and eastern area in which
all the civilisation of Scotland has begun, and from
which alone it spread — those Normans who wandered
far into the predominantly Celtic area, and who
married and settled there — were often tempted to fall,
and did sometimes actually fall, under the same in-
fluences by which the Anglo-Irish were so fatally
seduced. The Scottish Kingdom had a long and a
hard fight to maintain in the West Highlands and in
the Hebrides against that same Celtic element of tribal
faction^ and intertribal anarchy. In that fight some
men of Teutonic blood took what may justly be called
a rebellious part. But, on the whole, the Anglo-
Norman element in Scotland not only accepted the
Saxon and Roman civilisation which they found, but
48 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii.
carried it onwards and upwards as they did in Eno:-
land. Out of their number arose all the most powerful
champions of Scottish independence, when Edward I.
tried to convert the mere antiquarian claim of an
ancient and dubious " commendation " into the direct
rule of a complete dominion. Sir William Wallace
and Eobert Bruce were both Normans, and although
Bruce rallied round him powerful contingents of the
Scoto-Celtic element from Argyllshire, of the old
Gallo-Celtic element from Galloway, and of the
ancient Britons from Strathclyde, he was able through
a powerful personal character to organise this great
work of united action only because the idea of a
central monarchy, and the constructive ambitions
connected with it, had been long established in
Scotland.
Professor Richey, in referring to the different fate
and effects of Anglo-Normans in Scotland and in
Ireland, has been led, by a natural feeling of
patriotic exculpation, to dwell upon the mere geo-
graphical explanation that in Scotland the Teutonic
population had the advantage of a good natural
frontier, easily defensible against the Celtic popula-
tion of the Highlands. But this is no adequate
explanation of one of the most curious facts in history
— the growth and establishment of the Scottish Nation
and Kingdom. The Clyde in those days was no
barrier at all. Down almost to our own time it was
a shallow and wandering stream, fordable here and
CH. II.] ANGLO-NORMANS IN SCOTLAND. 49
there at low tide as far down as below Dumbarton.
The Eomans had not trusted to it as a military-
barrier, for they built a wall and garrisoned it with
legions. North of the Clyde and Forth, on the
long line between the eastern lowlands and the
highlands of Scotland, there was no geographical
frontier which could be easily defended. The line
of the Grampians opened upon the richer country,
and upon its early Teutonic settlers, by the ready
access of a hundred glens. Through these, if Irish
habits had prevailed, raids could always be made,
and through these some very serious Celtic invasions
did actually take place down to times comparatively
late. The causes were far more deeply seated, which
can alone explain the early growth of Scotland as a
nation under the final leadership of King Robert the
Bruce. Those causes may be all traced in the fact
that he was a Norman Knight, a born leader of men,
inheritinof the traditions of an ancient civilisation,
and sharing also in the blood of a Celtic family which
had already founded a real monarchy. In Scotland
the Norman element was Scottified. In Ireland the
Norman element was Ersefied. In Scotland the
Norman element became assimilated by a germ of
political civilisation which had been growing through
stages of much obscurity for at least three hundred
years before the Norman Conquest. In Ireland it was
still more assimilated with a barbarism which had been
getting steadily worse and worse through the history
E
50 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. n.
of a whole millennium. In Scotland the three cen-
turies of this building-up — amidst much obscurity of
detail — can in outline be clearly traced through several
long steps of constructive work, which are full of his-
torical and political interest. They were emphatically
centuries of union — effected partly by conquest, partly
by marriage, partly by alliance with, and even tribute
paid to, English kings, partly by social, partly by
ecclesiastical amalgamation. At least three great
men and three great events mark corresponding
stages through which the Scottish Kingdom rose. So
early as 730 the Pictish King, Angus MacFergus, laid
its foundation-stone in establishing one rule ov^er
Picts and Scots. A little more than one hundred
years later, in 843, Kenneth MacAlpine still farther
cemented the union of those two Celtic bloods in one
dynasty. For two hundred years all Scotland acknow-
ledged the Sovereignty of this Celtic House. In 1068
Malcolm Canmore crowned the edifice with an Anglo-
Saxon Queen, who gave birth to a family whose
descendants still reign in England. In Scotland,
therefore, one central monarchy had been consolidated,
of which all its subjects were every year more and
more learning to be proud. In Ireland, on the con-
trary, during the same epoch, there was no such
progress towards union — nothing, indeed, but in-
creasing and deepening disintegration. And when at
last — not till early in the elevtjnth century — one
gallant Irishman of purely native race did very
CH. Ti.] IRISH DREAD OF GOVERNMENT. 61
nearly accomplish a like work, the monarchy which
he for a moment did actually attain, was instantly
torn to pieces by his compatriot chiefs and tribes.
And Professor Kichey himself tells us that those chiefs
and tribes did so tear it to pieces for the very reason
that a central and civilised government was, of all
other things, that which they dreaded most. We may
all render honour to King " Brian Boru '* personally.
He might have been another Angus MacFergus, or
like another Kenneth MacAlpine — his Scottish kins-
man by blood. They and he alike proved by their
life that it is not because of anything indelible in
their race that the Irish Celt failed so miserably to
found a nation. They proved that it was something
in the habits and institutions of Ireland that we have
to look to for the cause. It was indeed the Danes
who actually killed Brian Boru, for he fell in battle
with them. But he fell in victory. And who was it
that killed not him alone, but also the fruits of that
victory, and obliterated from the annals of Ireland
everything but the record of a barren triumph ? It
was not the " we " of Mr. Gladstone's inflated fiction.
For " we " did not enter Ireland for a hundred and
sixty years later. It was the native Irish tribes them-
selves, and they did this with feelings and intentions
thoroughly indigenous, which have never received
more vigorous condemnation than in the words of
Professor Eichey — one of the very best of their own
historians.
52 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. n.
But here we come upon an extraordinary discrepancy
between the facts which these historians relate, and
— at least — the occasional language which they hold
concerning them. About the facts themselves there
is practically no dispute. But as to the light in which
they are represented — as to the use made of them —
there is the widest difference between the inter-
pretation which is obvious to others, and that which
even the best of Irish historians are tempted to
enforce. There is no dispute, for example, about the
perfect continuity of intertribal feuds, fightings, and
devastations, before and after the invasion of Norman
settlers in the twelfth century. The contemporary
Annals are sufiScient to confute any attempt to deny
that perfect continuity. Again, there is no dispute
about the fact that this continuity depended on, and in
itself consisted in, the more or less complete adoption
by the Anglo-Norman barons and chiefs, of the
habits, and manners, and sentiments of the Celtic
chiefs and people amongst whom they settled. With
them they established the most intimate relations by
marriage, by " fosterage," by complete participation in
common enmities, and by common methods of exer-
cising the rudest forms of military power over all
below them, and towards all around them. Further,
there is no dispute that for centuries the English
Sovereign and Government had not the physical
power to counteract this condition of things. Daniel
O'Connell, in his great speech of 1834, reiterated
CH. II.] ENGLISH GOVEENMENT POWERLESS. 5S
empliatically that not until 1614, in the reign of
James I., did Ireland come under one Government
with England.*
Professor Kichey not only enforces the same view,
but gives an excellent and detailed explanation of
the fact. He points out that in an age when there
were no standing armies, the cost of feudal levies
was so enormous that it far exceeded the cost even
of modern troops regularly paid. Moreover, feudal
levies could not be long kept together. They were
thus incapable from many causes of really conquer-
ing a country covered with enormous bogs and forests,
into which the native population could always re-
treat, and where they could not be followed. Neither
could feudal levies be used as permanent garrisons.
There was but one way, in the Middle Ages, of
representing Sovereignty — the way universally adopted
— that of the delegation and devolution of government
into the hands of strong feudatory vassals. These were
armed with all the powers of petty kings and rulers in
all things that pertained to domestic government and
administration. But this was no novelty in Ireland.
This had been the old condition of things for a
thousand years at least ; and, practically, during
some centuries, a like condition of things obtained
over the whole of Europe. The great difference of
result which arose in Ireland was due entirely to the
fact that the new chiefs sank down to the level of
* " Mirror of Parliament," vol. ii. (1834), p. 1189.
54 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch- ir.
the old, and did not, as elsewhere, introduce or main-
tain more developed institutions. Here, again, there
is no dispute as to the facts. Irish historians and
even Irish declaimers do not deny that the system of
English law, even as it existed in those rude military
ages, was immeasurably superior to the old Celtic
usages. At least, when it serves the purpose of their
charges against England, they blame her vehemently,
as O'Connell did, for not having at once established
her own higher principles of jurisprudence over the
whole of Ireland. It is true that the very same
historians and declaimers, when their accusations are
best served by an opposite contention, do continually
face round the other way, and utter the contradictory
complaint that England did cruelly or stupidly force
upon Ireland English laws which were entirely un-
suited to the people, and subversive of their ancient
rights. I shall return to this alternative directly.
Meantime, let us get what historic truth we can out
of the first of these accusations, as urged on a great
occasion by the very best Counsel for the prosecution.
With a glaring inconsistency between his vehement
denial of any conquest, and consequently of any
corresponding power, O'Connell, in the same speech,
bitterly inveighed against England because she had
not extended to the Irish the protection of her own
laws. He admits the fact that "a number of the
Irish did in 1246 — only seventy-six years after the
so-called conquest — apply for the benefit of British
CH. II.] DANIEL o'CONNELL'S SPEECH. 55
law, and to be considered as British subjects." He
admits and records the farther fact that Henry III.
did accordingly "issue a mandate, under the Great
Seal, commanding the English barons, who possessed
a portion of Ireland, tliat for the peace and tranquillity
of the land they should permit the Irish to be
governed by the law of England." And on whom
does O'Connell throw the whole blame of the failure
of a consummation which he admits was devoutly to
be wished? Not upon the English Sovereign, but
entirely on the new Anglo-Norman barons who had
taken — and because of their taking — the position of
Irish chiefs. And he explains the motives of their
conduct precisely as Professor Richey explains the
parallel conduct of the native Celtic chiefs two
hundred and forty years before, when they fiercely
tore to pieces the work of King Brian, because they
hated above all things the prospect of a well-ordered
central government, and of a more civilised monarchy.
Just as they had clung to the old Irish usages as the
stronghold of their barbarous power, and the great
instrument of their arbitrary exactions, so did those
Norman barons, who were now associated with them
in the same life, dread above all things the intro-
duction of English law, and for exactly the same
reasons. Nothing can be more emphatic than
O'Connell's language in identifying the motives which
animated the Ersefied Normans in clinging to the
Irish customs. It was because those customs lent
56 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii.
themselves to a life of constant war and constant
plunder.* He goes on to narrate how the same
petition came again " from many of the Irish " in the
reign of Edward I., in 1278, and again in the reign
of Richard II. He narrates how in all those cases the
petition was well received in England, and how in the
case of Edward I. he expressly made the grant of it
dependent on the " general consent of his people in
Ireland," or at least of the prelates and nobles who
were loyal to their Liege Lord. Now, in all this
story there are but three clear and admitted truths —
namely, first, the bare historical fact of such appli-
cations or petitions coming from Ireland ; secondly,
the farther fact that they were well and favourably
entertained in England; and, thirdly, that English
law and institutions would have been the salvation of
Ireland, and that the survival and persistence of the
old Irish usages were the real source of its continued
miseries. These three things are true, and it is well
to have them, not only admitted, but dwelt upon, by
such a man as Daniel O'Connell. But the moment
we come to the link by which he connects these three
truths with his charges against the English Sovereign
and the English nation in their whole relation to
Ireland, we find that it is a link forged by his own
imagination, or by his cunning and sleight of hand.
That link consists in the designation given to those
from whom came those beggings and petitions for
* " Mirror of Parliament," p. 1189.
CH. IT.] o'connell's erkoneous assertion. 57
English law. His dexterity in handling this cardinal
point is admirable. He begins gently. He first says
the petition came from " a number of the Irish." He
next advances one step farther, and calls the peti-
tioners "many of the Irish." Next he speaks of
" the Irish as a whole.'* From this he passes in-
sensibly, insidiously, and at last audaciously, to
language which identifies the petitioners with the
whole Irish people. "Thus," he says, "up to the
period of the reign of James I. we find repeated
endeavours on the part of Jr eland to be governed by
British laws instead of its own." *
Here we have the genuine element, not only of in-
flated fable, but of gross, yet cunning, misrepresenta-
tion. In Professor Kichey's conscientious pages and
in numerous other authorities more original and
authoritative, we may see the object of the fraud.
It was the English settlers of the lower ranks in
power and wealth who speedily discovered the intoler-
able evils of native Irish customs. The feudal depen-
dence on their lords under whom they had lived in
England, was a dependence regulated, restrained, and
limited, by the precepts and principles of a rising
jurisprudence, which tended more and. more to define
the rights and consequently to limit obligations of
men. They now found that the feudal dependence
under which they had to live in Ireland according
to the long-established and native customs of that
• " Mirror of Parliament," vol. ii. p. 1189.
58 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. tt.
country, was a dependence, absolute, servile, ex-
hausting, and often ruinous. Nothing they had could
be called their own. Under Celtic customs un-
limited exactions were levied from them, against
which they had no redress. The very idea of law
did not exist — at least for the subordinate and the
poor. Professor Eichey mentions especially — as indeed
all Irish historians do — one desperate Celtic custom
which, even if it stood alone, was enough to make life
unbearable to civilised men — the custom, namely, by
which the chief had always the acknowledged right
to quarter himself and his followers upon all those
below him who had anything to be devoured or used.
Antiquarian historians do, indeed, tell us that this
evil custom was, in primitive times, not confined to
Celts, but can be traced also in the early tribal usages
of the Teutonic races. This may be true, and it may
be true also that in certain rude conditions of a fight-
ing society, this custom, and many others of a like
kind, had their origin in some real necessity of those
conditions. But this has nothing to do with the
question now in hand. It cannot be too often repeated
that what was peculiar to the Celts of Ireland was
the continued survival and even the aggravation of
this custom and other equally barbarous customs for
long centuries, during which all other races had
grown out of them and had cast them off. To the
poorer English settlers even of the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries, they were intolerable. It was from
CH. n.] IRISH HATRED OF LAW. 59
these unfortunate poorer English settlers, and from
some native chiefs of the weaker class who felt the
need of some protection from Over-Lords, that the
petitions came which O'Connell and many other Irish
speakers and writers have twisted into a general desire
on the part of the Irish people to live under the
blessings of the English law, and into a special
accusation against the English Chiefs and barons as
compared with the rest of the population among whom
they came to settle. O'Connell forgot to tell the
House of Commons that in any resistance which the
English barons and Chiefs may have made to the intro-
duction of English law, they were acting in thorough
sympathy with at least all the more powerful native
Celtic Chiefs, and with all that great body of the
Celtic people in the very soil of whose mind these
ancient customs were indelibly rooted, and to which
they passionately clung. No doubt those of them
who were beaten in their interminable wars, were
sometimes ready enough to claim the protection of
English laws against their stronger rivals, or against
their native over-lords. But they never thought of
submitting to the restraint of those laws in their
dealings with their own people. Those opportunities
for plunder which O'Connell said the English barons
desired to keep, were precisely the same opportunities
of plunder which the Irish Chiefs had enjoyed for
centuries, — of which they were continuing at that very
time to take full advantage, and which they never
60 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. n.
ceased to cultivate to their own ruin, and the ruin of
their country, until, four hundred years later, it was
at last really conquered.
Professor Eichey has given a striking and graphic
account of the complete Ersefication of the Anglo-
Norman Barons in the centuries immediately succeed-
ing the pretended Conquest of 1172. In the first
place he tells us that the moment Henry II. turned
his back on Ireland, and the native chiefs saw that
all his imposing array meant nothing but a temporary
occupation, " they returned to their former indepen-
dence.'* Practically they were remitted to their original
position.* We know what this means — what that
position was. In the second place he tells us that
the Norman Sub -Feudatories were scattered more or
less over large portions of the country still largely
occupied by, or in contact with, native populations
against whom they could not organise any com-
bined defence. They did, indeed, build castles, — and
this was really new, — for no Irish chief seems ever
to have built one stone upon another. But with whom
did the Ersefied Normans garrison their castles?
With the native Celts. They gathered bands of
Irishmen at arms, called " Grallowglasses." These
Irish Gallowglasses exhibited towards their new lords,
we are told, a more absolute personal devotion than
English vassals or tenants have ever shown — just
because under the old native system they were
* " Short History/' p. 166.
CH. n.] THE ENGLISH BARONS ERSEFIED. 61
more absolutely dependent on the lord for all upon
which alone they lived. The Norman barons did
also bring with them some English dependants and
tenants. But how did they treat them ? They treated
them with the adoption of the most obnoxious and
destructive of all Irish customs — that of " coigne and
livery," — that is to say, by free quartering of the
Celtic bands upon their unfortunate countrymen. And
when those poorer English settlers, in despair of
getting the protection of the more civilised laws to
which they had been accustomed at home, abandoned
their holdings under their Ersefied lords, and fled back
to England, how did those barons repeople their
estates ? They stocked them with the native Irish,
who, if they had long been accustomed to be plundered
in the same way, were at least equally accustomed to be
repaid out of the plunder of the neighbouring tribes.
The capture of cattle by the hundred and sometimes
by the thousand — at that time and country the only
form of wealth, and almost the only sustenance of life
— was the habitual aim and practice in all Irish pre-
datory wars. " Great Distributor of Cows " is one of
the epithets of glory which we find applied by the
contemporary Irish bards in the verses celebrating
the dead heroes of their race. But cows did not fall
down from heaven, and the cattle so generously *' dis-
tributed" in one place had been always rudely
abstracted from another. There was therefore always
every inducement for the native Irish to settle under
62 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii.
any chief who could best defend such cattle as they
had, and could best add to their store by the robbery
of others. Thus there came about in many cases, an
almost complete amalgamation between the two races.
The English settlers married Irish wives. They
fostered their children with Irish mothers — and this,
under native usages, constituted one of the very
nearest ties of human life. A number of the English
went farther. We are told that in their new delight
in a life of lawless freedom from all restraint, which
was the great charm of native usages, they sometimes
threw off even the clothing of their race and country.
They " donned the saffron " — that is to say, they habited
themselves in the rude native stuffs that were dyed
in the browns and yellows which were obtainable from
certain lichens encrusting Irish rocks, and certain
herbs growing in Irish bogs. They fought with each
other of the same English blood, exactly as the native
Irish tribes and chiefs had always fought with each
other. They had the same feuds — becoming in some
cases just as hereditary and continuous — as in the
■well-known case of the Geraldines and the Butlers.
I am afraid, too, that we must go farther in our
account of this decline from a comparatively high,
and certainly a rising, civilisation, to the depths of a
barbarism which had been getting deeper and deeper
for a thousand years. There is nothing more indicative
of this scale among any people than their established
usages and rules of war. Giraldus Cambrensis, a con-
CH. II.] ADOPTION OF IRISH CUSTOMS. 63
temporary Anglo-Celtic historian, tells us that the
Normans in his day habitually gave quarter to the
vanquished, and held their prisoners to ransom ;
whereas the Celtic Clans gave no quarter, struck off
the heads of the vanquished as trophies, and allowed
no one to escape. Did the English settlers demean
themselves by adopting these Irish habits too ? Ex-
cept as regards the utterly savage practice of carry-
ing off the heads of the slain as trophies, there
is only too much evidence that they did. Indeed,
it is obvious that the natural law and necessity of
reprisals would compel them to do so. Men cannot
fight under totally unequal conditions as to the con-
sequences of defeat. Moreover, it is certain that
they did adopt that most fatal of all the peculiarities
of Irish war — the peculiarity of fighting, not for any
worthy aim, or even any definite political object
whatever, but for the plunder and devastation of the
territory of some hated local enemy. In short,
the Ersefication of the English settlers was almost
complete. Under those circumstances, it is a gross
perversion of historical facts to pretend that Ireland,
after the nominal conquest of 1172, was under the
Government of England even in the " last resort,"
and the phrase which assigns for English dominion
the period of "seven hundred years," which Mr.
Gladstone adopts, is seen to be an inflated fiction
indeed. Still more specifically false is the assertion
of Daniel O'Connell that Ireland became the prey
64 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii.
of the English Colonists, who alone, or who principally,
clung to Irish usages against the earnest entreaty
of the native Irish to be allowed to come under
the protection of English law.
One rich source of the most authoritative evidence
against this fiction is to be found in the contem-
porary Irish Annals. If any man will take the
trouble, and undergo the really revolting task of
reading consecutively through those Annals for the
period of nearly a century and a half which elapsed
between the Norman invasion of 1170-2, and another
invasion which forms a new epoch in the history of
Ireland in 1315, he will find that of the interminable
wars, predatory incursions, slaughters, plunderings,
and treacherous murders there faithfully recorded,*
a comparatively very small number belong to any
racial hostilities or any contests between the native
Irish and the English settlers ; and that the vast
majority of these atrocities are specially recorded as
yearly incidents in intertribal contests between the
native Irish Septs, or clans, or " bloods," amongst, and
against, each other. These were continued exactly as
they had been continued through the whole range of
preceding Irish history. The names given of the
conquerors and the conquered, — of the slaughtered
and the slaughterers, — of the plunderers and the
plundered, — of those cruelly murdered, and of the
treacherous murderers, are all, in the immense
* " Irish Annals," " Four Masters/' vol. ii.
CH. 11.] lEISH INTERTRIBAL WARS. 65
majority of cases, purely Celtic names. It is not
prominently a record of any destructive war between
the Irish and the English. It is savage fighting
between the " Kinel Connell " and the " Kinel Owen ;
between the "O'Donnells" and the "O'Rourkes;
between the " O'Briens " and the " MacArthys ; " be-
tween the "O'Neills" and the " MacLoughlins ; "
between the "O'Donnells" and the "Clan Dermot;'*
— it is of these pure Irish Celts, and a host of others
with unspellable and unpronounceable names, that we
read — tearing at each other's throats, ravaging each
other's territories, slaughtering each other, men, women,
and children, and leaving each other, so far as they
survived, to perish with hunger in the bogs and woods
of a ravaged land.
It is perfectly true that after 1170 we do find the
English barons and people also warring and fighting
more or less like those among whom they lived,
and whose habits and manners they so unfortu-
nately adopted. But on this head there are at least
three general conclusions established by the Irish
Annals, which are remarkable as bearing on the
crowning fiction put forward by O'Connell and con-
stantly repeated by Irish declaimers. The first is
that, as already said, the old intertribal savagery
between the native Irish is enormously the pre-
ponderating element in the list of horrors per-
petrated and endured. The second is that, in almost
every case in which the English settlers fought against
F
66 IRISH NATIONALISM. Lch. n.
native Irish, they did so in close alliance with other
Septs of the same race, who were often the instigators
in the quarrel, the directors of the attack, and always
the fiercest destroyers of the vanquished. The third
is that, so far from the English settlers being able to
dominate the native Irish as they pleased, or being the
only one of the two races who could exercise and profit
by the hereditary plundering usages of Irish warfare,
it appears on the contrary that in numerous cases they
were defeated by the native clans, who routed them
often with great slaughter, and sometimes even suc-
ceeded in taking and burning their new castles of
stone and lime. The truth is that not only during
the century and a half succeeding the invasion of
which I have been now speaking, but for the whole
period of the five hundred and thirty-one years which
elapsed between that event and the accession of James
I. in 1603, the native Irish, partly by the Ersefication
of the Colonists, partly by their own strength of arm
and the difficulties of their country, not only held their
own as regards the prevalence of their own old usages,
but gradually recovered ground which they had lost,
and at last succeeded in excluding English law from
the whole of Ireland except a very small area near
the Capital well known in Irish history as the Pale.
All the classes, both native and English, whose rule
and habits determined the condition of life for the
people of Ireland over nine-tenths of the Island, had
thus been combined — partly by passive resistance
CH. II.] IRELANP MADE THE ANGLO-IRISH. . 67
partly by conscious effort — in keeping up the deso-
lating usages of their country against the continual but
vain desire of English Sovereigns, and against their
repeated attempts on various points, and at various
times, to counteract the worst evils of the native
system, and to protect its people from their effects.
So far, then, as this period of time and this ground
of accusation against England is concerned, we have
as clear an answer to give to Mr. Gladstone's question,
"Who made the Irishman?" as we had for a like
period before the invasion. It was Ireland and its
usages that not only " made " the native Irishman, but
to a large extent " made " also the Anglo-Irish who were
settled in that country, and which reduced both races
to a lower .level of civilisation than that which pre-
vailed in any other country in Europe. There were,
nevertheless, even in such miserable conditions, a few
symptoms of that immeasurable superiority in English
laws over Irish usages and habits and traditions,
which is the only element of truth in O'Connell's
representation of the facts. There were at least some
Anglo-Normans who did good service to their adopted
country. Even in the building of their castles — bad
as the use was to which those castles were often
turned, — the very worst of them introduced an
element of advance qn the squalid houses of mud and
clay which alone had sheltered even the native kings.
But they did more and better than this. We have
already seen how to their Danish cousins, and not to
68 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. it.
the native races, Ireland owes to this day all her
principal commercial cities ; and we are next told by
the same truthful Irish historian that to the first
great Anglo-Norman barons Ireland owes, not less, a
large number of her existing towns of the second class.
Those barons did not confine themselves merely to the
creation of sub-feudatories. They also to a very large
extent attempted to found municipal towns, and
granted numerous charters in the hope of attracting
colonists. "Thus Kilkenny and New Eoss received
the first charters from the great Earl Marshall.
Galway and Clonmel were founded as towns by the
De Burgs, Fethard by the Butlers, Athenry by the
Berninghams." * This is a fact which implies a great
deal. It shows that, in spite of all the demoralising
influences under which the Ano^lo-Normans fell, owino:
to contact with a form of barbarism which offered to
them many charms, because many temptations in the
exercise of licentious power, the English settlers did
nevertheless sow ia Ireland the seeds of all that in
other countries are the recognised indications of
at least one of the beginnings of civilisation. To
this must be added the important fact that the one
thing on which the English Sovereigns did always
insist was the right of appointing the Bishops of Irish
Sees. In this way they established more and more,
from the very first, the Anglo-Norman Church, to the
gradual extinction of the semi-barbarous Celtic eccle-
* Richey's " Short History," p. 170.
CH. il] the latin church. 69
siastical organisation. There are archaBological senti-
mentalists, and there are theological parties, who may-
think this a matter of regret. I am not Protestant
enough to deny, or to doubt the immense part taken
by the Latin Church in the growing civilisation of
Europe; nor am I sentimentalist enough to fancy in
the Celtic or " Culdee " theology any elements of real
value in its diflferences with Eome. The balance of
advantage as regards all civil or secular affairs cannot
be doubted. It is certain that, in that age at least,
the English power was in this matter exercised for the
best in the interests of the Irish people.
70 IKISH NATIONALISM. [oh. in.
CHAPTEK in.
EFFECT OF NATIVE IKISH LAWS AND USAGES.
But we must not forget that the charge of Mr.
Gladstone against England is not the same as the
charge which we have dealt with in the mouth of
O'Connell. The two charges are the same only in the
one fundamental assumption — which is not true — that
subsequent to 1172, England governed Ireland in a
sense which made her responsible for the domestic
and economic condition of the Irish people. But
beyond this fundamental assumption, those two Counsel
for the prosecution take lines of argument which are
not only different, but are diametrically opposite and
contradictory. O'Connell's charge is invaluable in the
broad assumption which it makes, and on which it
entirely rests, that it was the Irish laws and usages
which were the bane of Ireland, and that England's
sin lay, not in imposing her own law, which was the
highest and best, but in even permitting the old Irish
customs to continue, and still more in so far as she
may have winked at that continuance when clung to
CH. III.] CONTRADICTORY CHARGES. 71
by her own colonists. Mr. Gladstone, so far as I know,
lias never taken this line of argument. The instincts
of the adroit debater, and the necessities of his own
new policy, have, indeed, not only held him back from
admitting this great truth which underlies O'ConnelFs
accusation, but they have led him to adopt the opposite
and far more ignorant contention, that the crime of
England lay in forcing her own " foreign " law on a
people to whose condition it was not adapted, and
whose ancient usages ought to have been conformed
to and respected. Mr. Gladstone knows that this is
by far the more popular idea of the two — the one
which best lends itself to passionate declamation, — to
the separatist policy, and to inflated fable. It would
never do for him to admit that the law and usages
of England, if universally established and resolutely
enforced, would have been the salvation of Ireland in
the twelfth century. It would never do for him to
recall, as O'Connell did, the repeated occasions on
which portions at least of the Irish people, both natives
and settlers, had earnestly appealed for the protection
of English law against the miseries to which they were
exposed from what may be called the systematic
anarchy and oppression of native usages. And so, on
repeated occasions, his language has strictly conformed
to the exigencies of his immediate position, and has
repeatedly dwelt on the alien character of English
legislation, and on the consequent woes it has en-
tailed. Demonstrably true as the opposite doctrine of
72
IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
O'Connell is, and founded as it was on his own know-
ledge as a lawyer, it was not the view which at all
suited Mr. Gladstone's purpose. Moreover, the oppo-
site contention being vague and general in its terms,
and harmonising with popular passion and popular
ignorance in Ireland, had this great advantage — that
even the best and most temperate of Irish historians
have used a great deal of wandering language which
involves the same notion, and is more or less inspired
by it.
Fortunately, here again, there can be no dispute
about the facts. The only question which can arise
is as to the terms and words in which those facts
can be most consistently described. In dealing with
this it is well to remember what the temptation is to
which Irish writers are inevitably exposed. Apart
altogether from the natural feelings of a local patriot-
ism, there is in our time, perhaps in all time, a
sentimental sympathy with primitive conditions of
society, and along with this a great liability to mis-
take for conditions really primitive, other very dif-
ferent conditions which were not primitive at all,
but, on the contrary, were the later products of a
long development of corruption. And this is exactly
what has happened in the case of Ireland. There
is a vague almost incoherent notion that the con-
ditions of society in Ireland in the twelfth century
had continued to be those of what is called the
" tribal " system, whereas the Anglo-Norman system
CH. iiij tRISH TRIBALISM. 73
is known to have been what is called the "feudal."
And upon this supposed distinction an immense super-
structure of inflated fable is erected. The sentimental
imagination always goes back, on the very mention of
the word "tribal," to those conditions of society in
which every association of men, having even the
semblance of a separate individuality, were brothers
or cousins in blood, and all equal in such possessions as
might belong to the group. Unfortunately, these are
conditions of which we have no authentic record later
than the Book of Genesis. And even that information
is imperfect. We do not know how long it lasted.
The charming pictures of Patriarchal times are vaguely
identified with it, and then we think of the old tribes
of Israel, or the early tribes of Latium. A hazy
notion of universal brotherhood and equality is the
attraction here. And no doubt, as compared with this
assumed and theoretical past, the regular grades of
subordination, and the rude dependence of everybody
on some Lord or Chief, which we associate with the
Feudal System, offers a very wide, and even an appa-
rently violent, contrast.
But the moment we begin to inquire into the
system prevailing in Ireland in historic times, which
has been called "tribal," the whole conception on
which this contrast is founded breaks down and
vanishes like a dream. The real facts cannot be
better stated than in the words of Dr. Kichey:
"The Irish tribe, at the earliest date at which we
74 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iir.
possess any distinct information upon the subject,
had been altered from its original form : it had
then reached the stage at which wealth, represent-
ing physical force, had become the acknowledged
basis of political power and private right, and the
richer members of the community were rapidly
reducing the poorer freemen to a condition little
better than serfdom; and at the date of its extinc-
tion, the tribe had been finally supplanted by the
military retainers and tenants, or serfs, of the chiefs." *
The condition of things among the Irish during all
the centuries which belong to history before the
Norman invasion, was a condition of Feudalism of
the coarsest and rudest kind. That is to say, it was
a condition of things in which every man held every-
thing on which his life depended on the condition of
absolute subordination to the chief, or lord, under
whom he lived. The nobler part of feudalism, indeed,
was wanting — the roof of the whole — the cope-stone
of the building. Under the perfected feudal system
of the Normans, the Chief himself was subordinate to
some central Sovereign, to whom his relations, as well
as his own relations to those below him, came more
and more to be fixed and defined by an advancing
system of Jurisprudence and of Law. In Ireland, this
golden link of subordination to a central authority,
and to common principles of limitation and definition
in all rights and obligations — this link was wanting.
* '' Short History," p. 42.
OH. III.] SEPTS INTENSELY ARISTOCRATIC. 75
Each petty Chief was a law unto himself. His power
was practically absolute, and the theoretical ** tribes-
men " — really clansmen — were entirely at his mercy
— until in extreme cases extraordinary vices may
have induced rebellion and civil war.
As to the notion of any equality amongst the mass
of the Irish people, — such as fancy imagines between
brother tribesmen, — such a thing did not exist in
Ireland. The whole constitution of society was in-
tensely aristocratic — full of men whose condition was
abject, of others who were little removed from it, and of
others, again, who were graded and ranked below and
above each other strictly in proportion to their wealth
in the rudest scale of semi-barbarous Possession.
Deeply aristocratic in the value set on lineage, and in
the power it enjoyed, it was next, and almost equally
plutocratic in the privileges which comparative wealth
conferred. The one possession in which almost all
wealth consisted was that of cows. And such was the
miserable poverty of the country, that the possession
of even eight of the small cattle then known in
Ireland was enough to place a man at once on at
least the first rung of the aristocratic ladder. A man
rich enough to have twenty-one cows " of his very
own," as our children now say, was by comparison a
Prince in the Irish Israel — for by virtue of that wealth
he was reckoned among the " lords " of Irish society.
" Aire " was the Celtic word by which that rank was
designated, and as in this, as well as in all other
76 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m.
branches of Aryan speech, the old root of " Bos " or
'* Bo " was the name of an ox or cow, so in the Irish
terminology the possessor of twenty- one cows was
entitled a " Cow-Lord " or a Bo-aire. And so on, up
the ladder of power and wealth on which all political
privileges depended in Ireland, the " Aires " or Lords
were ranked one above another in consideration and
importance.* It might be called a Bo-ocracy, under
which the great mass of the people were actually
serfs, or but little removed above that condition.
This is the condition of society which Irish factions,
and sometimes English ignorance and declamation,
have combined to imagine and represent, and mourn
over as a condition of " Tribal " simplicity and equality
which was cruelly broken up and oppressed by Anglo-
Norman Feudalism. The looseness of thought, the
indefiniteness of meaning, with which many men
wTite and speak of what they call the "feudal
system " is indeed extraordinary. Some politicians
now habitually apply the expression to everything
in old, or in existing laws, which they themselves
disapprove and dislike. The universal and necessary
dependence of men upon each other in all the re-
lations of life — the dependence of the borrower on
the lender in money, or in land, or in anything else
which is not our own, but which we may need to hire
— the dependence of ignorance upon knowledge — the
* Professor O'Curry's "Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Irish," vol. ii. pp. 34-38.
CH. III.] CLAKS WERE NOT TRIBES. 77
dependence of labour upon capital, which is the de-
pendence of value upon demand — the dependence of
weakness upon strength, — all these forms and kinds of
interdependence of some men upon others, are often
stigmatised and denounced by anarchists as Feudalism.
But, without turning aside to confusions such as these,
we have to encounter continually in writings of just
repute, a laxity of use as to what is called feudalism,
which vitiates the most important practical conclu-
sions. Thus, even Dr. Richey says that no two systems
of social organisation can be more widely separated
than the Feudal and the Tribal. This is quite true,
if by "Tribal" we understand the Patriarchal as
slightly developed into larger family groups, held
together by the bonds of a near blood-relationship,
and living together in security and in peace. But it
is absolutely untrue, if by " Tribal '* we mean such a
condition of society as that which had prevailed in
Ireland since before the dawn of history — a system of
clans and septs recruited from all quarters, holding, in
large numbers, serfs and bondsmen — themselves in
vassalage under others — and living in a state of per-
petual and internecine wars. That condition of
society w^as " feudal " from top to bottom, and as
different from the ideal state of primitive tribes as it is
possible to conceive.
The essence of the feudal system is a very simple
matter indeed. It is the necessity of protection
on the one hand, and of service and allegiance as
78 . IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. lit.
its price upon the other. This relation always is,
and always must be, the foundation-stone of all
societies which exist under conditions in which every-
thing depends upon the sword — ?the sword for the
defence of everything that is held, — the sword for
the recovery of everything that has been lost, — the
sword for establishing protective power, — the sword
for destroying enemies, and for repelling aggression.
Of course, in every nation that has ever existed, as
regards the ultimate necessities of self-defence, this
principle has been represented in its military organisa-
tion. But in great and powerful states it does not
come home to individual men in their social, or even
in their political, relations to each other. In all
Empires, moreover, properly so called, — that is to
say, in great monarchies, with subject and tributary
states under them, — the same principle has always
received a marked development in directly feudal
forms. It was so under the Babylonian and Assyrian
Empires. It was so in the Persian, Turkish, and
Indian Empires, where it largely survives to the
present day. Imperial Eome herself had taken a
long step in the same direction when she endowed
barbarian soldiers with lands on condition that they
would defend the frontiers of the Empire. But in
mediaeval Europe its more full and detailed elabora-
tion was due to the long absence of any adequate
central authority, and the subdivision of power prac-
tically supreme among the many chiefs who led the
CH. III.] INTENSIFIED INEQUALITIES. - 79
northern nations. This intensified the universal sense
of dependence on the sword. It brought it home to
every man's door. In Ireland this subdivision was
carried to the uttermost limit, and beyond it, of human
endurance, for there it was coupled with hereditary
enmities between clan and clan, sept and sept, which
made the whole Island a constant pandemonium of
savagery and destruction. Under such conditions the
dependence of every man upon some lord or chief who
could alone defend him, became, of necessity, more
absolute than in any other country in Europe. To
talk of tribal simplicity and equality among men in
such a country would be an absurdity, even if we
knew nothing of the details which contradict it. The
more tribal it was, and the less national — that is to
say, the more the depositories of power were not great
kings but petty chiefs, each practically independent
and unrestrained in his own country — the more intense
and helpless must have been the feudal subordination
and dependence of the great bulk of the people, — the
more unmitigated by any general law, which could
define rights or limit obligations.
Such, accordingly, we know to have been the fact,
and such is the only, as it is the full, explanation of
the assumption of O'Connell that the greatest crime to
be alleged against England is that she did not sooner
enforce her own higher and more regulated feudal
organisation on the Irish people, to the complete super-
cession and abolition of their own feudalism, which
80 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. in.
was SO desolating, because so unlimited and unre-
strained. Dr. Kichey says, truly enough, that what
the English settlers practised in Ireland was not the
feudal system at its best, but at its worst — severed
from those higher elements of the system, which not
only redeemed it from coarseness, but converted it
into the greatest agency of civilisation and of law.
But when he says, — or rather implies, for he hardly
asserts it distinctly, — that the coarser feudalism was
introduced into Ireland by the Anglo-Normans, he
wanders widely from the fact, as given both by him-
self and by a crowd of the most purely native witnesses.
What the English barons did was simply to rest more
than satisfied with the feudalism which they found to
have been long established in Ireland — a feudalism
which vested in them a degree of power over their
subordinate people which had many legal and cus-
tomary restraints in England. The facts on this
subject are notorious. They are the whole burden of
the song of every Irish writer who undertakes to
describe, however superficially, the condition of the
people. We have only to look at that single obligation
on the one side, and of privilege on the other, which
became proverbial as specially Irish, the practice of
*'Coigne and Livery." This was the acknowledged
right, habitually exercised, of every Irish Lord to
quarter himself and his followers to an unlimited
extent upon those who occupied land within his
territory. It is perpetually referred to as a typical
CH. m.] IRISH FEUDALISM. 81
example of many similar usages which depressed the
condition and perpetuated the poverty of the people.
Bat it is not less a typical illustration of the principle
on which all feudalism was founded, and of the rude
necessities out of which it came to be. Its historical
origin, and the only basis of justification on which it
ever rested, was tersely and forcibly expressed in the
proverbial motto of the poorer classes in Ireland, "Spend
me, but defend me." This means, " All that I have
depends on your protection : — I must give you as much
of it as you like to take."
It would be difficult to put into fewer words the very
essence of feudalism — that dependence of every man
on some lord for all his possessory rights, which is the
central idea of the whole system. Even therefore if it
had been true that the words, and terras, and phrases,
by which feudal relations were popularly expressed, had
been unknown in Ireland, it would be an accountable
error on the part of Irish historians to fail in recog-
nising the identity of facts, and above all to confound
such a system of not only subordination, but subjection,
with any supposed primeval equality of men grouped in
patriarchal tribes. But when we come to examine the
evidence supplied by the best-informed Irish writers,
we find that not only are the essential principles and
conditions of feudalism the determining elements in
all Irish history, but also that even the very root-
words which represent those conditions, are of Celtic
origin, and were familiarly used in Ireland to designate
G
82 IRISH NATIONALISM. [m. m.
the corresponding orders of society. The very word
"Vassal," embodying, as no other word can do, the
fundamental idea of the feudal relation, is a purely
Celtic word, and was used to designate the most
devoted dependants on Irish Chiefs. It is a word
which expressed in English ears, as it still in a
measure does, all that was most associated with the
abuses of feudalism, — all that was most raw and crude
in its beginnings and in its less fortunate developments.
I know that I have entered upon a thorny subject
in taking a single step into the bypath of Celtic
etymology. But at least the one step I have thus
ventured upon has been taken under the very safest
Irish guidance. Two eminent Irish Professors, in the
Catholic University of Dublin, full of Irish patriotism
in its best form, have combined their labours to
present to us all that can be traced and known by the
most laborious and learned investigation on the
ancient habits and manners of their country. The
"Lectures" of Professor O'Curry, together with an
elaborate Introduction bv Professor Sullivan, leave
nothing to be desired in the picture they present of
mediaeval Irish life. As regards the mere language
of feudalism, not only does Professor Sullivan identify,
without doubt, the word " vassal " as purely Erse, but
even the word " Feud " itself, respecting which there
have been so many theories, he has equally little
doubt in identifying with an ancient Celtic word,
" Fuidirs," which, passing through many stages of
CH. til] evidence of PROFESSOR SULLIVAN. 83
meaning, came to designate specially men of native
races who had been conquered, and who became, under
victorious Chiefs, holders or occupiers of land at the
will of their lords.* To a very large extent indeed
they became Serfs bound to the soil. Speaking of
the name attached to this class of men, "Fuidirs,"
Professor Sullivan says, "I have no doubt it was the
true origin of the word * Feodum,' " f adding that
languages foreign to the Celtic adopted the word in
forms variously modified *' to describe almost the very
same kind of tenure already existing among the people
where the word 'Feodum,' and all the other forms of
that term, came first into use."
But this is not all. No writer has torn asunder more
ruthlessly the inflated fictions which represent the
system of society under the Irish septs and clans as one
which had even the slightest flavour of the supposed
simplicity and equality of primeval tribes. He depicts
and describes in detail, on the contrary, a condition of
things in which division, subdivision, inequality, sub-
ordination, and subjection penetrated society through
and through. In the first place, the Irish clans in
the twelfth century, of whom he speaks conventionally
as being the natives, were nothing but a victorious
aristocracy, who held an older and a conquered
population in bondage. They were not, any more
than other races, autochthones. They were not even
* O'Curry's " Lectures," Introduction, pp. 224, 225.
t Ibid., p. 226,
84 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ni.
indigenous since times that are wholly unknown.
The details of the conquest effected by the dominant
Irish Clans, anciently called Scoti, are indeed obscure.
But traditions, which rest on much historical corrobo-
ration, have compelled the substantial agreement and
assent of the most learned writers on Irish history, to
conclusions which make it certain that the Irish
Clans, as we know them in the Middle Ages, had
exactly the same title, but no other and no better, to
the possession of their country, than the title of any
other invading and conquering race in Europe, or
than the title of any yet later invaders who might
succeed in repeating the same process. Moreover,
the same evidence and the invariable results of the
like causes have convinced the same writers that the
numerical proportion of the subject races to those who
ruled over them came to be so large that, in fact, the
great bulk of those who would now be called the
people of Ireland, were reduced to serfdom — to the
condition, that is to say, of holding everything that
belonged to them on conditions of tribute, or of
service, or of both, together with the usual status of
serfs — that of being bound to the soil.
But this universal cause and origin of inequality in
the social and political condition of every country in
Europe, was reinforced in Ireland by the most elabo-
rate system of distinctions of rank and wealth between
individuals among the dominant race itself, which do
not seem to have had any parallel elsewhere. When we
CH. III.] IRISH GRADATIONS OF RANK. 85
try to follow Professor Sullivan, for example, through
his learned and careful analysis of the good old Irish
society before the pretended conquest, we find our-
selves lost in a perfect maze of names and designations
for the different grades into which men were divided,
and subdivided, under and above each other. Those
names are not only unpronounceable, and unspellable,
— which would be a small matter as the result of the
mere linguistic peculiarities of the Celtic tongue, —
but, what is much more remarkable, they are almost
as untranslatable. The English language and the
English mind, labour in vain to follow the number and
variety of degrees under which Irish human beings
could be separately ranged and ranked in a society
w^hich was even nominally one. But wherever a trans-
lation of those names can be effected through evident
points of comparison and of contact with the other
military societies of Mediaeval Europe, we find sub-
stantially the same elements out of which the system
of Feudalism arose — only with this difference, that
they were much less civilised — much less modified by
the influence of that splendid jurisprudence of the
Koman people, which even its barbarian conquerors had
learnt to respect, and the great monuments of which
had been largely translated into their own tongue.
The Celtic Clans in Ireland, cut off from this great
source and fountain of organic power, and a prey to
continual feuds and fightings, went on for centuries
developing nothing except all those more and more
86 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
savage conditions of society, which are the inevitable
result of everything depending, not only on the
sword, but on the sword in the hands of nobody
more important than petty Chiefs, and Kinglets.
And so it comes out, as the net result of Professor
Sullivan's account, that those Irishmen, who were
in the enjoyment of such political and social rights
as then existed at all in a so-called Irish Tribe,
were a mere fraction of the people, — all others
living in various degrees of subjection down to the
lowest serf. Thus Professor Sullivan's account of
the " Different Classes of Society in Ancient Ireland "
occupies some twenty pages of closely printed matter
devoted to explain the position of some nine classes,
of which only three " could be said to have political
rights, that is, a definite position in the tribe ; " *
and all these classes, without any exception, we are
expressly told, were equally under the protection,
as retainers, of the " Flaths," or Chiefs — the very
highest of these classes, who were called ** Aires,"
holding their lands of their lords in lieu of suit and
service rendered, and the payment of certain feudal
rents.f
It is true that these graded classes were not castes
in the Indian sense of that word : — that is to sav,
a man might rise from a lower to a higher class.
But it was equally true that he might fall from a
higher to a lower grade. And it is farther true that
* Introduction, p. 129. f It»id.
CH. III.] IRISH FORM OF WEALTH. 87
the process of falling was much more easy than the
process of rising. The system, besides being intensely
aristocratic, was almost as predominantly plutocratic.
A man's wealth almost alone determined his position.
And as there was, among the ancient Irish, practically
but one form of wealth — the primitive one of cattle —
the system may be described as a Cow-ocracy, or, as we
have seen, it was to some extent even actually called
a Bo-ocracy. There is no doubt as to the meanins: of
the class of nobles called Bo-aires in the old Irish
social classification ; because the very same word, with
the same root-meaning, survives to this day in Scot-
land, where it is the custom in some counties for one
man to hire a whole dairy of cows from another man
who owns them as a farmer, and to undertake the
marketing of the produce for a stipulated rent per
head of the cows. This man is locally called the
Bo-er, corrupted into **Booer," and it is possible,
perhaps probable, that the common w^ord for a Dutch
farmer, Boer, is nothing but another survival of the
same word. However this may be, the essential fact
as to the ancient Irish is that the social and economic,
and even legal condition of every man was mainly
determined by his wealth in cattle, and that the pre-
datory habits of the clans as against each other must
have made the tenure of rank, depending on this pro-
fession, a tenure of extreme precariousness. Accord-
ingly, Dr. Sullivan explains * that as a necessary
* Introduction.
88 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
consequence of continual ravages all over the country,
the constant gravitation of all men downwards from
comparative wealth as estimated in those days, to the
greatest poverty, was a never-ceasing force dragging
down all the subordinate classes into more and more
abject dependence on the Chiefs, who alone could
possibly protect them.
Such is the system which many Irish agitators, and
some deluded English politicians think, or pretend to
think, was a system of charming tribal sympathy and
equality, which " we " broke down by the introduction
of what they call feudalism into Ireland. Dr. Sullivan
and other really learned and honest Irish historians
are not responsible, except by occasional and incon-
sistent observations, for this gross delusion. He says
emphatically, " that the state of things in Ireland was
no exception to what conquest has always produced
among nations — privileged classes and serfs or slaves,
— may be inferred, not only from the number of dis-
tinct immigrations which our legendary history records,
but also from the complete development of a tribal
system, aristocratically organised^* Nor does he fail to
show how in Ireland, even in the oldest and most primi-
tive days before the succession to chiefry had become
hereditary, eligibility to the position of Chief was an
eligibility attached to birth. It was only out of a
limited number of families, to whom legend attributed
a divine origin, that the Chiefs could be elected ; " f
* latroductioD, p. 79. t Ibid., p. 100.
CH. in.] IRISH PROPERTY IN LAND. 89
and Dr. Sullivan goes the length of saying that,
" properly speaking, it was only the noble families
that were of the Clan — the tenants and retainers,
when not related by blood to the Chief, only helonged
to it'' Neither does Dr. Sullivan deny — on the con-
trary, he fully admits — that whatever original elements
of inequality existed in the very nature of the clan
system and organisation, were aggravated in Ireland
by its perpetual wars — during the course of which a
larger and a larger portion of the whole people did of
necessity fall lower and lower, from the enormous
losses of property which they entailed, and from the
increasing need which all men felt for placing them-
selves under complete conditions of service and
dependence.
But the most inveterate part of all this delusion
about the old " tribal " system of the Irish, and the
part of it which is most hugged and cherished, is that
which is identified with the delusion that private
property in land was unknown till " we " introduced
it at the supposed conquest along with the rest of the
" feudal system.'* Dr. Sullivan and Dr. O'Curry both
repudiate and expose this delusion — as well they may.
Some of the most patent facts in Irish history are suffi-
cient to contradict it absolutely. There is a handsome
volume called '* The National Manuscripts of Ireland,"
in which we find, in regular feudal form, three Charters
of land given by Irish Chiefs and Kings, and written
in the Erse or Gaelic language. One of these is a
90 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
Charter, — a grant of land — to a family of monks, given
ninety-two years before the invasion of Henry II.
And we know that in all countries the first granting of
land in the form of written Charters was always the
mere beginning of formal records, and not at all the
beginning of the transactions thus for the first time re-
corded. All the first Charters were, and purported to
be, a mere recognition, in a new form, of rights and
practices of immemorial usage and antiquity. As
regards Ireland, it is notorious that Dermot, King
of Leinster, who invited the first Anglo- Welsh ad-
venturers, granted to them land as part of his treaty-
obligations with them for their aid in recovering his
own possessions.
Irish writers, indeed, pretend to find fault with
this grant as having been beyond the right of any
Irish King. But in this contention, they found
only on theoretical and purely imaginary concep-
tions about ancient tribal rights in Ireland, which
are without any sound historical evidence, even as
regards the earliest times, and are wholly inapplic-
able to the usages which, in the twelfth century,
had been long established. The grants given by
Dermot to the first of the Irish Geraldines, were
obviously made in pursuance of those rights of dis-
posal over landed estates which had been exercised
and recorded, nearly a century before, in favour of
the Monks of Kells in Meath. Nothing can be more
definite, nothing can bear more clear evidence of
CH. in.] EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT BOOKS. 91
the transaction being one of a familiar kind, than
the grant by Dermot to Maurice Fitzgerald and
Kobert Fitzstefen of the town of Wexford " and two
cantreds of land in its neighbourhood." * More-
over, we know that these grants by Dermot were
afterwards recognised and sanctioned by the titular
King of all Ireland, who seems to have still re-
tained some shadow of a recognised authority in such
matters. Farther, we see incidentally, from these
authentic Irish Charters, that land had then commonly
become possessed by individuals, and had been bought
and sold for definite sums of money. In the Charter
of 1080, the title given by it to the grantees proves
by the careful record of the fact that it had been the
property of an individual, who sold it and had held it
"as his own lawful land." f
There is, moreover, much older written evidence
than this Gaelic Charter of 1080. The " Book of
Armagh" is one of the greatest treasures of Irish
Archseology. The writing in which we now have it
has been pretty clearly identified as belonging to
the ninth century, and it is known to have been
then only a copy of an older manuscript of the
seventh century. In any case, whatever its precise
date may have been, it contains much of the very
oldest contemporary evidence we possess on the con-
dition of Ireland in what has been called its " heroic
* " The Earls of Kildare," p. 5.
t "National Manuscripts of Ireland," part iv. p. 45, and No. lix.
92 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m.
age." Yet in this Book we have the following entry —
" Cummen and Brethan purchased Ochter-n-Achid,
with its appurtenances, both wood and plain, and
meadow, together with its habitation and its garden." *
This is clearly the purchase of an Estate precisely
like the transactions recorded in Charters of four
hundred years later.
But, in truth, such formal evidence is superfluous.
The exclusive right of use over certain areas of land
vested in groups of men, and within those groups, in
the individuals of which the groups are composed,
according to the different kinds of use prevalent at
the time and place, has been the universal claim and
possession of mankind, whether savage or civilised,
since the world began. For this right they have
always had to pay, often heavily, by some sacrifice
or some exertion. Under whatever name this pay-
ment passes, and to whatever kind of use it is
applied, — whether hunting, pastoral, or agricultural, —
the principle is the same in all cases. Some organised
defence of this right is a necessity of its enjoyment.
The imaginary condition of tribes, patriarchal and
pastoral, feeding their flocks upon a vacant land,
with **none to make them afraid," is a vision and a
dream. It certainly is as wide as the poles asunder
from the condition of the Irish Celts from the earliest
dawn either of history or tradition. The particular
organised system of defence upon which in Ireland
* Sullivan's Introduction, p. 89.
CH. m.] ALLEGED COMMUNAL OWNERSHIP. 93
every man depended for all he had, and for life
itself, was a system which made the heaviest demands
upon him. Unlimited exactions were the price of any
tolerable security. Constant liability to be " eaten
out of house and home" was the permanent and
paramount condition. With those who wielded this
supreme power, the supreme disposal of land neces-
sarily rested. This fact could not fail to be recog-
nised in the practical transactions of life. Accord-
ingly, those Irish historians who have been really
learned in the ancient lore of their country, have
felt that in the whole structure of Society as the
oldest literature and tradition present that structure
to their view, there are to be recognised all the same
essential conditions which marked corresponding stages
in the barbarism and in the civilisation of the other
northern races.
It is now thirty years since Dr. Sullivan wrote
his elaborate Introduction to the " Lectures " of Pro-
fessor O'Curry upon the ancient Irish. Since that
time much has been written and much has been
clearly ascertained, which is at irreconcilable vari-
ance with the prevalent but vague impression about
the communal ownership of land among the various
barbarian races who overwhelmed the Koman Empire.
Yet Dr. Sullivan, from his intimacy with the facts
of the earliest Irish history, has anticipated much
of the results which have now been well established.
In our own Island the researches of Mr. Seebohm,
94 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. in.
and more recently the nearly exhaustive investi-
gations of Mr. Fustel de Coulanges, in France, —
researches which extend over the whole of Europe, —
have made it evident that whatever may have been
the state of things in ages which are quite beyond
the reach of history — ages when all our ancestors
were nothing more than nomad families — it is certain
that the division of ownership into individual possession
had been established, and often highly developed, at
the earliest dates of which we have any certain know-
ledge. Moreover, the amended doctrine, now generally
accepted on this subject, reconciles to a great extent
the real facts with the mistaken interpretation which
had long been put upon them.
That mistake lay in confounding communal occu-
pation and communal methods of cultivation, with
communal ownership. But these are wholly different
things. Communal methods of cultivation, com-
munal pasturages, and communal customs, even as
to the little ploughing that was practised in the
wretched agriculture of the early Middle Ages, were
indeed almost universal. The individual property
of most men consisted chiefly of cattle, and these
grazed of necessity, when there were no enclosures,
in common with the cattle of all neighbours in
the same township. But this has nothing what-
ever to do with the question, whether all these men
did not owe their common riglit of pasturage-
common as among themselves, but exclusive as re-
CH. III.] DR. SULLIVAN ON OWNERSHIP. 95
gards all outsiders — to the grant or leave of some
common lord or supreme owner. It is these two ques-
tions which have been long confounded. Individual
ownership has been denied merely because there was
little or no individual pasturing, or even continued
individual cultivation. But on close investigation it
comes out clearly enough that in all cases every man
had to pay for his share in the common rights to some
chief, or lord, or king, some dues, or services which
were in the nature of rent, and which very often
represented a far larger share of the produce than is,
or can be paid, by a modern tenant farmer. The pay-
ment of these dues and services is a universal fact
in the earliest history of Ireland, They are inseparably
connected with the idea of that exclusive right of
disposal over certain areas of land, whether small or
large, in which individual ownership consists.
Accordingly, Dr. Sullivan says, " I believe that the
right of individuals, among the Irish and so-called
Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain, to the absolute pos-
session of part of the soil, rests upon as certain, perhaps
more certain, evidence, than among the Anglo-Saxon
and other Germanic peoples ; and farther, that, as might
have been anticipated among so closely allied branches
of the Aryans, the general principles of the laws
regulating the occupation of land were practically the
same among all the early northern nations, whether
called Celts or Germans." * " In Ireland," he farther
* Introduction, p. 138.
96 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
tells US, " the ownership of land constituted, as it does
now, the special characteristic of the *Flath' or lord."
That there always was and always must have been a
part — and a large part — of the territory of the whole
Sept not occupied by the Chief himself, with his more
immediate retainers, is true. But Dr. Sullivan tells
us that even over this part he held *' dominion," and
considering what "dominion "meant in those days, and
among a people so dependent on the supreme military
power — considering that all that we now think of as
the State was then concentrated in the Chief — con-
sidering, too, that tribute and rent seem to have
been a universal condition of life to all, — we can well
understand how little that distinction came to on
which antiquarian theorists lay so much stress. But
so far as the communal habits of pasturage and of
cultivation were concerned, they remained the same
in all cases. Under the man, for example, whose
lands were bought, and given to the Monastery of
Kells, — and of which it is expressly said in the Gaelic
Charter of 1080 that they were his " own lawful "
lands, — there may have been, and there no doubt were,
occupying tenants of the various grades into which
Irishmen were then divided, according to their birth
or their wealth in cows, and these must have lived
under the same communal usages, which were universal
in the Middle Ages.
But perhaps the most extraordinary delusion about
Irish land is that which dwells upon the idea of irre-
CH. 111.] IRREMOVABILITY WAS BONDAGE. 97
movability as attaching to such subordinate tenures
as were possessed. It is an idea, indeed, largely
founded on some very certain and very obvious facts.
And yet it is extraordinary because of the equally
obvious misinterpretation of those facts. It is true
that the poorer classes in Ireland, in the early Middle
Ages, were to a large extent stationary, because they
were to a corresponding extent in a condition of
bondage. They were bound to the soil, and bound
not less to render dues and services for the protection
which they enjoyed under a bondage which was often
voluntarily adopted. This was one great reason and
cause for the irremovability which has been made so
much of. But there was another reason and another
cause equally powerful, and even more wide in its
operation. In the military ages men were valued for
nothing except their hands and arms as usable in
fighting. There was generally no reason in the world
why any chief or landowner should prefer one man
to another, except for physical strength ; and some
average number of weaklings had to be counted on
in every population. In those days and under those
conditions of society, there was nothing whatever that
could induce a chief or great landowner to move
his poorer dependants. One man as well as another
could employ a serf to herd his 60ws. One man as
well as another could employ the same agency to take
his turn in such miserable ploughing as was then
known among the people. The great aim and object
98 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m.
«
of every territorial lord was not to have poor de-
pendants whom he could remove, but to have such
dependants who could not even remove themselves.
On the other hand, those dependants themselves had
nowhere to go to except to place themselves, as soon
as they could, under the same kind of service and
correlative protection under some other chief. Never-
theless it is a curious fact that even in ancient Ireland
there seems to have been a large class of what we
should now call agricultural, or rather pasturing
tenants, who were not only theoretically removable,
but were actually and systematically removed when-
ever, from any cause, it was convenient for the
owner or chief to change his tenants. This was the
very large and ever-increasing class of men who were
too poor to have any cows of their own. They hired
the cows as well as the land, and Dr. O'Curry tells us
that the term of their tenure was only seven years,
at the end of which term they had to give up both
the cows and the land — the cows in undiminished
number and quality.* In short, he says that within
the tribal territory then, just as within all national
territory now, " individuals held inclusive property in
land, and entered into relations with tenants for the
use of the land, and these again with under-tenants,
and so on, much as we see it in our own days." t
This testimony from one of the most learned writers
on the ancient constitution of Irish society, effectually
* O'Ourry's « Lectures," vol. ii. p. Si. f Ibid.
CH. III.] BONDAGE TO THE SOIL. 99
disposes of the vague declamatory language held by-
politicians on this subject. The truth is that in
Ireland the mass of the people were not better off, but
greatly worse, in all these economic conditions, than
any other people in Europe. In Ireland, because of
the long endurance of lawless conditions, the steps of
development were from a comparative personal free-
dom to more and more universal subordination and
relative servitude. The wonderful thing about popular
Irish oratory upon the subject in modern times, is
that the best Irish historians have here also, as in
other cases, seen and stated clearly enough the facts
which demonstrate the absurdity of transferring the
language and ideas of the nineteenth, or even of the
seventeenth century, to the conditions of any of the
centuries between the Christian era and the Norman
invasion. Thus Dr. Sullivan very significantly says
that the irremovability of the poorer classes from the
home of their birth or of their enlistment, and even of
classes far above the poorest, was the inevitable result
of the immediate interest which the Chiefs had in keep-
ing up their military force. " Adscription to the Glebe,"
he says, " only gradually grew up in Europe from the
difficulty the lords experienced in keeping tenants." *
In the rest of Europe, indeed, in proportion as ancient
towns and municipalities revived, or were anew created,
freemen might be easily tempted to move away from
the territory of oppressive lords. In Ireland, there
* Introduction, p. 114.
100 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
was no such resource. But on the other hand the
universal prevalence of imminent danger to life and
to such property as existed, made the condition of
removability from the soil as little coveted on the one
side, as it would have been thought of on the other.
" All freemen," says Dr. Sullivan, " in the olden time
in Ireland, not even excepting the privileged crafts,
such as goldsmith, blacksmith, and some others, as
well as professional classes and Bo-aires (Cow-owners),
were retainers of the Chiefs or Lords." * Theoreti-
cally, indeed, " freemen " were free : but even they
had the conditions of dependence imposed upon them
by the circumstances of society in Ireland during all
the centuries of its early history. For it cannot be
too emphatically repeated that the historical evidence
for the perfect continuity of its miserable history
from the earliest times, is as overwhelming as it is
authentic. If the " Annals of the Four Masters " stood
alone, they would be enough to prove the facts. But
these Annals do not stand alone. In the "Book of
Leinster " — another of the most ancient Gaelic Manu-
scripts of Ireland, transcribed from much older docu-
ments in the twelfth century, we have a collection
of the antique historic tribes of the Irish Celts.
They go back to the Christian era. They have been
classified under the following heads — the titles of
which tell their own tale : — " Destructions," " Cattle-
Spoils," " Wooings," " Battles," *' Incidents of Caves,"
* Introduction, p. 110.
CH. III.] REMOVABILITY WAS PERSONAL FREEDOM. 101
" Voyages and Navigations," " Tragedies and Death
Feasts," " Sieges," " Adventures," " Elopements,"
*' Slaughters," " Expeditions," " Progresses," and
" Conflagrations." * Such was the whole history of
Ireland for twelve centuries and a half before the
Normans came, and such it continued to be with little
or no mitigation for three or four centuries later — until
the country was at last really conquered, and the Irish
were admitted to the same external influences to which
all other European nations owe their final civilisation.
To speak of irremovability from the soil, as it
existed in Ireland, as a boon to the people, or as an
indication of bappy conditions which were subsequently
lost, is one of the strangest misconceptions which has
ever arisen, even from that most fertile source of con-
fusion — the transfer of words and phrases from modern
times to au older world in which they had a very
different significance. The more clearly Irish orators
can prove the late date down to which the idea and
the practice of irremovability attached to the poorer
classes in Ireland, the more clearly they will prove the
verv late date at which two of the first conditions of
civilisation were established in their country. The
first of these two conditions is the recognition of
personal freedom as regarded military services. The
second is the recognition of personal merit as regards
the pursuits of industry. In the battles of spears and
shields, irremovability was the badge of bondage. In
* " National Manuscripts of Ireland," part ii. p. 30.
102 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
agriculture, it was the badge of stagnation and of the
absence of all improvement. There is no evidence,
however, that in this matter the Norman invasion did
either good or harm. In so far as a new element of
strength was added to Irish chiefry, it did probably
tend to improvement, because each chief in proportion
to his strength was better able to defend his own
territory, and so to afford some better opportunity to
such settlers as may have introduced some elements
of knowledge and skill into the archaic agriculture of
Ireland. But not much stress can be laid on this —
because even in England, in those ages, both pastoral
and agricultural industry were in a very rude stage.
All that can be said with certainty is that nothing
was made worse, and some things must, of necessity,
have been made a great deal better.
The moment we come to examine any of the
specific cases in which the English G-overnment is said
to have been the cause of any injury to the condition
of the people, as compared with their former state,
the accusation breaks down completely. There is one
case in which this charge has the support of Dr.
Sullivan, which is an excellent example. It is a
charge founded on the fact that the English law never
recognised the archaic usages of succession to property
in Ireland, which were akin to the old usage of Gavel-
kind in Kent. Yet Dr. Sullivan himself, as usual,
supplies all the facts, and even a good many of the
arguments, which prove that the Irish usages, in this
CH. III.] LAWS OF SUCCESSION. 103
matter, were in those ages always injurious to the
people amongst whom they had become established,
and were especially injurious in Ireland. In very
rude and prehistoric conditions of society, such as
those which prevailed among the northern nations
before their great migrations, — wlien no property
existed except some cattle, household utensils, and
weapons of war, — the subdivision of such property in-
discriminately, or with complicated discriminations,
which were perhaps worse, might possibly be com-
paratively harmless. Yet Dr. Sullivan explains very
truly that even then the system could only be worked
by a resort to that extensive emigration in quest of
new settlements which was the one great relief, in those
times, to hunger and poverty at home. He explains how,
as regards the Teutonic tribes, upon the Continent,
the inconveniences of increasing subdivision were early
arrested by the adoption of primogeniture. He quotes
the opinion of a distinguished writer on the Anglo-
Saxons, who thinks that the long survival of the ruder
custom among them, had so weakening an effect that
it facilitated their conquest by the Normans.* He
confesses that we only know the Irish custom in a
much more archaic form than even among the kindred
races, and he gives such an account of it in detail as
to show at a glance how incompatible it must have
been with any progress in wealth. But in his can-
dour as an historian he goes farther than this. He
* Introduction, p. 179.
104 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. in.
frequently admits that " the custom of gavelkind, by
the great subdivision of property which it effected,
tended to deprive the majority of freemen of all
political rights under a constitution where property
was an essential element of political power." *
Yet in spite of these truthful representations of the
historian, the feelings of the Irish sentimentalist prevail
again ; and in referring to the fact that English
law never did, as indeed it never could, recognise
those Irish usages, and, in 1605, did at last expressly
repudiate them, — he breaks out into the usual and most
illogical declamation — averring that this repudiation
"more than any other measure, not excepting the
repeated confiscations, injured the country, and gave
rise to most of the present evils of the Irish law
system." f Wonderful as this sentence is in contrast
with what has gone before, it is perhaps even more
curious in connection with some additional historical
facts which he adds in the same paragraph. One of
these is this emphatic testimony to the weakening
and impoverishing effect of the Irish gavelkind —
that when the Protestant Parliament was inventing
weapons of offence against the Roman Catholics, they
pulled this most effective of all weapons out of the
old Irish armoury, and enacted, as one of the Penal
Laws, that the Estates of all Eoman Catholics should
be made subject to the old Irish custom of Gavelkind
for the very purpose of preventing their acquiring
* IntroductioD, p. 183. f Ibid., p. 184.
CH. m.] INTEREST OF POORER CLASSES. 105
wealth, or founding families. Another fact Dr.
Sullivan records in the same connection, with
apparently an equal blindness to its significance —
namely this — that in Wales also, as well as in Kent,
the custom of Gavelkind was abolished by Statute
under Henry VIII. ; and he adds this significant
observation : " But the rights of the tenants do
not appear to have been injured by the new legisla-
tion." Of course not. It was not better, but a great
deal worse for the poorer classes, who were only
tenants, to be placed under petty landlords rather than
under greater landlords. The uncertain exactions,
which were the great curse of Ireland, were of neces-
sity more oppressive and ruinous to the mass of the
population in proportion to the weakness of their
landlords — to their poverty — to their inability to
defend their dependants against the raids of enemies,
and to their own dependence upon, and need of
exhausting contributions.
We could have no better example than this of the
inveterate unreasonableness of even the best Irishmen
in ascribing all the evils of their country to external
influences and causes, and of their blindness to those
which were of purely native origin. Dr. Sullivan is
no mere declaimer — no mere mob-orator — no mere
unscrupulous or passionate party leader. As an
historian he is in the highest degree capable, exact,
and honest. He gives us all the facts. He tells
us of the custom of inheritance to property — that
106 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi.
known as Gavelkind — which every other European
race abandoned as soon as a settled civilisation
began to be established. He shows how it operated
in weakening the social and political organisation
wherever it was suffered to remain. He tells us
how it was deliberately abolished, where it still
lingered in England, at the request of those who were
most immediately affected by it. He tells us how it
was at the same time abolished universally in Wales,
and specially notes that the abolition of it had no
injurious effects on the condition of the people.
Passing to his own country, he shows how disastrous
its operation had been there in breaking down all
natural barriers against the oppression of arbitrary
power, and reducing the people to one dead level of
helpless poverty and dependence. He tells us that
those effects were so thoroughly recognised and known
that the revival of this ruinous custom and its special
application to Koman Catholics was one of the sources
of the Penal Laws. And yet in the face of all these
facts and inevitable inferences, he suddenly turns
round in a passing observation to blame England for
not having kept up this custom, so penal in its effects
against the whole people of Ireland.
In comparison with this charge against England,
O'Connell's contradictory charge is reasonableness
itself, — the charge, namely, that she had not, cen-
turies before, applied to Ireland the benefits of her
own higher law and civilisation. And although, for
CH. III.] EVILS OF NATIVE CUSTOMS. 107
other reasons already stated here, this accusation can
be repelled, yet as regards this particular Irish custom
of succession it is true that when England did at last,
at the close of the sixteenth and beginning of the
seventeenth century, really conquer, and begin to
govern Ireland, on the principles recommended by
O'Connell, her statesmen saw and denounced this
old native custom as one of the main causes of
Irish poverty and of Irish stagnation. Sir John
Davies, in his celebrated Keport, declared it to have
been a custom which would have been enough to
ruin Hell, if it had been established in the kingdom
of Beelzebub. And it is a curious fact that all indi-
vidual Irishmen whose interests or whose intelligence
had led them to look at this, and other closely related
customs of the country in respect to property, had
long been unanimous in their desire to escape from
the whole system. Especially did the Irish eccle-
siastics of all divisions of the Church, whether
Celtic or Latin, bear unconscious but striking tes-
timony to their sense of the ruinous character of all
the native customs, and invariably made a point in all
the charters of land which they accepted to stipulate
expressly that the land was to be held free from all
the " evil customs of the Irish " — or as it was tersely
described in Latin, "absque omnibus malis consue-
tudinibus Hibernicis."
If Irishmen in our day have no other accusation
to make against England than that she would not
108 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m.
sanction those " evil customs " when she did get
the power of government into her own hands, we
may well be satisfied with the result, and may turn
with good hope to the work of dealing with the
extraordinary delusion of men, even so eminent as
Dr. Sullivan — that what are called the evils of the
Irish " land system " have had any connection
whatever with the abolition of customs which
have been admitted by Irishmen themselves, in so
many forms of action and confession, to have been
barbarising and ruinous in their effects. To this
subject I shall return — in thorough agreement with
O'Connell's opposite contention — merely observing
here that Mr. Gladstone has adopted the easy method
of all declaimers — that of denouncing England for
having introduced " foreign " and alien laws, without
any attempt to prove or to trace any rational con-
nection between the alleged cause and the effects. In
the mean time, and before returning to this subject,
I claim to have established the fact that, so far as
concerns the domestic government and social condition
of the Irish people, the great operative causes con-
tinued to be, after the pretended conquest seven
hundred years ago, precisely what they had been for
twelve centuries before that date — causes deeply seated
in the customs, manners, and political divisions of the
Celtic Clans, and that, so far as these causes are con-
cerned, they have nobody to blame but themselves,
and these outward circumstances of geographical posi-
CH. III.] IRISH INCONSISTENCY. 109
«
tion whicli isolated them from tlie main stream of
European civilisation, of race-mixtures, and of con-
quest. That every people should be governed ac-
cording to its own ancient usages and customs is a
general proposition which may be plausible. That all
old usages and customs are good for the people
amongst whom they have come to be established,
considering the corruption of mankind, and the way
in which man has tortured himself all over the world,
is a proposition that is, on the face of it, absurd. That
the very same Irishmen who admit the disastrous
effects of the old customs of their country, should
nevertheless ascribe all later evils to the conduct of
England in not upholding them — this is an exhibition
of inconsistency which may be interesting and even
pathetic when we trace it to the national influence of
a vague patriotic sentiment. But when we find this
sentimental nonsense passionately expressed by Eng-
lish politicians, who have no similar excuse, it is high
time to expose its true character.
110 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
CHAPTEE ly.
HISTORY CONTINUED FROM A.D. 1172 TO THE END OF
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
But now at last we come to a cause of Ireland's
later woes which does stand in close connection with
the events of 1172. But it is a close connection
forged mainly — in one aspect forged entirely — by Irish
hands. That connection is simply this — that, from
the moment that the King of England became the
Feudal "Lord of Ireland," all his enemies were
tempted to attack him on his Irish side. If the Irish
had been loyal to their Liege, according to the code
of honour and obligation admitted in that relation and
in those ages, this temptation on the part of the
enemies of England would have done no harm to
Ireland. The Island was practically inaccessible from
the European continent; and Ireland would have
remained far more unconquerable by the enemies of
the King of England than she was by that King
himself. Obviously therefore the danger could only
arise out of the complicity of the Irish, or of some
CH. rv'.J RIGHT OF ENGLAND. Ill
considerable part of them, with the enemies of the
Sovereign to whom they owed allegiance. Or if we
choose to say that it is absurd to claim as against the
Irish any duty of allegiance, even although they had
accepted it and sworn to it ; — if we choose to say that
— looking to the habits of those military ages — the
Irish had a right to throw off their allegiance if and
whenever they could, and to lend themselves to the
enemies of their acknowledged King, — even thus, the
case remains the same. There is much to be said for
this view. Those were not the days of Peace
Societies, and Courts of Arbitration. Everything,
all over the world, hung upon the sword. But if this
is the view taken, it must be taken consistently. If
the Irish had a right to ally themselves with the
enemies of England, at least England had the
corresponding right to do her very best to defeat and
punish all such alliances. Nor in the light of history
and of reason as applied to all the results to civilisa-
tion which were involved, can it be doubted for a
moment that this was, on the part of England, as
much a duty as it was a necessity and a right. She
bore in her hands a great future for mankind in
government and law. The Irish bore in their hands
no interest whatever of this kind — so much so that
even their greatest leading advocate in our own time,
Daniel O'Connell, could say nothing worse of England
than that she had not enforced her own system of
jurisprudence at a time when she could not possibly
112 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
effect any such design, I lay stress on this matter
here, because, as we shall see, it is the key to the whole
history of the relations between England and Ireland
from the twelfth century down to the middle of the
eighteenth — from 1172 to 1750. It is even the key to
the traditions, as well as to the thoughts, and feelings,
and anticipations which affect, and legitimately affect
us still.
The first occasion on which this great cause and
source of evil is seen working is an occasion typical
of all its worst effects. For nearly a century and
a half after Henry II. had received the homage of the
Irish Chiefs, the five succeeding Kings of England had
no enemy who was in a position to attack them
through Ireland. On the contrary, England was in
a position to use the Irish for her own aggressive
purposes. The Anglo-Norman element, both fresh
settlers and old Ersefied settlers, was on the whole
gaining ground in Ireland by reason of its inherent
superiority in many ways. The native Irish were
always ready to lend themselves to any fighting.
The English Kings continually called on the Irish
Barons for aids and military services in all their
foreign wars.* And so it happened that when
Edward I. undertook the conquest of Scotland he was
able to draw upon Ireland for a very large contingent
to his army. No less than ten thousand foot, besides
cavalry, was his summons in 1295. Such a force
* Richey's " Short History," p. 181.
CH. IV.] IRISH ANALOGY IN SCOTLAND. 113
could not be raised out of the English Settlers alone,
who must have themselves relied largely on their
native Irish retainers. The Irish of both breeds did
their very best to rivet the yoke of England on
the rising kingdom which had been established in
Scotland by the happy union and common allegiance
of both the Celtic and Teutonic races there.
When, after Edward's death, his feebler son tried to
complete his father's enterprise, the same combination
defeated him in the signal overthrow of Bannockburn,
in 1312. And it is a curious and significant indication
of the perfect consciousness of both kingdoms as to the
weakest points in their respective armours, that when
peace was made on the footing of the independence
of Scotland being recognised, both Sovereigns pledged
themselves not to assail, or to intrigue against each
other through alliance with the Celtic Clans. For
England these were represented by Ireland taken as
a whole. For Scotland they were represented by
the Hebridean Islanders. And so accordingly, the
moment quarrels and war broke out again, the English
monarchy and nation was at once attacked through
Ireland. The Irish themselves were excited by the
exhibition of English weakness. The Scots were
excited by the possibility of wresting from their old
enemy that country which had helped him to subdue
them. The Scoto-Norman knights, one of whom
had become King of Scotland, were not less excited
by the hope of founding a New Kingdom in the
I
114 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
West. But there was one fatal flaw in this con-
spiracy against England. And it was a flaw due to
the ineradicable eflects of the old Irish character.
Scotland had won her independence by a thorough
and hearty union between the strongest and best
of her many races, and by the noble ambition of
setting up a central and a civilised government. The
Irish proceeded, as they had always done, by falling
back upon racial animosities, and a fierce desire to
expel the very best of the materials out of which
alone they could build up a civilised government.
Dr. Kichey tells us that the native Irish chieftains
entered into their agreement with King Bobert Bruce
for the purpose "of expelling the English;" and in
their long letter to the Pope they expressly mentioned
the Celtic blood of Edward Bruce as the natural
explanation of their choice. They describe King
Bobert as "a descendant of some of the most noble
of our own ancestors." * If we are to allow ourselves
to be irrationally afiected in our readings and judg-
ments of history, by either racial, family, or even the
lower forms of national sentiment, I should heartily
sympathise with the famous attempt of Edward Bruce
to do in Ireland a work at least superficially like the
great work his brother had done in Scotland. Scotch-
men who, like myself, have the same special share
that he had in the ancient Celtic blood of the Irish
Scoti — who admire as we all do the heroic character
* « Short History," p. 195.
CH. IV.] SCOTS INVASION OF IRELAND. 115
of " The Bruce '* — who are disposed to remember with
resentment the ready help which Irishmen then gave,
and often have since given, to the enemies of Scottish
liberty, — we might be tempted to cherish a natural
sympathy with the invasion of Ireland by the Bruces
in 1315. But for those who look in History, above all
things, for the steps of human progress, and who
desire to know the causes of its arrestment or decline,
it is impossible to be guided by such childish sym-
pathies. It is, indeed, as idle to blame the Scottish
King, as to condemn the Irish chiefs and clans. If
indeed we were to carry the judgments of our own
time back into the history of the past, it would be
impossible not to denounce the war that followed as
having been, on the part of the Irish, a war quite as
wicked as it was disastrous to themselves. At the
same time it must be observed that although it must
be so judged as regards the Irish, it is impossible to
deny that King Eobert the Bruce had a legitimate
cause of war even according to the most civilised
rules of modern times. Dr. Richey very fairly says
that one object he must have aimed at was to cut
off the supplies of men on which England depended
for a large part of the forces with which she fought
against the Scotch. The real truth, however, is
that to blame Irishmen in the fourteenth century
for rebelling against their Liege Lord, or for fighting
against him with anybody or for anything, would be
as absurd as to blame one gamecock for flying at
116 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
another, and inflicting the most bloody injuries upon
him.
Let us therefore put praise and blame equally out
of the question on both sides, and look at the matter
simply as one of cause and of effect. Whatever
defence or justification may be pleaded for either the
Irish or for the Scotch, it is certain that no defence or
justification is needed for the English. It cannot be
denied that England was not only entitled but bound
to fight with every weapon she could employ against
the setting up of a new and hostile kingdom on her
flanks — a kingdom to be founded on the defeat and
expulsion of her own sons, who had been settled in
Ireland for a century and a half, and held their
possessions by the same title as the Irish themselves : —
a kingdom which would be animated by the fiercest
hostility against herself, and under the sway of a
family which had proved its formidable military
genius. The rout of a great English army at Ban-
nockburn only three years before had made as deep
an impression upon the English as upon the Irish
mind. And the reality of the danger as it must have
appeared to Edward II. may be measured by the fact
that only a few years later King Eobert the Bruce
did actually repeat the process, not in Scotland,
but in England itself. At Bannockburn it could at
least be said that Bruce had the advantage of a posi-
tion chosen by himself, and one which hampered the
deployment of so great an army as that of Edward.
CH. IV.] DEVASTATION OF IRELAND. 117
But a few years later all those advantages were on
his own side, when in the heart of a great English
province he awaited the attack of King Kobert at
Byland, in the heart of Yorkshire. Yet there again
he was disastrously defeated by the Scots.
Although this event was still future when the in-
vasion of Ireland took place, the very possibility of
such a military power as the Scotch had already shown,
being made the basis of a hostile kingdom in Ireland,
must have appeared at that time a very formidable
danger. It was therefore a necessity of life for England
to put down the Irish insurrection, and the Irish
must have known it to be so. The disastrous results
must consequently be laid entirely on them. All
historians are agreed that the two years of war
during which the Scotch and native Irish fought
a desperate and devastating war with England on
the soil of Ireland, was a great and terrible epoch
in the miseries of that country. The war lasted no
less than three years and five months — from May 25,
1315, till October 5, 1318, when Edward Bruce was
killed in the battle of Dundalk. And as during all
this time the contest was waged over a great part of
Ireland, as far south as Limerick, with all the ferocity
and all the devastating practices of the Irish tribal
wars themselves, it may be easily conceived what a
terrible effect it must have had upon the country and
upon the people. An eminent Irish authority is
quoted by Dr. Eichey, with full adoption, as saying,
118 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
that the barbarism and weakness of Ireland during:
the rest of that century, and the whole of the succeed-
ing century, — that is to say, for one hundred and
seventy years, from 1315 to 1499, — were due by con-
sequences, direct or indirect, to the Scotch invasion
brought about expressly by Irish invitation. And one
of the indirect consequences is explained to have been
simply that aggravation, or at least continuance of
that very old source of Irish woes, the increasingly
arbitrary power over all below them which wars
always do and always must place in the hands of
those who retain any power at all.*
Now let us note in passing what the result of these
acknowledged facts is upon the inflated fiction, which
is so ignorantly but so constantly repeated about the
seven hundred years of English Government in Ire-
land. We have before seen it to be admitted that
there was no real Conquest of Ireland till the begin-
ning of the seventeenth century — or the accession of
James I. to the English throne in 1603. Bat real
responsibility begins only with real power. The whole
interval between the date of the nominal Conquest in
1172 and the real subjugation about 1603 is four
hundred and thirty-one years. Of this we have now
seen that, during the period up to the Scotch invasion,
or one hundred and forty-five years, the condition of
Ireland was determined by a mere prolongation of
her own indigenous customs, against which England
* " Short History," pp. 198, 199.
CH. IV.] LASTING RUIN. 119
had no means whatever in her hands to struggle with
success. Next we have seen it acknowledged by Irish
historians that after the Scotch invasion, for another
period of one hundred and seventy years — down to
the year 1500 — her condition was mainly determined
by the effects of that war which the native Irish had
entirely brought upon themselves. These two periods
make together three hundred and fifteen years out of
the whole four hundred and thirty-one years before
the real Conquest came — thus leaving only a little
over one hundred years to be still accounted for, as
regards the internal condition of Ireland, before the
real Conquest was effected, and the real responsibility
began. This makes a large hole in the clap-trap
seven hundred years — reducing it from the "seven
centuries " to little more than three hundred years —
even if we had not one word more to say upon the
subject.
But we have a great deal more to say. In the first
place, before parting with — to use a very Irish phrase
— the long reign of anarchy for three hundred and
fifteen years from the nominal Conquest down to the
end of the fifteenth century, we must go back upon
some instructive incidents which demonstrate the
injustice and inconsistency of the chief charges laid
against England by many Irishmen, and by the new
school of English declaimers. The agents for the
prosecution against England must make up their
minds as to which of the two opposite and contra-
120 IRISH NATIONALISM. [oh. iv.
dictory pleas they intend to urge — that of O'Connell,
or that of a host of other Irishmen, now backed by Mr.
Gladstone. Have we to defend England against the
charge of trying cruelly to force "foreign" and un-
suitable laws upon a people who had happier laws and
customs of their own ; or, on the contrary, against the
accusation which charges her with having refused to
Irishmen the protection and advantages which English
law would have afforded against their own ruinous and
desolating usages ? I have already pointed out that
this last form of the attack is by far the nearest to the
truth, inasmuch as it at least admits that most im-
portant portion of the truth which recognizes the
indisputable evidence we possess against the Irish
customs. I have also pointed out that, with the true
instinct of all declamatory rhetoricians as to dangerous
admissions, Mr. Gladstone takes the opposite line of
attack. But the really instructive exhibition is to see
one and the same writer adopting both charges— the
one when he is engaged in responsible narrative, or in
deliberate reasoning, and the other when he makes pass-
ing comments under the influence of a local sentiment.
Such is the exhibition which we have in that ex-
cellent Irish historian. Dr. Eichey, in connection with
an event which happened fifteen years after the defeat
and death of Edward Bruce, when the English King
— that great sovereign, Edward III. — had to face
the utter disorganisation and ruin into which the
Scotch invasion had thrown the whole miserable
CH ivj ENGLISH LAW IN IRELAND. 121
framework of Irish society. The Norman colonists —
the " degenerate English," as Dr. Richey himself calls
them — had been almost reduced and degraded into the
condition of the Irish Clans. They were fighting with
each other fiercely. The old Irish Septs were recover-
ing strength only to use it as before. In 1329 retali-
ating massacres and murders were the order of the
day. At last England was aroused to the dreadful
condition of the country — dreadful to the Irish of all
races, and shameful to England, in so far — but only
so far — as she had any power to effect a reform. And
so she turned to that only remedy, — which Daniel
O'Connell blamed her for not having adopted from the
beginning, — the remedy of applying the principles
of English law at once to the whole of Ireland. The
odious distinction of races was, as far as possible, to be
abolished. Accordingly, in 1331, Acts were passed in
England providing that one and the same law should
be applicable to both English and Irish. Such
elementary principles as the keeping of good faith in
truces between combatants received statutory embodi-
ment. No landowner was to keep bands of armed
men on his estates other than were needed for mere
self-defence. The barons were to reside upon their
lands. In short, England tried to do what was
obviously needed to lay even the first foundations of
a civilised government in Ireland. The righteousness
of that policy is not denied. The trueness of aim
with which, so far as it went, that policy struck at the
122 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. iv.
root-evils of Ireland for a thousand years, is not
denied. Yet Dr. Richey allows himself to describe the
new measures thus : — " The policy of those ordinances
may be called Imperialism. They attempted to
establish English ideas and laws among a totally
dissimilar people — to bring about a unity of the
two countries by extending and enforcing in Ire-
land, English law and government."* A dissimilar
people ! Yes — fortunately for the world. But surely
to make them " similar " in the elementary ideas of
civilisation was the one great work to be done.
Dr. Richey, however, soon recovers himself from this
relapse into nonsense. He proceeds to say what is
quite true, that this policy could only be successful
if founded on, and enforced by effective conquest.
Was this physically possible at that time, and with
the resources at the disposal of the English sovereign ?
Let us look at the event that followed.
Within five years of the Statutes which, if obeyed,
would have effected a great reform, Edward III.
found that Irish disorganisation had gone too far to
encourage the faintest hope that the country could
be reclaimed by mere authority not enforced by
arms. One of the greatest of the Norman Feuda-
tories, who had remained loyal to the English
Crown, w^as murdered, and his great remains of
power were usurped by relatives who ostentatiously
renounced the hereditary policy of their House,
* " Short History," p. 201.
CH. IV.] STATUTES OF KILKENNY. 123
and, as the symbol of new enmity, threw off their
English dress, and donned habiliments of the Irish
" saffron." Edward sent his son Lionel to Ireland to
re-establish, as far as was possible, the authority of the
Crown over at least some remnant of the kingdom.
Then followed, in 1361, the famous " Statutes of Kil-
kenny," passed by an Irish Parliament, under the
influence of the Prince, the whole object of which
was to leave the native Irish to themselves, and to
limit the authority of the English law to that small
area of country, which was still inhabited by Anglo-
Normans, loyal, in the main, to the English monarchy.
No part of Irish history has been more obscured and
more grossly misrepresented than this episode. In-
flated fable has been riotous and rampant on the
subject of the Statutes of Kilkenny. Plowden, one
of the most prejudiced and clamorous of Irish
writers, breaks out in the most violent language
against the policy of "antipathy, hatred, and
revenge " which animated the code.
There 'seems, indeed, to have been some unusual
excuse for this ignorant language in the fact that the
text of the Statutes was hidden away and lost, and
only recovered so late as 1843. Dr. Kichey analyses
the clauses or sections, as now known, with perfect
candour, and with this remarkable result — that he
not only excuses, but he defends them all, and
actually praises some. The new Statutes do, indeed,
denounce the old Irish customs as the cause and source
124 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
of the fatal degradation of tlie English settlers ; and
in this they did but speak the words of truth and
soberness. Bat the prohibitions of the Statutes against
Irish customs were confined to those whose duty
it was to maintain nobler laws against the invasion of
surrounding savagery. " A fair analysis of the Act,"
says Dr. Eichey, " leads to the conclusion that the
English Government, at this time, abandoned the
prospect of reducing to obedience the Irish and the
degenerate English, and, adopting a policy purely
defensive, sought merely to preserve in allegiance to
the English Crown the miserable remains of the Irish
Kingdom." * As usual, the one only substantial fault,
which Dr. Eichey finds with England, is her want of
power or energy to enforce her wise and civilising
policy. " The policy of the Act, if steadily carried
out, might have been advantageous to botli the English
and Irish in Ireland, but it required a vigorous execu-
tive." This is true ; and it brings us back again to the
truth implied in O'ConnelFs reproach to England that
she did not conquer Ireland more ejSectually, and give
it all the blessings of English law.
But now let us see what was the next remarkable
step taken in this strange and monotonous history of
the effect of savage customs entrenched behind an
inaccessible geography. If indeed we could legiti-
mately judge of the conduct of men in the fourteenth
century by the principles both of duty and of policy,
* " Short History," p. 214.
CH. IV.] ENGLISH ACTION DIVERTED. 125
which would be acknowledged without difficulty or doubt
in the nineteenth, the blame to be cast on English
Sovereigns for several generations would be heavy
indeed, not specially or alone in respect to Ireland,
but quite as much in respect to England and Europe
generally. Their long, bloody, and exhausting wars
to establish a separate kingdom in France were, in
the light of our day, not only useless, but mischievous
and even wicked. If they had only spent one-half the
energy, thus worse than wasted, in completing the
civilisation of their own country, and in effectually
establishing their authority over Ireland as an integral
part of their dominions, the gain to themselves, and so
far as we can see, to us even now, would have been
untold. But such judgments and speculations are
worse than idle — unless, indeed, we take them as
lessons in the mysterious course of human follies
since the world began. But it is a curious incident
in this connection that it is said to have been due to
this very ambition of English Kings to become great
continental potentates, that Kichard II. was at last
induced to make no less than two considerable efforts
to conquer and to civilise Ireland. The first was in
1394 ; the second in 1399, the last of his reign. This
may be a bit of gossip from the Middle Ages — but it
was believed by Sir John Davies, early in the seven-
teenth century, and it is adopted by Dr. Kichey as if
it were true, — that Eichard had hoped and intrigued
to be elected Emperor, as successor of Charlemagne,
126 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
and of the far-off Emperors of the Western World.
His pretensions are said to have been ridiculed, and
one of the jibes against him was that he could not
even hold his own against the wild tribes of Ireland.
This may or may not be true. If it was true, it is the
earliest specimen we have got of that element in our
controversy with Ireland on which Mr. Griadstone has
often dwelt effusively — namely, the vague impressions
of foreign spectators. In this case, they seem to have
been a great deal more intelligent than Mr. Gladstone's
modern friends; because they do not seem to have
blamed Kichard or his predecessors for having asserted
a sovereignty over Ireland, but, on the contrary, for
not having made that sovereignty practical and effective.
However this may be, another motive assigned by other
Historians is, perhaps, more probable — namely this,
that the small tribute of revenue which had ever been
reaped from the Irish kingdom had now been stopped.
And so followed one of those expeditions to Ireland
which prove how really great, if not insuperable, were
the difiSculties of a mediaeval sovereign in effecting
such a lasting and effectual conquest as could alone
be of the least use in Ireland. The expedition of
Richard II., in 1394, was almost an exact repetition
of the original invasion of Henry II., two hundred
and twenty-two years before. He went with great
pomp, and a formidable feudal array — four thousand
men in armour, and no less than thirty thousand
archers. Whereupon the Celtic Chiefs, exactly as
CH. IV.] EXPEDITION OF RICHARD II. 127
they had done with Henry II., flocked to Dublin,
and, in a " humble and solemn manner," did homage
to their Liege Lord, and swore fidelity. The evideiwe
appears to be that there was not a chieftain or lord of
an Irish Sept but submitted himself in one form or other.
But, just as before, the moment Kichard's back was
turned they all returned to their old life, and to their
inveterate predatory habits— specially directed against
the newly established "Pale.'' And so, enraged by
this conduct, the unfortunate Kichard again collected
his army, and, in the last year of his reign, re-landed
in Ireland. In a very short campaign against one of
his sworn Anglo-Irish Yassals, he was victorious — of
course. But the Irish had only to retreat into their
bogs and forests, drive away their cattle, and leave the
invading army to be starved. Such, accordingly, seems
to have been very nearly the fate of Kichard's arma-
ment, which was only saved by the timely arrival of
the English transports to take them home.
This brings us to the close of the second out of the
four centuries — the fourteenth— which elapsed before
that complete conquest of Ireland which could alone
attach any real responsibility to England. We have
seen how false it is that the government of the country
was in her hands even in " the last resort." We have
seen how false it is that she had intentionally tried to
withhold the benefits of English law from Ireland ; we
have seen how equally false it is that the Irish, as a
people or a nation, were willing to accept it at any
/
128 / IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
time. We have seen that the miserable condition of
the/country was the natural and inevitable result of
Ii^sh habits and Irish conduct in each conjuncture
"of those times. Two centuries more, out of the four
we have still to account for — the fifteenth and the
sixteenth — remain to be considered ; and never has the
perfect continuity of great historical causes been more
signally displayed. There is no other change whatever
than such as was due to the same identical causes —
only operating with fresh intensity because of addi-
tional circumstances of outward provocation. Human
history in this way is often very like a pendulum,
which may swing a long time with equal beat ; but if
any synchronous movement reaches it from outside,
then the swing will rapidly become excessive, and
may break all bounds imposed by the mechanism
which contains it.
During the whole of the fifteenth century England
was so situated as to leave her no time to deal seriously
with the condition of Ireland. Her foreign wars in
France, and her civil wars of the Koses, due to a dis-
puted succession to the throne, made it impossible for
her to govern Ireland even in " the last resort." We
have seen how the pendulum was swinging at the
close of the fourteenth century. It was swinging
towards the complete reconquest of the whole island
by the native chiefs, — by the degenerate English who
had been amalgamated with them, — and by the deso-
lating usages of Clan feuds and fightings which were
CH. IV.] SUPREMACY OF THE IRISH. 129
inseparable from that condition of society. Even the
narrow territory of the Pale which Eichard 11. and his
Irish Parliament of Kilkenny had tried to define and
to keep within the marches of civilisation — even this
Pale was being invaded perpetually by incursions and
robbery, and still more fatally by the infusion of Irish
usages. During the reign of Henry Y., at the very
time when the power of English arms was being shown
in the historic glories of Agincourt, and an English
King became Eegent of France, with the right of
succession to that kingdom, the English Colonists in
Ireland were reduced to such misery that they were
emigrating in crowds back to England ; and England
could only endeavour to force them to return again to
Ireland. At last, — close to the end of the century, — that
last refuge of feebleness was resorted to — the refuge
of actually erecting a fortified embankment and ditch
against the Irish enemy, round the nucleus of the Pale
in the immediate neighbourhood of Dublin.*
But even this extreme result of Ireland being left prac-
tically to herself is not the most important lesson which
the events of this fifteenth century impressed upon the
English mind, and which explain and largely vindi-
cate her conduct then, and in later times. We have
seen the inevitable tendency among the Irish Clans,
and among the degenerate colonists, to take part with
any external enemy of England who might heave in
sight over the troubled waters of those stormy times.
* " Short History," p. 229.
K
130 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. iv.
This tendency had been exhibited in a terrible manner
in the fearful wars brought upon Ireland by the in-
vited invasion of the Scotch in the beginning of the
previous century. But now we have to note the same
danger in another form. Whenever any faction might
arise in England — above all, when there came to be
a disputed succession to the throne, — the inevitable
temptation of the Irish was to take sides with the
claimant — whoever he might be — who did not succeed
in England. To set up a separate and a rival kingdom
had been their object, so far as Irish Septs ever had
any object at all, in inviting Bruce. But obviously
the same purpose might be as well or even better
attained by choosing a king for themselves, who had
failed to establish himself on tbe throne of England.
Accordingly, when the Wars of the Roses broke
out, the Irish, in so far again as they ever acted
together, or on any principle whatever, embraced
the cause of the House of York against the great
Lancastrian sovereigns who had succeeded Richard II.
They had some temporary and personal temptation
to do so. In the middle of the century with which
we are now concerned, the fifteenth, the Lancas-
trian Henry VI. sent over to Ireland, in order to
get him out of the way, Richard, Duke of York,
as Viceroy. This shows that the new danger was
not then foreseen or expected. But it was imme-
diately developed. Duke Richard at once set to
work in that body which was called a Parliament,
CH. IV.] IRISH SUPPORT HOUSE OF YORK. 131
but which represented nothing but the narrow limits
and the degenerated occupants of the Pale, in order
to establish for himself an independent position.
The first step was to get that Rump of a Parliament
to declare itself independent of England as represent-
ing the whole of Ireland. It asserted what Dr. Richey
calls the complete independence of the Irish Legis-
lature, and all those constitutional rights, which, — as
this excellent Irish writer significantly says, — " are
involved in the existence, of a separate Parliament,
but had not hitherto been categorically expressed." *
It took up the position, in fact, in the middle of the
fifteenth century which was afterwards taken up by
Grattan's Parliament towards the end of the eighteenth
century in 1782. The spirit and intention with which
this was done, and its political significance to the
English throne and nation, is sufiBciently shown by
the fact that the Irish Lords took an active part in
the civil war and fought for tlie House of York in
several of the battles of the Roses.
It is not the least necessary to blame the Irish for
this course. It is quite enough to consider it as only
natural — in the sense in which a great many things are
natural which are nevertheless inseparably connected
with causes working to the most ruinous results, even
for those who are under their influence and controlling
power. But for tliose in later generations who look
at those causes in the light of their origin and effects,
* " Short History," p. 232.
132 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
it is impossible not to see that Irish independence
in the fifteenth century would have given free play
to influences which had shown their disastrous action
in Ireland for more than a thousand years ; and that
as regards England it would have been a serious
political danger. We have only to ask ourselves,
which of those two communities of men was most
freighted with good influences for the world, to
have that question answered in favour of England
with a shout — as much of reason as of sympathy.
At all events, if we are to judge of the conduct
of men merely according to that which we see it
was both right and natural for them to do in the
circumstances of their case as it appeared to them,
we must apply the same standard to the conduct
of England and her sovereign. Nothing can be more
certain than that when the Wars of the Koses had
closed on the field of Bosworth in 1484, and the rule
of the Tudor Sovereigns began with Henry VII., he
was absolutely called upon, by his duty to the great
monarchy of England, to put an end to the danger
of an independent kingdom in Ireland, founded as it
would be on the claim of a small section of the whole
people of Ireland to choose its own dynasty, its own
sovereign, and to maintain its own half-Ersefied usages
and laws. This is the full and adequate explanation
and defence of one of the most celebrated and deter-
mining episodes in Irish history — the enactment of
the Statute known as Poyning's Law, from the name
CH IV.] poyning's law. 133
of the Viceroy or Lord Deputy who induced the same
Parliament of the Pale to pass it in 1495. This was
an Act which acknowledged the Irish Parliament
to be a strictly subordinate legislature — not to be
summoned and not to act except under the supreme
authority of the English Crown. It is needless to say
that this was nothing but the full realisation of the
duty which O'Connell charged England with having
so long neglected. As Dr. Richey says, " English
legislation was introduced en hloc." All English
statutes then existing in England were by the same
statute made of force in Ireland. If only this measure
had been made effectual, it is the universal testimony
of Irish historians themselves, that it would have
been the greatest of all reforms.
It is perfectly intelligible that Irish historians, if
they can manage to throw off from their minds the
bearing and significance of every one of the great
facts which they themselves narrate, or are com-
pelled to admit, — and if they can imagine them-
selves to be citizens of a state, or subjects of a
monarchy which had a great past, and might other-
wise have had a great future, — should deprecate or
even condemn this attempt on the part of England
to make her old suzerainty a real and effectual
dominion. But it does indeed require a strong effort
of imagination to conjure up a vision and a dream so
utterly at variance with all the realities of the case.
Yet Dr. Eichey, speaking in this sense, says of the
134 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
Poyning's Law, " This, the most disgraceful Act ever
passed by an independent Legislature, and wrung
from the local Assembly of the Pale, bound future
Parliaments for three hundred years." That the body,
which he now discovers to be not in any true sense
a Parliament of Ireland, but only " a local Assembly
of the Pale," was under the supreme influence of the
English Lord Deputy is likely enough. But they had
been equally under the influence of the Duke of York
when, thirty- six years before, in 1459, they had taken
the opposite course of constituting themselves an in-
dependent Legislature and of supporting the family of
a Pretender to the English Crown. It is not rational
to speak of this body as representing an Irish nation
when it acted in one way, and then to disparage
it as a mere "local Assembly" when it acted in
another way. In both cases it was the same body —
with the same restricted character — with the same
disabilities, and liable to the same influences of
personal favour or of corruption. Probably, whatever
of wisdom and of public spirit it enlisted, it was
stronger in the later action which clung to the
English law and power, than in the earlier action
which asserted its own separate independence. We
know how much the Colonists of the Pale suffered
from the wild Irish around them, and, in setting
up an independence which they could certainly not
have maintained alone, they must have been acting
from mere impulse, and with great ignorance of the
true interests of their country.
CH. IV.] NECESSITY OF POYNING's LAW. 135
From an English point of view, — which is the point
of view identified with the civilisation of the British
Islands, — there can be no doubt whatever of the duty
of the Sovereign to act as he did. But even in that
point of view which looks solely to the interests of
Ireland, it is difficult to conceive how any reasoning
man can regard the so-called Parliament of the Pale in
the fifteenth century as having been one whose separa-
tivenessand independence can now be regarded as even
a possible source of good. Such a prospect could only
be founded on one or both of two things — either on
the fitness of the Anglo-Norman Colonists inside the
Pale at that time, to exercise such powers well and
wisely not only in its relations with England, but
in its relations with Irish tribes all over the Island ; —
or else on the possibility at that time of the Irish
tribes reinforcing that Parliament with better elements
of its own, and so forming gradually a really national
Parliament likely to govern the country well and
wisely. Neither of these alternative suppositions has
one single element of plausibility or even of possibility.
And it is only doing Dr. Kichey justice to observe
that he supplies us with the most definite and con-
clusive information against them both. As regards
the first, — the capacity of the English Colonists of
the Pale to govern well even the small portion of the
country which they precariously held, — the experiment
was actually tried. Henry VIII., having no army of
his own to enforce his policy, resolved to trust the
136 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv.
Government of Ireland to the oldest and noblest
representative of the first Norman Settlers. He
confided his powers to the Geraldines, the Earls of
Kildare, who were the lineal descendants of the men
who preceded Henry II. three hundred years before.
The Pale was thus to be governed under the English
Crown through the greatest of its own Magnates — a
family which had been so long settled, and had so
identified themselves with the Irish people, that it was
their boast to be called " More Irish than Irish." And
what was the result? Let us hear what Dr. Kichey
says. He tells us that the Geraldines had many
of the personal characteristics which distinguish men
in rude ages. They were brave, enterprising, courteous,
and generous. But they were totally devoid of any
of the qualities requisite for the character of a states-
man. They had no higher views than the maintenance
of their position as chiefs of the most powerful Irish
Clan. Accordingly, during the time of their supremacy
from 1489 down to 1535 the Government was utterly
perverted to their private purposes, and the Eoyal
banner was carried in a great battle in which sixteen
Irish chiefs were defeated by the forces of the Pale
in alliance as usual with other Irish Septs from the
north. Here we have a perfect and indeed a typical
specimen of what Home Eule had always been in
Ireland, and what perhaps more than ever it would
have been under a "local Assembly of the Pale."
We have the head of the Geraldines, representing the
CH. IV.] CONDITION OF IKELAND. 137
authority of the English Crown, quarrelling with
a member of his own family, his son-in-law, and in
alliance with a fighting mixture of De Burghs, the
O'Briens, the Macnamaras, the O'Carrolls, and other
southern Septs, fighting a desperate battle with the
O'Eeillys, Mac Mahons, O'Farrells, O'Donels, and
other chiefs of the north.* Such is the spectacle
presented by the best specimens of that English Pale
which ought — it is suggested — to have been allowed to
declare itself independent of the power and civilisa-
tion of England.
Then let us turn to the condition of the " Irish
enemy," as they were called, — the native Septs and
Clans occupying all the rest of Ireland. Here,
again. Dr. Eichey not only does not deny the facts,
but states them most explicitly. He admits that the
Celtic Clans were not only as bad, but considerably
worse than they had been three hundred years before.
"In the twelfth century," he says, "the Irish Celts
were in a state of political disorganisation, but they
still had a feeling of nationality, and had the form at
least of a national monarchy. Justice, criminal and
civil, was administered among them according to a
definite code of law. At the commencement of the
sixteenth century there remained no tradition of
national unity — no trace of an organisation by which
they could be united into one people. The separate
tribes had been disorganised by civil wars, and the
* " Short History," pp. 233, 234.
138 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch iv.
original tribesmen were suppressed and supplanted by
the mercenary followers of the several rivals for the
chieftaincies.*' * Such is the description we have of
that other portion of the Irish people whose abstract
interest in an independent Irish Parliament was to
supplement what was wanting in the degenerate
English of the Pale !
So closes the fifteenth century — the third of the
four centuries for which we have to account before
England had effected that real conquest which could
alone give power to remedy the desperate evils of
the Irish clan system. In describing the once
happier condition of the Irish people in the words
here quoted, Dr. Eichey can only be criticised for
having given an almost purely ideal sketch of the
condition of things even in the twelfth century. The
native Annals testify against the truth of it. The
stages of descent through which the Celtic clans had
fallen in Ireland had reached, even in the twelfth
century, a lower point than Dr. Eichey in this
passage admits; and every farther step in the same
descent was confessedly due to the continued operation
of the same causes, — all being of purely native origin.
England's only blame was the fault which consisted in
her want of power, — a want which was due quite as
much to insuperable physical obstacles as to ambitions,
pursuits, and policies which were the common heritage
of all the European races in the military ages.
* " Short History," p. 238.
( 139 )
CHAPTER V.
IKELAND UNDER THE TUDORS DOWN TO THE DEATH
OF HENRY VIII.
Let us now pass on. The sixteenth century in
England, as we all know, was wholly occupied by
the rule of the Tudor sovereigns. No less than
eighty-one years out of the hundred were passed
under the two single reigns of Henry VIII. and of
his daughter, Queen Elizabeth. The intervening
short episodes of Edward VI. and the " bloody Mary,"
lasting together only for eleven years, contributed
nothing of lasting importance to that side of British
history with which we are concerned here. But
in those two reigns England was, to a very large
extent, made what she continued to be ; and Ireland
was at last brought for the first time within the
influences of one supreme dominion. The first nine
years of the century, during which Henry VII. con-
tinued to reign, brought no change as regards the
Irish. Neither did the first twenty-six years of the
reign of Henry VIII. Nothing particular happened
140 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
except that which was then happening always, and
had been happening with a perfect continuity of
causation for a thousand years, namely, the deepening
of anarchy, the development of corruption from the
more complete abandonment of all classes of Irishmen
to themselves. At last a crisis occurred, out of which
a new life began for Ireland. The Geraldines rebelled.
The best and noblest representatives of the early Eng-
lish Pale — the very chiefs and heads of those whose
rule was carried on in the shape of a local Parlia-
ment — broke from their admitted allegiance to their
Sovereign, publicly and formally renounced it, and
rode out from Dublin shouting the Celtic watchword
of their family — now converted into a mere Irish Sept.
It marks with poetical fidelity the influences which
were supreme with the rebellious Lord-Deputy
Fitzgerald, that he was incited to this course by the
rhapsodies of a native Irish Minstrel; and that
among his own retainers with whose aid he seized the
Castle of Dublin, and invaded the Council Chamber,
not one of them could speak the English language,
or could even understand the speech of the Chan-
cellor, who tried to dissuade them from a course so
disastrous.
This event happened in 1534 — when the second
quarter of the century had been well advanced. And
it is universally recognised as an epoch in the history
of Ireland. Dr. Kichey says it marked the close of
the Middle Ages, and the beginning of those condi-
CH. v.] THE GERALDINE REBELLION. 141
tions which belong to the modern world. Dr. Riehey
accordingly takes this as an opportunity for summing
up the condition of Ireland as it was found to be,
when England was then compelled to take up the
gauntlet thrown down by the same Geraldines who had
preceded Henry II., and had been now for a number
of years the King's Deputies in Ireland. Here once
more we meet with that marked discrepancy between
the language of the sentimental Irish patriot, and the
language of the Historian. Counting up the years
between the pretended conquest of Ireland in 1172
and the year 1534, he finds the interval to be three
hundred and sixty-two years — and he proceeds to call
this period "three hundred and sixty-two years of
English so-called government." In the same strain
he says the " English government had collapsed,
leaving nothing but the misery it had caused.*' This
language from an historian whose account of the
facts is, as we have seen, so honest is all the more
strange, and all the more pathetic, because at this
juncture we find it in juxtaposition with a special
exhibition of candour. As an Irishman he puts the
question to be answered, and he answers it as an
Englishman and a philosopher. " To what condition
was Ireland reduced by the first three hundred and
sixty-two years of English rule ? " — this is the ques-
tion — and it could not have been put in any form
involving a more thorough traversing of the facts of
history. It is a form worthy of an Irish stump orator,
142 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
or of Mr. Gladstone in his more recent phase. But
how does the honest Dr. Eichey answer his own
question ? He says he will not answer it himself,
nor will he take his answer from any native Irish
historian. And so he replies in the words of the first
of the State Papers addressed to Henry YIII. when
the minds of English statesmen were first brought
really to bear upon the state of Ireland — now become
really urgent, and from external causes likely to be-
come alarming. Dr. E-ichey quotes in extenso this
Paper, which, from beginning to end, is one long
indictment against Irish native usages, and one long
demonstration that the miseries of Ireland were due
to them alone.
Of course the only logical escape for Dr. Richey
and for those who speak in the spirit of his question,
is to point out that England was to blame for the
very reason that Irish usages had been so long
allowed to act almost without a check. But no one
has explained better, as we have seen, than Dr. Eichey,
the insuperable difficulties which had made it practi-
cally impossible for England during those centuries to
conquer Ireland and enforce her own law by arms.
Besides which, even if we set aside this considera-
tion, it will be at least a great step gained if we
recognise what were the positive, and not merely the
negative causes of the desperate condition to which
human society had been reduced in Ireland. The
State Paper quoted by Dr. Eichey leaves nothing to
CH. v.] KESULTS OF IRISH HOME RULE. 143
be desired on this head. It tells us that there were
more than sixty distinct divisions of the country,
which were in the possession of the native Irish Septs
— every one of them ruled by some chief who assumed
various titles, from Kings and Dukes, and Archdukes
and Princes, down to Chiefs and Lords — and every one
of these was independent of the other — exercising the
whole powers of government within his territory, and
all also exercising constantly the right of peace and
war against each other. Those other parts of Ireland,
which were nominally English, were similarly divided
between thirty more rulers completely Ersefied, and
all exercising similar powers and jurisdictions. Nor was
this all. Within each chieftainship, the succession
was not regulated by any fixed law or even custom,
but was practically determined by the power of the
strongest to seize upon it. Whence it followed that
many parts of Ireland were a prey to intestine factions,
and to the constant fighting of still more petty chief-
lets. Then as regarded the condition of the poorer
and dependent classes we hear once more of the
desolating usages, purely native, of "coigne and
livery," and of the consequent devastation of the
country. They who wished to be peaceful were
flying from the island. The Pale was perpetually
invaded and ravaged, and few parts of Ireland were
more miserable. Such was Ireland — not under the
rule of England even in " the last resort " — but under
Irish Home Kule, and the operation of the identical
144 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
causes which we have seen to be in operation with
more or less severity for many centuries. Nor is Dr.
Richey less honest when he resumes his own narra-
tive, and tells us in his own words what was the
condition of Ireland, and who had been its rulers, as
well in the first as " in the last resort." " The Celtic
Tribes," he tells us, "had for above two centuries
enjoyed a practical independence/' * But " more than
two centuries " before 1534 are words that take us back
to some undefined date before 1334 — in fact, to the
great Scotch invasion which those tribes had invited
and brought upon their country in 1315, in the reign
of Edward II. But why stop here in the retrospect
of years during which the Irish tribes enjoyed a
practical, and for themselves a disastrous, indepen-
dence? Was it not with special reference to the
preceding period of one hundred and forty-three
years between the pretended conquest of Henry II.
and the Scotch invasion, that Dr. Richey himself ex-
plained the physical impossibility of England effecting
any real subjugation of Ireland? And have we not
the testimony of the native Celtic Annals as to the
perfect continuity of the characteristic habits and
usages of the Irish ?
But here again we have nothing to say against the
perfect honesty of this Irish historian. No sooner has
he quoted the graphic account of Ireland in 1534, which
is given by the Statesmen of Henry VIII., than he
* "Short History," p. 244,
CH. v.] TESTIMONY OF NATIVE ANNALS. 145
proceeds to quote, with the same fidelity, the account
to be gathered from the native Irish Annals. Casting
aside all the pleas which have been advanced by other
Irishmen against taking the testimony of those Annals
as a fair picture of the state of society in Ireland as
it really existed. Dr. Kichey says, " It is but fair to
judge the Celtic tribes by their own historians ; '* * and
then he proceeds to give the following result of the
yearly jottings for the thirty-four years from 1500 to
1534, — and this for one part of Ireland only: "Battles,
plundering, etc., exclusive of those in which the Eng-
lish Government was engaged, 116 ; Irish gentlemen
of family killed in battle, 102 ; murdered, 168 — many
of them with circumstances of great atrocity ; and
during this period, on the other hand, there is no
allusion to the enactment of any law, the judicial
decision of any controversy, the founding of any town,
monastery, or church ; and all this is recorded by the
annalist without the slightest expression of regret or
astonishment, and as if such were the ordinary course
of life in a Christian country. " f
Even much more marked ebullitions of a local
patriotism might well be pardoned in an historian
who is so splendidly honest as to pen this powerful
description of the condition of Ireland at the close of
some five hundred years of " practical independence."
But Dr. Eichey's <jandour is not exhausted. It is.
helped, no doubt, by the curious idea that he can
* " Short History," p. 247. f Ibid., pp. 247, 248.
L
146 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. v.
assign to the English Government, as a cause, all the
evils which his facts, and his narrative alike, attach
by an inseparable connection to that Irish indepen-
dence to which he confesses freely. But his genuine
historical instincts are not satisfied even with such
confessions as these. He returns to the subject again
and again, and explains in the greatest detail the
operation of those purely native usages which were
sinking the people deeper and ever deeper into the
miserable condition which he has described from their
own native historians. He tells us how unceasing civil
wars had tended more and more to degrade the whole
people into mere armed retainers of predatory soldiers :
how, within each tribe or elan every ambitious member
of the tribal house sought the chieftainship, which
tended to fall into the hands, not of the elected, but of
the strongest and most unprincipled member of the
house : " — how the future was as hopeless as the present
and the past were terrible, inasmuch as "neither
chiefs nor followers had any aspiration for, or idea of,
a higher state of society : " — how the " Hibernicised
Norman Lords" were as bad as, or worse than, the
Celtic chiefs around them, just because they were so
completely Hibernicised ; and because even their own
Estates were largely repeopled with a native or a
bastard race, " ignorant of the freedom of the Saxon
tenant," but devoted to their lords with absolute aiid
unscrupulous devotion : — how even the few centres of
a possible civilisation in Ireland, the walled towns on
cH. v.] DK. richey's confessions. 147
the seacoast, or on the great rivers, had betaken them-
selves to the same lawless habits, and in 1524 "the
cities of Cork and Limerick carried on a war against
each other by sea and land, sent ambassadors, and
concluded a treaty of peace." In short, civilised society
did not exist in Ireland, nor was there the smallest
hope of its restoration from any internal centre of
resurrection or reform.
Yet even after all these confessions, Dr. Eichey
cannot help again returning to his patriotic miscon-
ceptions of the true solution to the question which he
asks : What was the cause of this most miserable con-
dition ? English writers, he says, would only assert
that it arose from the uncivilised and untamable
nature of the Celtic nation. But this is not the
solution of English writers. What they did and
do assert is not that the Irish were untamable; but
that the process of taming had to be begun by sub-
mitting Ireland to the same process which had effected
the civilisation of all the rest of Europe — namely,
conquest by a fresh race, and a higher and an older
civilisation. But here again, as usual, Dr. Kichey's
unfairness is only momentary. His most erroneous
account of the only thing that " English writers would
say '* is immediately contradicted by his own quotation
of what Henry YIII.'s Irish Council did actually
say in 1533 : " As to the surmise of the bruteness of
the people, and the incivility of them, no doubt, if
there were justice used among them, they would be
148 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. v.
found as civil, wise, and polite, and as active as any
nation." This is the truth. But what did the hingeing
condition in this sentence mean : " if there w^ere justice
used among them " ? It meant government established,
and law enforced. Dr. Kichey's own question, however,
is very different. Assuming for a moment the poor
part of a declaimer instead of the nobler part of an
historian, he asks two questions in a breath — as if
they were practically the same. But they are abso-
lutely different — one of them to be answered with a
decisive " yes," the other to be answered by an as
decisive " no." He asks — (1) " Were the Celts a nation
hating all rale and order ; and (2) by destiny given
over to chaos and degradation ? " Again the answer
to the first of these two questions is his own. What
did he tell us of the causes which led to the failure of
a native sovereign. King Brian, more than Rye hundred
years before, who had for a time established something
like a civilised monarchy? He says that "a truly
national government of this description found its
bitterest enemies among the provincial chiefs who
longed to restore anarchy, and were willing to league
with the foreigner for that purpose." * So it had
been all through; and so it was when Henry YIII.
was at last compelled by the rebellion of the Fitz-
geralds to begin the real conquest of Ireland.
As to Dr. Kichey's second question — all the eminent
men of the Tudor period, both in Henry YIII.'s
* " Short History," p. 116.
CH. v.] RESULTS OF NATIVE INSTITUTIONS. 149
time and in that of Queen Elizabeth, attribute the
ruin of Ireland, not to anything incompatible with
civilisation in the nature of Irishmen, but to the
nature of the indigenous, social, and political system
under which they had so long lived. All of them who
have a natural opportunity of doing so, repeat in various
forms the same testimony to the many elements of
natural genius and virtue in the Irish character. All
of them unite in placing these elements in startling
contrast with the actual condition to which the people
had been reduced; and all of them "point the moral
and adorn the tale " by dwelling, as Dr. Kichey himself
repeatedly does, on the traditional habits which made
all their natural gifts fruitless in building up the
edifice of a civilised society. Dr. Eichey's question
about '* destiny " is on a level with Mr. Gladstone's
celebrated ascription to his opponents of an idea that
the Irish have *' a double dose of original sin." The
question is not about original sin, but about developed
corruption. The germs of that corruption are thickly
sown in the natural soil of all races ; and it has often
happened to nations, as it has often happened to
individuals, to fall into positions, both physical and
moral, out of which they cannot rise without some
help from outside themselves. From no other quarter
could that help come to Ireland than from England —
from that country and nation, which through the fire of
many conquests, and the intermixture of many breeds,
had enjoyed advantages and opportunities which she
150 IKISH NATIONALISM. [ch v.
alone could now afford to Ireland, by the long-needed
and long-desired enforcement of her own great dominion.
At all events we have at this juncture as clear an
answer as before to Mr. Gladstone's question, " Who
made the Irishman ? " The Irishman had made him-
self — through many centuries of a practical monopoly
in that business. And the only blame that can be
cast on England is that she had so long allowed
that " making " to have its way, and produce its own
deplorable results.
But now we enter upon a broader reach of the great
stream of history: and it is impossible to speak too
highly of the truth and candour with which Dr.
Richey treats the subject. The thrones of kings have
never been first established on abstract theories of
duty ; nor has the dominion of great nations ever been
founded on mere philanthropy. They are the result
of impulses and instincts which are the common
heritage of mankind, and we have to judge of them
by the fruit they bear. Moreover, as regards the
actors, in every case we have simply to remember
that in proportion as they have had really great and
permanent interests to defend or to sustain, in the
same proportion they must be credited with a more or
less conscious and responsible recognition of the real
greatness of the cause which they may happen to
represent in the history of the world. It will not be
denied by any sane Irishman that the cause of the
English monarchy was in the sixteenth century a
CH. v.] ERSEFIED ENGLISHMEN. 151
great cause — perhaps the greatest cause which then
depended on human action and on human conduct in
any part of the world. No man can compare with
that cause the separate causes of the ninety petty
chiefs of Irish Celts, and of degenerate Englishmen,
all " Hibernicised," who fought, and slaughtered, and
robbed, each other all over that poor land of Ireland,
without one thought or aim which could grow up to
be even the germ of a prosperous or a civilised nation.
And what has to be clearly seen, firmly grasped, and
frankly admitted — is the unquestionable fact that the
very existence of the English monarchy, and the place
of England among the nations, was now at stake in
the Irish contest.
The Fitzgerald rebellion was declared, as we have
seen, in 1535. But in the year before that memorable
date the whole history of Europe had taken a new
turn. Henry VIII. had finally quarrelled with the
Pope, and along with the Pope had a quarrel forced
upon him with the German Emperor, and with France,
and with Spain. From that moment began the great
combination, and standing conspiracy of the Con-
tinental Catholic Sovereigns to subdue England and
to put down her reformed religion, — a conspiracy
which for more than two hundred years never ceased
to exist more or less in fact, and never ceased to
inspire Englishmen with a determined spirit of sleep-
less watchfulness and of active resistance. From that
moment, too, Ireland became the cherished hope of
152 IRISH NATIONALISM. [CH. v.
England's enemies, as the joint in her armour where
she was weakest. Let it, then, be clearly understood
and universally admitted that nothing that England
might really find it needful to do — however severe it
might be in itself — in order to keep out her foreign
enemies from Ireland, and in order to secure her own
dominion in it, — can now be considered in any other
light than as the necessary steps in a long battle for
self-preservation and for life. We may leave to their
own operation all those sources of feeling and of sym-
pathy which may lead men to take part in the past, as
they continually do in the present, with the worse
instead of with the better cause. We may leave
Irishmen, as such, to identify themselves in imagi-
nation, if they really can, with the ninety petty
chieftains who alone represented Ireland at that
time, and were living a life of perpetual war and
hopeless anarchy: — we may identify ourselves, and
leave Roman Catholics, as such, if they can, to
identify themselves with the endeavour of their co-
religionists all over Europe to extinguish in blood at
home, and by conquest abroad, the liberty of the
Christian Church to reform itself. We may even
leave political anarchists of all kinds to cherish a
universal sympathy with all rebellions: but we can
at least demand from all those types of mind the
recognition of the plain fact that England was now
not only entitled, but called upon by all that has ever
determined the conduct of mankind, to establish her
CH. v.] IRISH INTRIGUES WITH FOREIGNERS. 153
own complete dominion over Ireland by every means
at her disposal. All men who can rise above the
pettiest temptations which pervert the judgment, must
see somethiug more and higher in the actual conduct
of England at this crisis than simply the natural and
inevitable action of universal human instincts. They
can see that English statesmen and the English
Sovereign had a clear and a noble consciousness of
the great interests with which the cause of England
was identified in the world, and at the same time a
clear, intelligent, and even generous perception of
their own duty towards the people of Ireland. Such
was unquestionably the language, and the conscious
motive of all the great statesmen of the Tudor period.
Now, it is precisely in those conclusions that Dr.
Kichey does rise above the level of mere provincial feel-
ing in the discharge of his duty as an historian. He
not only admits, but he lays stress upon the fact that
since the Irish factions — just as they had done two hun-
dred years before — had again begun to intrigue with
the foreign enemies of England, and since those foreign
enemies had also begun to lay their plans accordingly,
the contest into which Henry YIII. was compelled to
enter, by the rebellion of the Geraldines, was a con-
test of life and death for England. So early as twelve
years before this date, the Irish Earl of Desmond had
actually negotiated a treaty with the King of France
for the invasion of Ireland by a French army; and
five years later, he received a letter from the Haps-
154 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
burg Emperor, asking for a similar alliance.* Every
enemy that the Pope could stir up anywhere in Europe
was sure to take part, sooner or later whenever oppor-
tunity might arise, in the contest. England, as Dr.
Richey says, was then entering on a "struggle for
existence." t England found that she must entirely
conquer Ireland, or herself succumb in the struggle.
A full admission of this is all that, on behalf of Eng-
land, we need care to demand. If the cause of England
had been laden with as many woes for humanity as
it w^as, in our opinion, laden with many blessings, the
admission would ba enough to justify her in every step
she took to assert and enforce her sovereignty over
Ireland. But we can demand much more than this.
We can assert, on the clearest evidence, that the
statesmen of the Tudor period were wise and foresee-
ing men, who knew the real greatness of their cause,
— the place it had in the highest politics of Europe, —
and the bearing it must have on the permanent interests
of the inhabitants of Ireland. And all this, too. Dr.
Richey admits, and more than admits. He breaks out
into a splendid eulogium on the statesmen who acted
under Henry VIII., and on that Sovereign himself.
" The study," he says, " of his official correspondence,
especially the letters and instructions relative to Irish
affairs, gives a much more favourable impression, not
only of his abilities, but also of his moral character.
Like all his contemporaries, he was impressed with the
* " Short History," p. 303. * Ibid., pp. 234-239.
CH. v.] POLICY OF HENRY VIII. 155
permanent necessity of maintaining law and order, —
he had a deep sense of his own responsibilities, — a
sympathy with the poor and weak who were exposed
to the oppression of the powerful or insolent, — and a
sincere dislike to shed the blood of, or to use violence
towards, the masses of the people. His own subjects
understood him better than his historians. He was
all through supported by the masses of the people.
The violent and despotic acts of which he was accused,
were done bv a monarch who had no stand Ino^ armv*
scarcely even a bodyguard, and who resided close
beside, almost within, the poAverful and turbulent city
of London. As regards his Irish policy, his State
Papers disclose a moderation, a conciliating spirit,
a respect for the feelings of the Celtic population, a
sympathy with the poor, which no subsequent English
ruler has ever displayed." Nor is this all that Dr.
Eichey admits. He admits further that under this
Sovereign, — compelled at last to assert his sovereignty,
and aided by Statesmen on whom he bestows praises
as large and generous, — a policy was thenceforth
adopted, " honest in intention, noble in its aspirations,
and persistently pursued." So much for matters of
historical fact. Then comes the usual expression of
a purely sentimental feeling, " but founded on prin-
ciples radically erroneous." *
Let us now bring this sentimental feeling to
the test of reason. What was the Tudor policy,
* "Short History," p. 268.
156 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
as described by himself? The first aim was to
establish the Sovereignty of England both in reality
and in name, and to repudiate as its basis the
grant of a mere Lordship over Ireland, by a Pope of
the twelfth century ? Was this " most erroneous " ?
Another aim was to effect a financial reform, and
to secure a revenue from Ireland sufficient to pay
the costs of its own Grovernment. Was this " most
erroneous " ? The third was to substitute the
civilised laws of England for the barbarous anarchy
and the desolatino^ usao^es which had been the curse
of Ireland for a thousand years. Was this " most
erroneous"? Is there a rational being who can dis-
pute either the political necessities, or the imperative
demands of wisdom and of justice by which all the
links of this chain of policy were welded and twined
together ? It is too little to say that it was only
natural, — or that it was defensible, — or that it was on
the whole the best. It was all of these ; but it was
more, — it was the only possible policy. There was
absolutely no alternative. There was no other law
than the law of England to which Henry VIII. could
resort. The old Irish Brehon Law, even if it had
been really operative at all, was no law at all in the
modern sense of the word. It was a mere collection
of archaic precepts and usages wholly inapplicable
to the conditions of what we understand by civilised
society, and with no machinery for judicial application.
But even that law was not really in force. Each one
CH. v.] SOME LAW A NECESSITY. 157
of the ninety Chiefs and Kinglets in Ireland was a law
unto himself.
Henry VIII. went to the heart of the whole question
when he said, in an excellent letter to his Lord
Deputy, that it was not so much a question whether
the Irish should be compelled to live under the law
of England, but whether they should live under any
law at all — of any sort or kind. There is, therefore,
neither justice nor common sense in any of those
complaints made against the Tudor policy towards
Ireland, which harp upon the old story of the evil of
forcing upon any people laws which were strange to
them. And accordingly the result is that when we
ask reasonable men like Dr. Kichev to coDdescend
to details, and to specify what particular instance
they can give of violent or unjust legislation in
Ireland, they are obliged to fall back upon one so
trivial in itself as the prohibition for the future of
the Irish dress and of the Irish habits of personal
adornment, such as the mode of wearing beard or
moustaches, or of cutting the hair. Let all this be
conceded, as inexpedient and practically useless, not
only because it could not possibly be, and was not,
enforced ; but also because the abandonment of
barbarous personal habits would necessarily have
followed in due time the establishment and enforce-
ment of the weightier matters of the law. But even
in this trivial question we must not forget how it really
stood in the eyes of both Englishmen and Irishmen
158 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
in those days. For centuries the Irish dress and
habits of personal apparel had been the symbol and
flag of repudiated allegiance to the acknowledged
Lord of Ireland. Whenever an " Hibernicised '*
Englishman wished to declare his rebellion, the
" donning of the Irish dress and accoutrements " was
the regular accepted form of abjuration and rebellion.
The step, therefore, of denouncing and prohibiting
the use of such symbols was a perfectly natural part,
however well it might have been omitted, of the new
policy of reducing Ireland to order and to law. And
even if it had been true — as O'Connell audaciously
asserted in 1834 — that the Irish people had been
eagerly desirous in previous centuries to enjoy the
advantage and protection of English law, and if they
were now even hostile to such a change, — this could
only prove the immense decline which had taken place
in the intelligence of the people, and in that poor
degree of political consciousness which they had ever
possessed, but which they had lost through long
familiarity with chaos.
But whatever may be the aberrations from common
sense upon this subject which may be due to a mis-
placed national sentiment, there is one broad fact
which stares us in the face as we follow the acts and
the language of Henry VIII. and of his successors in
respect to Ireland, — and that is the fact that every
year brought more and more home to the mind of
England that, in fighting for her secure hold over
CH. v.] MILITARY WEAKNESS OF ENGLAND. 159
Ireland as an integral part of the dominions of the
English Crown, she was fighting for her own life.
Every year, more and more, Ireland became the
focus of intrigue, and the hoped-for basis of actual in-
vasion, against England, by the Catholic continental
sovereigns, and by Scotland, then under the same
influences. Moreover, the serious difliculties which
Henry YIII. encountered in putting down the Geral-
dine rebellion, and in establishing his authority in
Ireland, throws a clear light on the ignorance of
historical conditions, which can alone account for the
blame thrown on England for not having undertaken
the work of conquest much sooner. During the long
period of the wars with, and in, France, and also during
the civil wars of the Roses, England was in no condi-
tion to accomplish a task so beset with physical diffi-
culties and almost insuperable impediments. Even in
the later days of Henry YIII. it was more than a year,
from March, 1534, to June, 1535, before England
could provide and equip an army capable of batterino-
down the single Geraldine Castle of Maynooth ; and it
was no less than seven years before, in 1542, Henry
could summon a Parliament professing to represent
the whole of Ireland, which he could trust to pass the
Act which should transmute his old hereditary feudal
title of Lord of Ireland into that of King, with all its
authority and honours.
Yet even this date of 1542 does not mark the
complete subjugation of the country, which still lay
160 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
more than sixty years in the future, and was only
accomplished by Queen Elizabeth in the last year
of her life, 1603. This last, accordingly, is the
date which, as we have seen. Dr. Richey specifies as
marking the first full sovereignty of England over
Ireland, and therefore the first full responsibility for
the government of the country. This calculation at
once strikes off four hundred years from the " seven
centuries " which is the stereotyped period of inflated
declamation ; and as during the whole of our own
present century, and during eighteen years of the last
century, Ireland has had either a native Parliament
-with full powers, or a full share in a united Parliament
in London, the period of English responsibility would
be reduced to the period from 1603 to 1782, or exactly
one hundred and seventy-nine years, instead of seven
hundred years, as usually represented. Inasmuch,
however, as Henry VIII. had unquestionably con-
quered at least a great part of Ireland in 1542, when
this kingship was declared and acknowledged, and
inasmuch as from that date, England did unquestion-
ably enforce her own laws and policy wherever she
could, and inasmuch, farther, as her power did actually
prevail wherever any semblance of law or civilisation
existed at all in Ireland, we may well take that
earlier date of 1542 in any argument either in defence,
or in accusation of English action in Ireland. That
leaves exactly two hundred and fifty-eight years
instead of seven hundred years for the period, in any
CH. v.] A DEMAND FOR ENGLAND. 161
sense, of the responsibility of England — as regards the
condition of the people — even to repeat Mr. Gladstone's
phrase " in the last resort." Let us now proceed to deal
with the great cause before us, in respect to the conduct
of England during this period, as clearly as we can.
In the first place, then, there is one imperative
demand which we must insist upon on behalf of
England — and that is that we do not assume the
applicability to her conduct of the rule which we now
understand as the law of perfect equality and freedom
^ in matters of religion. We must repudiate that as-
sumption, not only on the ground that nobody then
admitted it for a moment, but also on the farther
ground, too much forgotten, that the Koman Catholic
Church, — wholly in the sixteenth and seventeenth, and
partially even in the eighteenth century, — was not a
mere religious body or communion, but was more or
less actively one great political organisation of the
most formidable kind. For myself, I must at once
declare that I do not admit the sacred doctrine of
religious freedom and toleration to be applicable at
all, unless what is meant by " religion " is defined. If,
for example, a man says that his religion demands
that he should be free to resort to human sacrifices, he
must be told that we shall not allow it. If another
man tells us that it is part of his religion to acknow-
ledge the supremacy over his conduct of some priest,
whether at home or abroad, he must be told that we
shall not allow him to translate his belief into act, if
M
162 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
it leads him to transgress one iota of our laws. If
another man tells us that it is part of his religion to
obey a spiritual Potentate, who pretends, or who in-
herits the tradition of pretending, to influence his
allegiance to our laws, he must be told that we will
hold him in perpetual suspicion, and take all necessary
precautions against him, until we have good reason to
believe that his doctrine has been either formally
abandoned or has died a natural death from the
changed conditions of the world, — a change which
may make all such pretensions harmless and even
ridiculous. The whole of this demand, or claim of
right, with all its consequences, cannot be stated too
broadly. It may appear an abstract doctrine to us
now, although even in our own days we have occa-
sional warnings that cannot be disregarded. But
we must fully realise and take in that, during the
later half of the sixteenth century and the whole of
the seventeenth century, this doctrine was not abstract
at all, but ever present in the most concrete of all
possible forms. The Roman Catholic Church over
the whole of Europe was one great standing conspiracy
against the English monarchy, and the liberties of
England. With nations, even more than with the
individual, the instincts, duties, and rights of self-
preservation are absolute and supreme. We may
think as we please of the origin of the quarrel between
Henry YIII. and the Pope, — we may sympathize as
we please, with either the Catholic or the Protestant
CH. v.] RELIGION NOT YET CONCERNED. 163
cause, as each emerged out of the dubious personal
motives in which the separation began. But we must
all acknowledge that the highest interests of mankind
and of nations were from the first involved, and we
must acknowledge with perfect frankness the necessity
under which England lay to use every old, and to
forge every new weapon that could be serviceable in
her own defence.
Farther, let us remember that at the time of which
we are now speaking, those weapons against the
Catholic Church in Ireland which are now known
specially as the Penal Laws, were not in question.
Those penal laws lie as yet a century and a lialf
ahead of us. So far as the arbitrary conduct
of Henry YIII., in ecclesiastical matters, is con-
cerned, no just distinction can be drawn in principle
between his conduct in Ireland and his conduct
in England. In his time the purely theological
rebellion against Eome was not yet fully developed,
and, so far as it was seen at all, it is not probable that
his proceedings were regarded with more general
suspicion in Ireland than in England. It does so
happen that in matters ecclesiastical, all the English
Sovereigns since Henry II. had taken an active part
in the maintenance of their rights over the Latin
Church in Ireland. There was, in fact, in this matter
a close alliance between the two branches of the
English Government. The Irish people had been ac-
customed for many centuries, as we have seen, to see
164 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v.
an autagonism between two Churches — both nominally
Catholic — which hated each other with a mortal hatred.
They had been accustomed to associate the Latin
Church with its historical origin as introduced first
by the Danes, and then upheld and extended by the
Norman English. The rebellious Irish had more or
less resented the original Papal gift of the Lordship
over Ireland to the English Sovereign, and had, not very
long before, addressed a laboured remonstrance to the
Holy See against its legitimacy and justice.
Thus, all things considered, the conduct and policy
of Henry VIII. in ecclesiastical matters had much
more an aspect of natural continuity in Ireland than
it had in England ; and it should never be forgotten
by Catholics even now that whatever share they may
be disposed to claim for their Church in its in-
fluence over the Irish people, was a share due to
the continual support and patronage of the English
Kings against the anarchical and even degrading
influences whicli had been long exercised by their
own native and tribal ecclesiastical organisation. So
far as the Irish rebels are concerned, whom Henry
VIII. was called upon to suppress, it would be absurd
to credit them with any motive connected with what
is now called Catholic doctrine. It is indeed a
significant circumstance, as indicating the real nature
of that rebellion, — as it had been of all previous
rebellions in Ireland, — that one of the very first things
the Geraldines found it convenient to do, was to
CH. v.] IRISH NOT PAPAL. 165
murder the Archbishop of Dublin and his chaplains.*
There was absolutely no religious element, properly so
called, in the rebellion, and whatever ingredient there
may have been at a later time, which pretended to
the name of religion, was an ingredient involving
a permanent hostility to all that then concerned the
very existence of the English Grovernment and nation.
In the days of Henry VIIT. there was not even this
pretence. He found no difficulty whatever in procur-
ing from the Irish Chief's, without apparently any excep-
tion, a willing agreement to renounce the authority of
the Pope, and to acknowledge the Royal supremacy.
"The renunciation of the Pope's pretensions" — says
Dr. Richey — "was made a necessary article in the
submission of the local rulers. None of them seem
to have had any hesitation upon this subject. The
instruments still remaining are such as to forbid our
considering this arrangement less than universal.*' f
Nor is it less striking to find the explanation, given
by this excellent historian, of the causes which led, in
the course of some fifty or sixty years, to a change, as
regards this great test of Catholicity, in the attitude
of the native Irish. "They did not become ardent
Catholics until an intimate connection with Spain, at
the end of the sixteenth century, taught them that
the cause of Celtic independence, in order to be suc-
cessful, must be united with the Catholic Church."
In other words, the Irish did not become ardent
Short History," pp. 304, 305. f Ibid., p. 363.
* ii
166 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. t.
Catholics at all, until they found that, in the inte-
rests of their own rebellions, they must identify
themselves with the declared enemies of England on
the Continent of Europe. It follows from these facts,
which are indisputable, that no condemnation can be
passed on Henry VIII.'s conduct towards the Church
in Ireland, except on grounds which would condemn
equally, or even far more severely, his conduct in
England. Dr. Kichey does indeed indicate an opinion
"that the monastic bodies in Ireland, at least those
belonging to the Latin Church, were not as corrupt
in morals as their brethren in England were alleged
to be.^' This, we may or may not believe. There
is no adequate evidence on the subject. But on
the other hand there is abundant evidence of the
utter uselessness of those bodies in Ireland for any
of the great aims of Christian civilisation. They had
become almost as tribal and ferocious in their habits
as the degenerate representatives of the old Celtic
Church of St. Patrick and Columba. They did
nothing to maintain a religious life among the people —
nothing even to restrain the most cruel crimes. *' In
an age," says Dr. Kichey, " of lawlessness and violence,
they never came forward to protest, as Christian
priests, against the tyranny, robbery, and murder rife
around them : their Bishops were, to a great extent,
agents of the English Government; and the mass
of the clergy were split into hostile parties, and
participators in the national animosities and lawless
CH. v.] BARBARISM OF NATIVE CLERGY. 167
violence of those times." * Nay, more than this : — the
monastic clergy were often the most insensate in-
stigators of the old intertribal hatreds. Abbots and
monks would appear in arms, invade and slaughter
the Irish people, and yet celebrate their Masses
notwithstanding, and with hardly an interval of time
to mitigate the desecration. They maintained no
learning. They kept up no piety. They promoted
no culture. So far from the intellectual condition
of Ireland advancing with that of the Continent,
it had retrograded continuously from the date of
Edward Bruce's invasion; and its condition in the
sixteenth resembled more that of the twelfth than
that even of the fourteenth century." f In short, we
may say with certainty that the practical independence
of Ireland for so many centuries had ended, in spiritual
matters as in secular affairs, in one universal scene of
chaos and of crime, and that when "We'* — England— r
began for the first time to "make the Irishman," we
had everything to begin anew if the very foundations
of civilisation were to be laid at all.
* " Short History," p. 295. f Ibid., p. 297.
168 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
GHAPTEH VI.
THE EPOCH OF CONQUEST AND COLONISATION.
Passing now from the religious or ecclesiastical
grievances of Ireland to that other great alleged
source of grievance, the agrarian policy of the Tudors,
— let us see how this stands. Irish Nationalist
writers, and their new sympathisers in England, go
on repeating that England forced upon Ireland her
own " land laws," which were totally unsuited to the
people, and have been the fountain of innumerable
woes. Those who use this language never take the
least trouble to define even to themselves what they
mean by the " English system " of land tenure. Do
they mean the size or extent of the Estates which
were granted to new settlers ? If so, they mean
something which has no relation to the facts. There
is no evidence that the new owners under the Tudors
held their rights over larger areas of land than the
old Celtic chiefs. Quite the contrary. Doubtless
there were large grants in some cases. But they
were generally, if not universally, the mere transfer
CH. VI.] IRISH LAND RENTS.' 169
to a new set of owners of great territorial estates held
by the Celtic or Ersefied English who had rebelled.
The general tendency was undoubtedly the other way
— to cut up the old larger territorial possessions of
the Irish chiefs into a greater number of comparatively
limited estates. What then is meant by the English
land system ? Is it the system of rent-paying on the
part of the peasantry, and rent-receiving on the part
of the Proprietary class? Was there anything new
in this? Is there any Irish writer — ^even a Nation-
alist — who will venture to deny that, under the old
Irish system, rent or its equivalents were universally
paid by all the occupiers of land? But more than
this — can they deny that the equivalents for regular
rent, in the shape of services and exactions of all
kinds, were infinitely more oppressive under the old
Celtic usages than under what they call the English
system? Nothing can be more certain and more
universally admittted by Irish historians and Annalists
than the fact that the Chiefs habitually, and as part
of the known usages of the country, could live upon
their agricultural tenants by unlimited exactions —
''eating them out of house and home," to use the
expressive phrase adopted by that intense Irishman,
Mr. Prendergast.
The one grand distinction between the English
system and the Irish was precisely this — that whereas
in Ireland there was no limit to feudal rent-exactions,
except the possibility of getting them, under the
170 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vt-
English system, the rent or dues were always
limited and definite in amount. This was the one
feature of English law which from the beginning
had been attractive to some Irishmen, and had in-
duced them to seek its protection, and even to buy it
with large sums of money. But in this lay the whole
wide difference between utter barbarism, and even
the possibilities of civilisation. It is worse than a
merely inflated fable — it is a direct opposite of the
truth — that, in this fundamental matter, the Irish
system was better for the people than the English
system. It was not only worse, but it was worse in
an immeasurable degree. There is no comparison at
all between the two systems. The Irish system was
incompatible with the very beginnings even of
agricultural prosperity. The English system, on the
contrary, was one which assured that prosperity in
those 'gradual degrees which were proportionate to
growing skill, and growing capital.
What then can be meant by the English system
which has been the source of Ireland's woes ?
Usually that system has been identified with the
custom — belonging to a later time, — under which the
proprietor builds the houses on a farm, and encloses
the fields, and drains the land. But, even in England,
this custom came later than the sixteenth or even
the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and was
merely one of the natural and rational developments
of the system of definite rents paid for definite
CH. VI.] CONDITION OF TENANTS. 171
privileges which were lent or let. Not that — even
in Ireland — some analogies with this custom were
wholly wanting. On the contrary, one very close
analogy was common. The Irish peasantry — even the
larger occupiers — were often, as we have seen, too
much impoverished by centuries of desolating wars,
to be able to provide '* capital " in the only form
in which it was known in those days, namely cattle.
Consequently all over Ireland the ownership of the
cattle had fallen almost wholly into the hands of the
Chiefs who were the strongest, and they supplied to
their dependents, at a rent, the whole stock, without
which land had no value whatever. Hence we see
the meaning of the Celtic eulogy on a great chief that
he was a "great distributor of cows." Not in any
other form was capital ever laid out on the land in
those days — at least in Ireland. The houses of the
whole people were nothing but huts and hovels.
Even in England, down to a much later date, the
rural population built their own cottages of wood and
clay. Nothing else was thought of. But in the
ownership by the chief of the only equipment of land
which was known in those days, — the cattle — what is
called vaguely the " English system " had its exact
counterpart in Ireland as a necessity in the nature of
the case. The one only difference which was essential
was that in England all rents had been made definite
and limited, instead of being, as in Ireland, indefinite
and unlimited.
172 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
What other meaning, then, can there be in the inflated
fable about the English land system ? If it be that
change in an agricultural system, which put an end to
an absolutely sedentary population — never moving
except when called to fight, or except when robbed
and decimated, or even exterminated by a victorious
enemy on the war-path — then indeed this was a
change, not specially English, but world-wide,
wherever peaceful industry began to be established
instead of the universal profession of arms. When
the new object and aim of life was to improve and
cultivate the soil, — to produce better corn and better
cattle, — then, of necessity, men came to be valued for
their ability and industry in this happier pursuit.
And just as men fared hardly in the military ages who
were weak or cowardly, so, when the industrial ages
began, men who were bad cultivators had to give
place to better. The best interests of society, — and
amongst other interests, that one of paramount im-
portance, the increase of the food of the people, —
were absolutely bound up with this great chauge.
But it was not a change peculiar to England. It
was European. And in those stagnant nations of the
East where a sedentary population has been stereo-
typed by the survival of primitive conditions, — as in
half-Oriental Russia — we now see, in our own day,
nothing but extreme poverty, indebtedness, and
frequent famines.
But next we come in the category of inflated fable
CH. VI.] lEISH CONFISCATIONS. 173
which ascribes all Irish woes to England, to the well-
worn phrase of " frequent confiscations." Considering
the unquestionable fact that a very large part — inde-
finite in numbers and equally indefinite in distribution
— of the existing population of Ireland are the direct
descendants of those to whom the land was given, and
not of those from whom the land was taken, — this his-
torical reminiscence does not seem to be very relevant.
Considering the farther fact that the whole population
of Ireland, without exception, have inherited whatever
rights they possess in land from either the new race of
owners who got the land for the first time, or from the
old owners who were not disturbed in their possession,
it does seem to be an " Irish idea" indeed to connect
any of the evils which now exist or which have
arisen within the last three hundred years with the
" confiscations " of the sixteenth, or the early part of
the seventeenth century.
But there is a great deal more than this to be
said about the Irish confiscations. They are not
generally or expressly^ referred to, and they cannot
be referred to, as justifying or accounting for any
sense of personal grievance in any portion of the
mixed population which in Ireland, as elsewhere,
is now a mongrel breed between those who gained
and those who lost, at a time removed from us
by so many generations. They are referred to for
no other purpose than that of heaping up epithets,
which may give the flavour of continuous wrong to all
174 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
that was done by England against Ireland. It may
be well, therefore, to point out the indisputable facts
w hich show how thoroughly justified were most of the
territorial confiscations upon every ground which has
been universally acted upon by all nations and govern-
ments in the history of the world. There is not a
civilised people now existing in Europe which is not
living on "confiscated land." The confiscation may
be more or less remote. But the fact is universal.
There is not now such a thing in existence as
aboriginal possession : and, for that matter, the Irish
of the mediaeval centuries were themselves conquerors,
dispossessors, and enslavers, within a time still at least
traditionally remembered. But, without going back
to those fundamental facts of all our modern civilisa-
tion, there were special circumstances, in the case of
Ireland, which, even in the light of modern law and
practice, are a special justification and defence of the
Irish confiscations three hundred years ago. If there
were frequent confiscations, it was only because there
were also frequent rebellions, and all of them more
or less closely connected with the danger of foreign
conspiracy and invasion. Then, besides this, there
was the still higher ground for the confiscations, that
the lands confiscated were almost universally in a
barbarous condition of neglect and waste as regarded
all the uses to which they were put.
As to the cultivation of the soil — there was none.
The truth is that, when we come to look into the
CH. VI.] THE CATHOLIC QUEEN. 175
evidence furnished to us by Irish historians themselves,
the only wonder is that confiscations on a large scale
were so long delayed, rather than that some such
confiscations were seen to be an absolute necessity at
last. And it is indeed a memorable fact that they were
not made when resentment against rebellion seemed
most natural, and when, as a mere form of punishment,
they would have been most amply justified, Nor were
they dictated, as is often supposed, by any connection
with religious persecution or even antagonism. Both
Henry VIII., in spite of his quarrel with the Pope,,
and Edward VI., in spite of his more pronounced
Protestantism in theology, dealt most gently with the
conquered Irish rebels, and systematically avoided
territorial confiscations. It was a Catholic Sovereign,
— Queen Mary — who began those confiscations and
adopted on a considerable scale the policy of Planta-
tions in Ireland. Mary, indeed, was a Catholic, but
she was also an English Queen, and she was a Tudor.
Whatever she might believe as to the Mass, or even
as to the supremacy of the Pope in matters of spiritual
belief, she was not willing to abate one iota of her
Sovereignty, or to sacrifice the interests of England as a
Nation, or as an Imperial Government. The Irish Chiefs,
on the other hand, did not care at all either for her
religion or for their own ; and, despite her Catholicism,
her accession to the crown was at once marked by a
revival of their rebellious habits. Farther than this
— there was the urgent fact to be dealt with, — that a
176 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
great district in Ireland, — close to the old English
Pale, within easy reach of the Capital, and command-
ing access to other parts of Ireland, lay in the hands
of certain chiefs who kept it in a state of absolute
waste, and valued it only as the inaccessible harbourage
of the armed bands with which they raided the sur-
rounding provinces. The continued possession of it
by them made any progress towards even a decent
civilisation impossible in a region lying close to the
very heart of the kingdom. Never, therefore, in the
history of the world, could there be a more thorough
justification, or indeed a more absolute necessity for
the action of any Sovereign than that which was taken
by Queen Mary, when she erected the great territory
held by the O'Mores and the O'Connors into the
civilised districts ever since known as the Queen's
County and King's County.
Dr. Kichey as usual admits all the facts, and
as usual also gives way to the most incongruous
sentiments of censure and regret. He admits that
"no Irish tribe had been the cause of such con-
stant annoyance to the English Government." He
admits that the territory they held was " theoreti-
cally," — that is to say legally, — a part of the terri-
tory of the arch-rebel Geraldine, who had been the
cause of the war in 1553, and whose lands were
justly forfeited by rebellion. He admits that it was
simply "a wild pathless tract of forest and bog,
almost inaccessible to the forces of the Crown." He
CH. VI.] QUEEN mart's PLANTATIONS. 177
admits that it menaced the Pale, and threatened the
communications between Dublin and Kilkenny. He
admits that the tribe was so wild and lawless as to be
a perpetual danger to the Government, and that they
had been the most active supporters of the Geraldine
rebellion — in short, he admits every fact which estab-
lishes not only the fullest justification of the action of
Queen Mary, but the absolute necessity for it in the
interests of her kingdom and people. He further
admits that after all the Queen did not wish or pro-
pose to expel the whole native population, but only to
make a division of the land between them and new
settlers, who could, and who would improve the
country, and keep the peace. Nay more, — he admits
the triumphant success of the first Plantation — how
the country became improved — how the dense thickets
were removed — how the bogs were reclaimed — how
wealth and comfort were established, — where nothing
but savagery and poverty had held sway for centuries.
Yet he cannot help inserting the qualifying epithet
" material " before the word " wealth " — as if any
spiritual or intellectual wealth had flourished in the
woods and bogs of a tribe of lawless freebooters ! But
the most candid admission of all is that which this
excellent historian makes as regards the general result
of the Plantation. He says that result was such as to
satisfy alike " the statesman, the lawyer, and the econo-
mist." Surely under one or other of those three cate-
gories every consideration may be brought which ought
N
178 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
to determine the conduct of civilised and Christian
Governments. Let us admit — if this be demanded of
us — the right of the O'Mores and the O'Connor tribes-
men to fight for the continued possession of their old
wasted lands — as we are told they did go on fight-
ing for their woods and bogs until they were either
expelled or exterminated. We may even sympathise
with them in such a struggle, just as we sympathise
with any other wild creatures whose habits and whose
traditions are incompatible with the very elements of
civilisation. But at least do not let us commit the
double absurdity and injustice of blaming the Sove-
reign, or the nation, which was compelled to assert
its own supremacy, or of pretending that the existing
population of those two Irish counties have been
injured by the conquest of their barbarian predecessors,
or by the civilised laws which they now enjoy.
Nor is it enough to stand on the defensive in this
great question as regards the conduct of England
towards Ireland. Of the seventy years that passed
between the time when Henry VIII. undertook, in
earnest and at last, an efi*ective subjugation of Ireland
under the English Crown and the English law, every
year was marked by some step more or less sure, how-
ever slow, towards the great end of securing for the
first time some measure of prosperity and civilisation
among a people who, for more than seven hundred
years, had been the prey and the victims of their own
desolating tribal wars. The remaining years of Henry's
CH. VI.] QUEEN ELIZABETH. 179
own life, the seven years of his son Edward VI., — the
five years of the Catholic Queen Mary — had all seen
substantial progress made, in spite of many difficul-
ties, in one part of the island or another. The forty-
five years of Queen Elizabeth's reign were full of
events which more than ever impressed upon the Eng-
lish people the life-and-death character of the struggle
which she had to maintain in Ireland, against foreign
as well as domestic foes. The half-century of the
Spanish Armada was one which burnt this great lesson
into the English heart and mind. Elizabeth found
on her hands a war with France and a war with Scot-
land. She could barely afford to keep up a little force
of fifteen hundred men in Ireland. The " Ersefied "
Geraldines were again meditating rebellion, and a
renewal of the alliance with the old Celtic rebel chiefs.
The North of Ireland was being rapidly " planted " by
invaders from the Celtic Hebrides, as hostile to Eng-
land as the Irish tribes whom they had exterminated
or driven out.
It was under these circumstances that Queen
Elizabeth at once indicated her determination to
pursue her sister's policy of Plantations — that is to
say, of colonising appropriate parts of Ireland with
loyal and industrious subjects, and especially that
part of the North of Ireland which was then being
actually " planted " bj^ men who were at once extermi-
nators of the native \Frish and, at the same time, in-
veterate enemies of England. Thus so early as the
180 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
very first year after her accession, the Plantation of
Ulster, subsequently effectei with such triumphant
success, was deliberately planned by Queen Elizabeth,
with the view, as she expressed it, ''of peopling some
parts thereof (Ireland), and especially the North, now
possessed with the Scots." * But next followed the
War of Shane O'Neill, one of the last of the contests
between the English Crown and a great Irish rebel
chief. It is useless and irrelevant to lay any stress on
this man's personal character. Dr. Richey implies
that English writers have exaggerated the blackness
of its features. But his own account of it may well
satisfy the most hostile writer who has ever painted
the characteristics of that kind and type of man. Dr.
Richey admits that he " was a murderer ; " that he
was " bloodthirsty and merciless ; " that he was *' false
and treacherous ; " that he was " profligate in his life; "
that he was a " drunkard ; " that he was a *' tyrant ; "
— that he was "barbarous in his manners." But
against all those admissions Dr. Richey sets off counter-
accusations against the personal character of many of
his enemies. With all this we have really nothing to
do. What we have to do with is tlie much more
important admission of Dr. Richey that " Shane
O'Neill," whose family and clan had accepted the
Earldom of Tyrone from Henry VIII., was aiming in
his war at no object short of that of making himself
Kinor of Ulster. " t What we have to do with is his
* "Short History," p. 451. f Ibid., p. 461.
CH. Ti.] SHANE O'NEILL'S EEBELLION. 181
farther admission that England under Queen Elizabeth
— the " We " of Mr. Gladstone — acted under the one
" fixed idea " that this was not to be allowed. What
we also have to do with, as a subordinate fact
and consideration, is this — that Dr. Richey admits,
farther, that Shane's ambition was not at all in the
interest even of his brother Celts in Ireland, inasmuch
as it was no object of his " to unite the Ulster Chiefs,
but to crush them beneath him." What we have to
do with — in short — are the conclusions admirably ex-
pressed by this writer himself in the following words,
giving a summary of the whole war: "The leading
native Chief aimed at establishing his ancient
supremacy in utter disregard of the changed con-
dition of things, and uninfluenced either by patriotism
or religion — staked his existence in the attempt at
once to resist foreign dominion, and crush into obe-
dience his traditional vassals : (whilst) the lesser
chiefs, equally regardless of country, sought only to
maintain their local independence, and hailed the Eng-
lish as deliverers." * At last, in 1567, Shane O'Neill
was defeated, and took refuge with the Hebridean
Celts who had devastated a great part of Ulster. By
them in a drunken brawl, and in revenge for old
injuries, he was in true Irish fashion hacked to pieces,
along with all his immediate followers who had not
time to mount their horses and escape.
Next and last came the "Desmond War" — one of a
* " Short History," p. 489.
182 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
similar kind, but contemporary with other events of
high significance in judging of the conduct of England
towards Ireland. There is one method of looking at
history which may often be most usefully adopted.
It is the method of looking back on the conduct of
men very much as we look on the actions of the lower
animals, or of the inanimate agencies of nature. On
this method we do not read of, or look at, events with
any reference either to praise or blame. We do not
even think of conduct as determined by reason, but
only of action as determined by causes. Keason, of
course, is in itself not only one cause, but the very
highest and noblest of all causes. But men cannot be
considered always as purely reasoning beings. They
are governed by feelings and impulses which are com-
paratively in the nature of mere physical causes. It
is in this aspect that — more or less consciously — Irish
historians are apt to take up the defence of their
countrymen in the past centuries. We are summoned
to consider what was only natural and inevitable in
their conduct — they being what they were. This is
quite fair — so far as it goes, — ^and it is an aspect of
every historical question which ought never to be
altogether neglected.
But if this criterion of judgment be adopted as
regards the conduct of the native Irish during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or in any other
century, we have a right to demand that it be equally
applied to the conduct of the English Government and
CH. VI.] THE CATHOLIC CONSPIKACY. 183
people at the same epochs. And this, with his usual
candour, Dr. Kichey admits. He is honest enough to
conceal nothing, although he treads lightly sometimes
on the tremendous significance of the contemporary
events of that memorable time of thirty-six years,
which elapsed between the suppression of Shan
O'Neiirs rebellion in 1567 and the end of the reign of
Queen Elizabeth in 1603.
That was the time when England stood almost alone
in Europe, not only as the bulwark of a theological
Protestantism, but as the one great mainstay and
defence of all the liberties, political and intellectual, of
the civilised world. It was the time of the great
Catholic reaction — of the counter-Reformation — of
the cruel and sanguinary wars in the Low Countries
carried on by the armies of Spain under Alva — of the
organised attack on England by the Spanish Armada.
It opened with the promulgation in 1569 of a Bull of
Excommunication by the Pope against Queen Eliza-
beth — an instrument which was expressly intended to
release all her subjects from the duty of allegiance
and which, it was specially hoped, might rouse the
native Irish, who were all Catholic, to reinforce foreign
invasion by domestic treason and rebellion. We may
try to conceive — perhaps it is difficult now to do so
adequately, — so far off do those times seem to be —
with what feelings of indignation, exasperation, and
defiance, those events must have inspired all English-
men in defence of everything that they held most
184 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
sacred. This is enough not only to account for all
they did, but also, at least as regards their aim and
motive, to justify their conduct and even to make it
glorious. The danger was great, imminent, and per-
petually renewed. There was hardly a year of that
long generation when there was not some dark cloud
on the horizon — some threat of invasion — some fresh
intrigue with Irish rebels, or even some alarming
successes of those rebels to keep up the national
excitement, and to warn England that she must strain
every nerve to secure her safety by keeping whole the
integrity of her dominion. Spanish correspondence
and intrigue was always going on. Spanish ships
were constantly hovering round the coasts of Ireland.
The Desmond rebellion arose in the Province of
Munster — suppressed indeed easily as regards military
operations, but at great cost and trouble. This was
followed by another of those Plantations which gave
to Ireland the only prosperous populations she had
held for centuries. Then came a renewed rebellion
on the part of the great clan of the O'Neills, re-
presented by the Earl of Tyrone.
So formidable was this rebellion at one time that,
in 1598, the Queen's army was defeated with great
slaughter, including the Marshal in command, and
eighteen out of twenty-three ofiScers of rank. England
was at last thoroughly aroused and alarmed. An army
of twenty thousand men had to be poured into the
country; castles were stormed, the territories of the
CH. VI.] Tyrone's rebellion. 185
enemy were wasted with fire and sword. Forts were
established, and the country occupied by an army of
men, many of whom had seen the butcheries of the
Catholic party in the Low Country. Then followed
another signal proof of the real danger to be feared.
A Spanish fleet arrived on the Irish coast in 1601. It
landed a force at Kinsale; and called on all Irish-
men to rise in the name of the Pope. " I speak to
Catholics," said Don Juan de Aqnila, the Spanish
General, " not to froward heretics." Another force
of Spaniards soon landed at Castlehaven, and then
at once the Irish Chiefs of Cork and Kerry rose and
joined their allies. Nothing could so well serve to
burn into the very heart of England the inseparable
connection between Irish rebellion and the utmost
peril of her own destruction. The joint Spanish-Irish
army was defeated with a slaughter aggravated, as
usual, by the ferocity of the Irish element which was
in alliance with the English army. Yet so far was the
conduct of England from being unreasonably vindictive
after her victory, that it may well astonish us to recol-
lect that Tyrone was ultimately allowed to retain his
possessions almost on the same terms which he had
himself proposed several years before. Well might
Tyrone " burst into tears " when he heard of the death
of Queen Elizabeth, as he rode into Dublin in 1603.
For, unlike the Queen herself, neither her English
nor her loyal Irish subjects could bear to see a man
treated with honour and kept in great local power, who
186 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
had done his very best to bring down upon Ireland
the dominion of Philip of Spain. New Catholic con-
spiracies, as is well known, real or believed, speedily-
inflamed still farther the fears and the passions of
all who were filled with the spirit of a natural and
justifiable distrust ; until at last, in 1607, the last of '
the Irish Chiefs, who had so long kept up the tra-
ditions of anarchy, violence, and rebellion, fled from
Ireland, and the real conquest of the Island was at
last crowned by the Plantation of a half-empty and
desolated Province, by James I.
But now let us again proceed in our review of
the centuries of Irish history. The dominant facts
and considerations, by which we are bound to judge
of the conduct of both parties engaged in the wars
of the concluding years of the sixteenth century,
are the same facts and principles by which we
must continue to judge of them during the whole
of the seventeenth. Keligion and politics were in-
separably interwoven. That Christ's kingdom is " not
of this world" was a doctrine neither accepted
nor even understood by anybody. The great contest
lay between the cause of Rome and despotic govern-
ments on the one side, and the cause of Protestant
England and constitutional liberty on the other.
Ireland was only one of the battle-fields on which this
great contest was carried on. By all means, let the
conduct of both parties be considered as "only natural."
But let this doctrine be equally applied. Even if the
en. Vi.] England's case stated. 187
principle of perfect religious toleration had been ad-
mitted by either of them, it would not have been
applicable to the case. Catholicism did not represent
religion — pure and unmixed. It represented, in a pre-
eminent degree, politics in its most fundamental prin-
ciples. It represented ambitions of dominion — fierce
hatreds and antipathies — and resolutions of violence
fortified by the flavour of religious fanaticism. The
English Government and people, on the other hand,
represented in an intense degree the spirit of a proud
nationality, and all the passions which are naturally
arolised by the danger or by the fear of losing it.
Looking at events in this point of view, it is quite
idle to blame either party. What we ought to do is
to make due allowance for both in respect to personal
conduct, and above all to associate our sympathies with
whichever cause we can best identify as representing
the lasting interests of mankind. In this point of view
it is quite possible, or ought to be possible, for us now
to cast aside all thought of the questions of mere theo-
logy which distinguish the Koman from the Eeformed
Churches. But let us always remember that a great
nation is a thing of infinite value in the history of
mankind — of a value altogether immeasurable as com-
pared with rude local tribes such as the Irish, with an
almost unbroken history of anarchy and barbarism for
more than a thousand years. We have only to look at
the conduct of Mary Tudor, — an intense Catholic in
her personal religious belief, — to see this great natural
188 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vi.
connection, and the universal instinct of it, translated
into corresponding action. The Protestant Sovereign,
James, who succeeded the half-Catholic sister of Mary
Tudor, pursued exactly the same policy, and with as
complete justification in Ulster, which Mary Tudor had
pursued in the district of the O'Mores and the
O'Connors. Nor can it be questioned that the Plan-
tation of Ulster was even more successful. To this
day it is the most industrious and peaceful part of
Ireland. In respect to that Plantation we may use
the words of Dr. Kichey in respect to the Queen's and
King's Counties by the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor —
that " the statesman, the economist, and the lawyer
may alike be satisfied."
( 189 )
CHAPTEK VIL
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
With the "Flight of the Earls," the last of the
great Irish Chiefs, — with the death of Queen Elizabeth,
and the Plantation of Ulster, — we enter on the full
current of that seventeenth century which was every-
where an epoch of civil and of foreign wars and of
political troubles — all of them animated with, and
some of them entirely dominated by, the fiercest
religious passions. They were prolonged and destruc-
tive over almost the whole of Europe. They caused
much suffering and distress in England, still more in
Scotland. But in Ireland it may be said with truth
that the whole century presented the spectacle of a
veritable Pandemonium. It was truly a hell upon
earth. Each party when dissecting the conduct of the
other can truthfully describe it in the blackest colours
of injustice, violence, and the most savage cruelty.
For this period we lose the guidance of that historian,
Dr. Kichey, whose perfect fidelity to fact we have seen
to be wholly unaffected by his occasional outbursts
190 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. vii.
of inconsistent sentiment. But it is more than a full
compensation that we come instead under the guidance
of another Irish historian of the highest rank in
English literature, Mr. Lecky. In tone and balance
of mind he is quite as judicial as Dr. Eichey, and, if
there is any bias due to nationality, it takes the
better and stronger line of protesting against the some-
what rough partisanship of Mr. Froude. In deal-
ing with the dreadful massacres of Protestants with
which the great Irish rebellion of 1641 began, Mr.
Lecky has proved, I think, to demonstration that
at least the extent and number of them has been
greatly exaggerated. In dealing with . the causes
which led up to that rebellion, he has laid an
amount of stress on the feelings of exasperation
roused by the policy of conquest and of Plantations
which tends, I think, to obscure our memory of the
preceding condition of the country, of its utter
anarchy — of its chronic poverty, of its decimation
by other enemies, and of the hopeless waste of its
naturally fertile lands by the most barbarous systems
of native exactions. But Mr. Lecky's great point is
one in which ^he is indisputably right — namely, this —
that the Catholics in Ireland had the best reason to
be convinced that, in a yearly increasing degree, the
Government, and especially the Parliament of England,
was aiming at, and was determined to effect, the com-
plete suppression of their Church, which was to them
the whole of their religion.
CH. viT.] INEVITABLE ANTAGONISMS. 191
In the time of Henry VITI. this had not been true.
Considerations of policy, and not of religion, had been
supreme with him. This was still more evident and
was made indeed conspicuous in the conduct of Mary
Tudor. Even Queen Elizabeth was but a half-hearted
Protestant in theology. But, during the reign of
James I., and still more during the reign of his suc-
cessor, Charles I., that torrent of Protestant passion,
which — in the form of Puritanism — had been gather-
ing head for many years in England, burst through
all restraint, and obtained complete possession of the
English people and of the English House of Commons.
Mr. Lecky is fully justified in pointing out this
great historical fact, and in putting prominently
forward, in mitigation of the conduct of the Irish,
that to a large extent they were then a "half-
savage" people whose native soil had been invaded,
conquered, and planted by those whom they regarded
as hereditary enemies, and whose religion was directly
threatened with extinction.
It is quite fair to remember all this. But what is im-
peratively demanded, if we take the philosophical line
in judging of human conduct, is that we should apply
it equally all round. I am not quite sure that in trying
to redress one side of the balance, Mr. Lecky always
recollects the other side. If Ireland had good reason
to believe that Protestant and half-Puritan England
was determined on the suppression of their Church,
most assuredly England had equal reason to be con-
192 IKISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vii.
vinced that the Catholic party, both in Ireland and
all over the Continent, was one vast and ever-active
conspiracy to overthrow Protestantism in England, and
to crush her liberties under both a political and a re-
ligious despotism. The Irish Catholic party was known
to be in constant communication with the implacable
enemies of England ; and the only course for a philo-
sophical politician to take is to consider two great
questions, first — which of the two great contending
parties in Europe began the course of religious tyranny,
intolerance, and savage cruelty ; — and secondly, which
of those two parties was, on the whole, most freighted
with the principles and beliefs on which the progress
of the world depends. To some extent, of course,
the last of these two questions may, even still, be a
matter of opinion. There may be men surviving in
the nineteenth century who think that it would have
been better for the world, and for Christianity in
particular, if Ireland, and England too, had been sub-
jected to the Government of Philip of Spain, or of
Louis XIV., and if Protestantism had been put down
by such measures as Alva used in the Low Countries,
and the French monarch adopted in the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes. But as to the first of the
two questions above indicated — which of the parties
began persecution — there can be but one reply. It
is a matter of historical fact, and not at all a
matter of opinion. The abominable doctrine, that
men's religious convictions were to be put down by
CH. VII.] ^ PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY. 193
force, and that heresy was to be quenched in blood,
was then the favourite doctrine of the " Catholic "
Church. Nor was it a doctrine only. It was put in
practice and enforced all over Europe in the very
sight and hearing of those who in England came to
identify the Catholic cause in Ireland, and everywhere
else, with the ruin of all that was dear to them in life.
And even if they had not been Protestants they had
at least the same interests and inducements connected
with an Imperial dominion as those which dictated
the conduct of Mary Tudor, the Catholic Queen of
England.
And then, is there not another aspect of the whole
case which is forgotten in Mr. Lecky's excellent
chapter on the history of Ireland during that dreadful
century — the seventeenth ? If we are to be really
philosophical historians, is it possible to avoid the
questions which arise when we weigh in the balance
of a higher morality, and of a higher knowledge, the
comparative character of the many motives which
have been the cause of man's fearful " inhumanity to
man"? How stand the ferocious hatreds and the
cruel deeds of clan and intertribal wars as compared
with those which have their origin in conviction,
however false and misdirected, as to the duty of
enforcing religious truth? Which has the nobler
elements of the two ? Which of them stands nearest
to the dawn of a rising day? Yet it is undeniable
that the miseries of Ireland, — and they can hardly be
194 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vii.
exaggerated — during at least a thousand years, had
been due entirely to that lowest form and stage of
perverted human instincts. Men who fight, and spoil,
and massacre under the fierce incitements of religious
bigotry, or of the pride of a great national dominion,
have at least some great object in view. Men who do
the same under no other incitement than hereditary
feuds, or the plunder of cows, have nothing in view
that can be even called a cause in the progress of
humanity. Mr. Lecky holds up to just condemnation
the conduct and the language of Cromwell when he
put to death a number of helpless Catholic captives
after he had stormed the city of Wexford. And yet,
on a smaller scale, and under no similar fanaticism,
such massacres had been constant in the fights
between native chiefs and tribes during many cen-
turies. Then, again — as regards the lower motives of
cupidity on which Mr. Lecky dwells in the conduct
of the English in Ireland, we may well ask whether is
it worse to covet land for the purpose of planting a
higher civilisation, than to covet cattle for no other
purpose than that of mere plunder and robbery ? This
had been the most constant and predominant of all
motives in the Irish native wars ; and it often involved
not merely the most abject poverty to the vanquished,
but the extreme consequences of actual famine. Then
lastly — if we are to be philosophical, — is it fair to
forget that the very feelings of indignation and of
horror with which we now read the words of Cromwell,
CH. vn.] IRELAND NOT GOVERNED BY ENGLAND. 195
in respect to the massacre of rebellious Catholics, are
feelings which have arisen out of the very conquest he
effected, and even out of the triumph of the special
sect to which he belonged. The Independents —
threatened with persecution by both Episcopalians and
Presbyterians — were the first Christian sect to pro-
claim the doctrine of religious toleration ; and the
inconsistent conduct of Cromwell towards the Koman
Catholics is one of the many proofs that throughout
the seventeenth century and, as we shall presently see,
down to a much later date, the Catholic Church was
never in that century thought of as a mere theological
or religious sect, but as a great political power,
acting under the most determined motives of political
domination, and armed with the most formidable
means of military strength.
But the main lesson to be enforced from the history
of Ireland, during the whole of the seventeenth cen-
tury, is to establish the conclusion that it must be
withdrawn absolutely from our reckoning of the time
during which Ireland was, in any proper sense of the
term, under the Grovernment of England. It was a
century mainly occupied by the completion of the
necessary work of conquest. That work, even if it
had been conducted most humanely, instead of being
conducted as it was under every possible inducement
to the most passionate indignation, was in itself a work
incompatible with the exhibition of the settled and
peaceful policy of an established government. Con-
196 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vii.
sequently any charge against England, which is
founded on the omission or forgetfulness of this cardinal
fact, is liable, in proportion to the injustice of the
terms in which it is conveyed, to the condemnation of
being a serious misrepresentation. And nothing, ac-
cordingly, can be more grossly unfair and unjust than
the language used on more than one occasion by Mr.
Gladstone, when, for political purposes, it has been his
object to heap up odium against England, under the
plausible appearance of candour by the use of the
pronoun " We." Thus, for example, the employment
of foreign mercenaries in putting down the rebellion
by King William has been referred to as aggravating
the sins of England in the vindication of his sovereignty
over Ireland, — a reproach which implicitly, although
not explicitly, implies the glaring injustice of assuming
that the invocation of foreign intervention was the
special and peculiar iniquity of England — whereas it
is notorious that foreign intervention had been the
one hope and the one strenuous endeavour of all Irish
rebels since the invasion of Edward Bruce in the four-
teenth century : had been resorted to repeatedly during
later centuries — was most conspicuous and most
dangerous to England during the whole of the century
then running, — and, in the final struggle at the Battle
of the Boyne, was visibly represented by the presence
of some ten thousand men of the best troops of France.
This sort of misrepresentation is a great deal worse
than merely "inflated fable." That phrase may
CH. VII.] COMPARATIVE INTOLERANCE. 197
mean nothing worse than great exaggeration. But
the ripping up, by a minister of the Crown, of old
animosities by a special accusatioo, which of ne-
cessity implies a total misrepresentation of historic
truth, is a far worse offence than any amount of mere
exaggeration.
Then there is another item in Mr. Gladstone's
language about Ireland which is open to an objection
almost equally serious. He has denied that the Irish
Catholic party has ever shown any disposition to
persecute the Protestants. It is, of course, true that
as the purely religious element did not, as we have
seen, enter much into the inducements to Irish re-
bellion until the beginning of the seventeenth century,
and as, moreover, the Catholic party had no general
ascendency, except for a moment, at the end of it,
the odium of religious persecution attaches most
visibly to the Protestant and not to the Catholic
cause. But, besides and in addition to the close
alliance of the Irish Catholic party with those foreign
Governments who were pre-eminently persecutors,
when, at the Eevolution, a moment did come when
the Irish Catholics gained a complete ascendency, then
the disposition towards religious persecution blazed
forth in overt acts of the utmost violence and injustice.
Mr. Lecky has indeed, fairly enough, protested against
the one-sidedness of the dark pictures drawn by
Macaulay of the deeds of the Irish Parliament of
1699. In the same spirit of philosophic equity in
198 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vii.
which he has pleaded in palliation of the Irish
massacres of 1641-2, on the ground mainly of intense
provocation, he has also pleaded in palliation of the
forfeitures and attainders of Protestants by this almost
purely Irish Parliament. I have not a word to say
against this view of the case when it is equally applied.
But it must be so applied to be at all compatible with
truth and justice. And when this application is made,
it remains undeniable that the doctrines of religious
persecution were then the doctrines of the Catholic
party, and its practice, too, whenever it got the power.
The truth thus comes clearly out, as the result of
the historical facts which I have now traced, that we
must practically subtract the whole of the seventeenth
century from the time during which England has been
fully and really responsible for the Grovernment of
Ireland. Her assured and complete dominion did
not begin until the close of that century, or rather the
beginning of the eighteenth century, when William
III. finally accomplished the suppression of the Irish
rebellion.
Our investigation into the course of Irish history
has now established the conclusion that, so far as those
causes are concerned which determined the domestic
and economic condition of the people, they lay entirely
outside the power of the earlier English " Lords," or of
the later English Kings of Ireland. Those causes lay
not only predominantly, but almost exclusively, in the
persistent survival in Ireland of native habits, usages.
CH. VII.] SHORT PERIOD OF ENGLISH RULE. 199
and traditions, some of which had indeed been common
to the earlier stages of society in other countries, but
the whole of which in Ireland had yielded to no
process of development except the development of
increasing barbarism and destructiveness. The seven-
teenth century was almost wholly occupied by civil
wars incidental to the indispensable work of establish-
ing English sovereignty, and of repelling the danger
of a foreign dominion over one of the three kingdoms.
With the concluding ten years of that century, and
with the opening years of the eighteenth, we for the
first time enter upon a time when England did become
more or less responsible for the government of Ireland
in so far as the possession of full dominion, and of
supreme political power, were concerned. This con-
dition of things, however, lasted only till the year
1782, when a virtual independence was conceded to a
native Parliament. From that moment any supreme
power was lost, and with it any supreme responsi-
bility ; so that, as one striking result of all these
indisputable facts, we see that the inflated fable of
" seven centuries " of English rule over Ireland
becomes reduced in sober truth to a period of rule
less prolonged than that of many a single human
life. And, although, no doubt, it is conceivably
possible to do much harm even to a nation in the
course of a single human life, it is plain that we
begin our farther investigation of this fractional
period in a closely consecutive history of more than
200 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vii.
a thousand years, with a presumption of tremendous
force that the influences and tendencies which had
gathered strength during that long lapse of time, did
not at one fixed date suddenly cease to be, but, on
the contrary, that they must have continued to exert
a more or less powerful influence for the ninety-two
years which followed the nine /hundred years preced-
ing. Only in the case of the complete extermination
or the complete expulsion of any people can such a
complete break be effected in the continuity of social
causes; and in the case of Ireland, much as we all
talk of the confiscations and plantations of the Catholic
Queen Mary, of Queen Elizabeth, of James I., and of
Cromwell, yet, after all, the great bulk of the Irish
people were comparatively unaffected, and remained
in a great deal larger numbers and in greater force
than was sufiScient to carry on the old habits and
traditions of the race to which they belonged, with
all the peculiar social and political conditions which
had made them what they were.
When, therefore, Mr. Lecky says that no Govern-
ment has ever had more complete or more uncontrolled
power over any people than England had over Ireland
from the battle of the Boyne, which completed the
conquest in 1690, down to 1782, we may accept this
assertion implicitly without any sacrifice of our right
and our duty to examine very carefully the limitations
under wl^ich alone it can possibly be true. It is true
in all senses except that in which any political power is
CH. VII.] PHYSICAL CONDITION OF IRELAND. 201
supposed to be independent of the nature of things —
of surrounding facts — of the influences which these
facts must necessarily exert upon the minds both of
governors and of the governed — of the purely physical
materials it has to work upon — and of the universally
accepted doctrines of men in the epoch in which that
power is exercised. Mr. Lecky, as we shall see, fully
admits these limitations, at least in general terms,
although I do not think he quite sees some of them,
or fully appreciates the full force of others which he
does see and does specify.
In the first place, then, let us recollect what was
the physical condition of Ireland at the close of the
long and exhausting civil wars, which were at least
as destructive as — although they could hardly be worse
than — her own old intertribal, continual, and inter-
necine fightings. All Irish historians are agreed that
the destruction of human life, and especially of pro-
perty, effected during the civil wars which followed
the great rebellion of 1641, was only to be compared
with the similar devastations of the Island produced
by the invasion of Edward Bruce in the fourteenth
century, and from which Ireland is said not to have
recovered for many generations. The population was
reduced to the lowest ebb both in number and re-
sources. The Island was still covered with bogs and
forests. No beginnings even of agricultural improve-
ment had been possible, or were even conceivable to
the people. They were sunk in ignorance and super-
202 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. vii.
stition. The only form in which capital had ever been
known in Ireland, namely, the form of cattle, was as
nearly exhausted as was compatible with the bare main-
tenance of life among a scanty population, ignorant even
of the commonest expedients for keeping cattle alive
during the winter months. Mr. Lecky, in justly de-
precating extreme censure on these poor people when
they broke out in deeds of cruelty and massacre against
the Protestants who were suppressing their religion
and occupying their lands, calls them '* half-savages,"
And this is the plain truth — implying no disbelief in
the high capacities of a quick-witted and imaginative
race, but simply describing the condition as to the
very elements of civilisation in which centuries of
their own native misgovernment had left them. But
if this was the admitted condition of the people, and
of the country, it must be admitted, not for the
purpose of one particular argument alone, but for all
the arguments which it may effect. Such was the
physical condition of the country, which for the first
time fell into the hands of England to be governed,
and such was the economic and the intellectual con-
dition of the great mass of its people. One immediate
and insuperable consequence was this, — never now
sufficiently thought of or considered, — that even as
regarded the mere physical or material improvement
of the country — the drainage of bogs, the clearing of
forest thickets, and the reclamation of other kinds of
waste land, for the mere production of human food in
CH. vil] instincts of DOMINION WHOLESOME. 203
any tolerable sufficiency — the sole reliance of England,
and of Ireland herself, lay in the new planters, whether
as owners or as mere occupiers, who brought at least
some knowledge, some skill, some industry, and some
capital into the island. We have only to follow up
this fact and this reflection to a few of its most im-
mediate consequences to see how much they practically
involve. They indicate that inseparable connection
which exists between the natural action of human
instincts and the ultimate welfare of mankind. The
instinct of nations in respect to the security of their
dominion, and of individual men in respect to the
security of whatever property they may have acquired,
is a universal and insuperable instinct; and we see
how in abstract economic reasoning both those in-
tincts, which are indeed one, must have co-operated
with increased intensity in Ireland from the moment
that the suppression of rebellion had been accom-
plished by William III.
The next step follows as a matter of necessary
consequence. The head and front of the offending of
England against Ireland at this time is most truly
identified with the two great systems of policy and of
law which the English Government brought into new
operation. One of these was the system of Penal Laws
against the Irish Catholics, and the other was the
system of Protective Laws against the commercial
freedom of all Irishmen, whether Catholic or Pro-
testant. Nothing can be more true than that these
204 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vit.
were for a while, if not the dominant, at least the
most conspicuous, features in the new government of
England. Yet if we look at each of them in turn we
shall see, as Mr. Lecky most fairly admits, that the
conduct of England, in respect to both of them, was
dictated by motives, and under conditions, of almost
insuperably coercive strength.
In the first place, both Dr. Eichey and Mr. Lecky —
pattern historians in recording facts — admit explicitly
that the Irish Penal Laws, which were enacted between
1700 and 1709, were nothing but the echo and re-
joinder, on the part of Protestant England, to the
innumerable persecuting laws and practices of the
Catholic party all over Europe wherever it had the
power. " The celebrated penal laws," says Dr. Eichey,
" are the reflection of the equally detestable legislation
of the Bourbons." * I attach no importance to Mr.
Lecky 's notice and admission of the fact that the
penal laws of Queen Anne were passed through the
instrumentality of the Irish and not of the English
Parliament; because, as the English Parliament was
supreme, the ultimate and the substantial respon-
sibility may undoubtedly be laid upon it. But I do
attach great importance to the fact, as admitted by
Mr. Lecky, that, at that time, " over the greater part
of Europe, the relations of Protestantism and Catholi-
cism were still those of deadly hostility." * I attach
* " Short History," p. 132.
t Lecky's " History of Ireland," vol. i, p. 241.
CH. VII.] ENGLAND IN PEEMANENT DANGER. 205
still greater importance to the more detailed and
specific admission of the same conscientious historian,
when he informs his readers that the Irish penal laws
" were largely modelled after the French legislation
against the Huguenots; but persecution in Ireland never
approached in severity that of Louis XIV. ; and it was
absolutely insignificant compared with that which had
extirpated Protestantism and Judaism from Spain." *
But this is not all — it is not even the strongest fact
that is to be remembered in judging of the conduct
of England at this time. It would have been indeed
an irrational and a purely savage proceeding, to re-
venge upon the Irish the iniquities of foreign Govern-
ments, if no urgent danger, and hardly any risk even,
would arise in Ireland from this universal temper of
Catholicism towards Protestantism in general, and
towards England in particular. But the matter is
wholly altered, and the whole complexion of the
question changed, the moment it is admitted that
England still was, or at any rate conceived herself to
be in imminent danger, from year to year, from the
old Catholic conspiracy against her among the Conti-
nental States — certain to make use, as they had
always done, of Catholic disaffection in Ireland for
the suppression of Protestantism and the overthrow
of the English Monarchy. Now, it is on this very
question that Mr. Lecky, with his usual fairness, gives
emphatic, though somewhat scattered, testimony. In
* Lecky's " History of Ireland," vol. i. p. 137.
206 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vn.
the first place, he makes at the very outset of his
history of the eighteenth century, this striking state-
ment : — " The position of the new dynasty was exceed-
ingly precarious, and its downfall would inevitably be
followed by a new revolution of property in Ireland."
The only defect in this statement is, that it rather
seems to limit the consequences of the overthrow of
the Protestant Monarchy in England to a revolution
in respect to " property." It is needless to say that it
would have been a revolution in everything else — to
all that Englishmen hold dear in law, liberty, and life.
In harmony with these facts, and in an inseparable
connection with them, Mr. Lecky fully admits that
the Irish penal laws were " not mainly the product of
religious feeling, but of policy." * Again, he says,
"Besides, there was in reality not much religious
fanaticism." f And, yet once more, in connection
with his distinction between the safety of property
and the safety of all on which property depends, he
says, " The penal Code, as it was actually carried out,
was inspired much less by fanaticism than by rapacity,
and was directed less against the Catholic religion
than against the property and industry of its pro-
fessors." t All these are but different ways of
expressing the unquestionable fact that the Irish
penal laws had essentially a political origin and a
political aim, and that this aim was nothing less
* Lecky's " History of Ireland/' vol. i. p. 137.
t Ibid., p. 168. t Ibid., p. 152.
CH. VII.] THE PENAL LAWS. 207
important than the security of the Protestant religion,
and of the English Government and nation. Not only
are all the historical facts connected with these Acts
consistent with this explanation of them, but they are
inconsistent with any other. The penal laws did not
prohibit or proscribe Catholic religious worship, pure
and simple. On the contrary, they expressly per-
mitted it, and provided for its lawful celebration by
registered Priests, and in registered Chapels. What
they did strike at and prohibit was the entry into the
kingdom, not of parochial priests, but of the Eegular
Orders and of the Bishops and higher dignitaries of
the Catholic Church. The reason for this distinction
is clear. Neither the Monks nor the Bishops were
essential to the ordinary ministration of the altar or
of the Confessional; whilst, on the other hand, the
Monks were considered as the soldiers, and the
hierarchy as the commanding officers, of the great
Papal army. How thoroughly justified was the
English Government in those assumptions, comes out
in a strong light indeed from a discovery, which Mr.
Lecky tells us has been made in documents recently
brought to light. For from these documents it
appears not only that all the Catholic priests in
Ireland were in sentiment and opinion adherents of
the Pretender, but that he actually held from the
Pope the personal privilege, during the whole of his
life, of appointing his own nominees to the Catholic
bishoprics in Ireland.
208 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vii.
This remarkable discovery only reveals what was
practically known or correctly presumed at the time,
and is a complete vindication of conduct on the part of
the English Government which has been falsely called,
and attributed to, religious intolerance and persecution.
If a religious communion chooses to act the part of a
political conspiracy it must take the consequences.
The same interpretation of the whole aim of the penal
laws is enforced by the nature of those provisions which
have naturally attracted most attention because of
their exceeding oppressiveness and injustice from every
other point of view. These provisions were specially
directed to prevent Catholics from acquiring wealth,
or from attaining official positions which could give
them the least political power. Especially were they
directed to impede them in the retention or acquisition
of that form of wealth which, in those days, was most
connected with political and territorial influence —
namely, landed property. Although far less bloody
and ferocious than the contemporary action of
Catholics in the persecution of Protestants on the
Continent, the Irish penal laws seem specially odious
from the very fact that they were apparently con-
nected with a permanent civil policy, and contrast so
hideously with even the pretence of toleration.
So much for the evidence to be found in the Acts
themselves. But the time and circumstances of their
enactment are equally, or still more, decisive. They
were enacted in years immediately following a Kevo-
CH VII.] REALITY OF DANGER. 209
lutioa which had been needed to relieve England of a
Sovereign who had apostatised to Popery, and who was
endeavouring to restore it under the guise and shelter
of a pretended desire for toleration. They were passed,
therefore, at a time when the very name of religious
toleration was the symbol of concealed designs for the
restoration of Eomish tyranny. They were passed
under the fresh recollection of an Irish Catholic
Parliament, which had resorted to measures of confis-
cation and attainder against all Protestants in Ireland
which were passed under circumstances of special
violence and hypocrisy. They were passed under all
the excitement of the suppression of the Irish rebellion,
when it was still fresh in the minds of men that an
army of French soldiers, ten thousand strong, had just
been combined with Irish rebels in defending the
passage of the Boyne against an English army. They
were passed in a series of eight or nine consecutive
years, during the whole of which it was known that
the great and powerful French Monarch was enter-
taining the Koman Catholic Pretender to the English
throne, and was prepared at any moment to assist him
actively in his attempts. It is impossible for us fully
to realise or even to conceive the frame of mind, and
the natural and legitimate motives, wliich were then
operating on the Parliament of both countries, in
England and in Ireland. Intense alarm and passionate
indignation — an attitude of just and vehement suspi-
cion and of vigilant guard against an imminent danger
p
210 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vti.
to the highest interests — were the motives and incentives
called into action by all the circumstances of the time.
But if this almost purely political interpretation of
the penal laws is thus justified by all the facts con-
nected with their enactment, and with the nature of
their provisions, it is, if possible, still more clearly
proved by all the circumstances attending the measure
of their enforcement, their speedy fall into desuetude,
and the time of their final abandonment. The fact is
indisputable, and is fully brought out in Mr. Lecky's
clear and forcible narrative, that with every new year
of increasing confidence in the stability of the Pro-
testant Dynasty in Great Britain and Ireland, the
enforcement of the penal laws steadily relaxed, and
the whole spirit of the Government became more and
more tolerant towards the Catholics. So earlv as 1715
— only six years after the enactments of the penal
code had reached their maximum development, the
hunt after Catholic bishops and priests had sensibly
abated.* That was the year, it will be recollected,
when the first Jacobite rebellion was defeated in
Scotland, and the political prospect began to be more
secure. Mr. Lecky has well summed up the general
result in a single sentence : " The policy of extinguish-
ing Catholicism by suppressing its services (?) and
banishing its bishops was silently abandoned ; before
the middle of the eighteenth century the laws against
Catholic worship were virtually obsolete, and beforo
* Lecky, vol. i. p. 168, note.
CH. VII.] TWO MOTIVES BALANCED. 211
the close of the eighteenth century the Parliament,
which in the beginning of the century had been one
of the most intolerant, had become one of the most
tolerant in Europe." *
I have dwelt upon the political origin and spirit of
the Irish penal laws for one reason mainly — namely,
this — that it stands in close connection with a dis-
tinction which is of the very highest interest to society,
not merely as regards the fair and just interpretation
of the past, but as regards our guidance for the future.
I know that there are some minds to which the spirit
of purely religious intolerance and persecution seems
greatly better, and not worse, than the intolerance and
persecution which is purely political and purely secular.
There is a flavour, perhaps unconscious, of this senti-
ment in Mr. Lecky's language. It is founded on the
feeling that, whereas purely religious fanaticism has
the excuse sometimes of a zeal for truth, persecution
from political motives alone is comparatively sordid.
I understand the feeling, but I hold the very opposite
opinion. I look upon the right of every individual
mind to an exclusive property in its own spiritual
operations and convictions to be the most absolute
and the most sacred of all human rights ; and I
consequently regard the tyranny involved in pure
religious persecution as the most wicked of human
tempers, and the most atrocious of human crimes.
It has done more than anything else to damage and
* Lecky, vol. i. pp. 168, 169.
212 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. vii.
discredit Christianity, aad to throw upon it a false
discredit which is to this day a powerful influence
in the minds of men. On the other hand, I regard
the right of all political communities to defend them-
selves, their dominion and their laws, as a right which
is not only supreme, considered as a mere right, but
supreme also as a duty. If in the exercise of this
right, and in the discharge of this duty, they have
to encounter a system and a power which, in the
name of a religion, and under the pretence of a zeal in
spiritual truth, is in reality a vast political organisa-
tion using the "secular arm" to attack kings, and
Governments, and nations — then such political societies
have an absolute right, and lie under a supreme obli-
gation, to take the extremest measures in self-defence.
And whilst all needless cruelty is criminal, in this as
in all other cases, yet assuredly in this particular case
there is the largest possible excuse for the excesses of
passion. But this was exactly the case of England
and of the Irish Protestants during the first twenty-
five years of the eighteenth century. They were stand-
ing at bay against a Power pretending to be a Christian
Church, which was animated with the most cruel spirit
of intolerance and persecution, — which inspired the
atrocities of Alva in the Low Countries, — which
dictated the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in France,
and which consecrated that act of supreme atrocity by
the issue of a medal by the Pope himself in commemo-
ration of the " Strages Huguenotorum."
( 213 )
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY — ECONOMIC CAUSES.
The calm philosophy of Mr. Lecky's narrative is not
only delightful in itself, but representing as it does,
nearly in perfection, the temper and other highest
qualities of the genuine historian, it is invaluable in
the confidence with which it inspires us that all facts
are truly stated — and no facts, so far as known to the
historian, are omitted, — that nothing is sacriliced to the
temptations of epigram or antithesis, as is often done in
the case ot Macaulay, or to the onesidedness of strong
convictions, as sometimes in the case of Mr. Froude.
But in judging of the character and conduct of the
chief actors in such events as the passing of the penal
laws in Ireland, the tone of perfect impartiality, even
when it is consistently maintained, is apt to fail in
its practical application. And when we have to con-
tradict and expose such passionate misrepresentations
as the inflated fables of Mr. Gladstone's speeches, it
is absolutely necessary to dwell on aspects of the facts
which lie in the region of suppressed or neglected
214 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
elements. Mr. Lecky makes a much more important
observation when he points out that the power of mere
religious dogma, pure and simple, was itself gradually-
losing ground during the course of the eighteenth
century — with the subdivision of sects, and with the
progress of a speculative scepticism. Rapidly among
Protestant?, — much more slowly among Catholics, —
but still on the whole steadily and surely, the spirit of
toleration was gaining ground, and the fierce passions
of mere religious antipathy were becoming less and
less possible as the animating springs of action. The
perfect quiescence of the Irish Catholics during the
Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 was partly due
no doubt to the hopelessness of any local rebellion in
Ireland, but it certainly was also due to the decline
of mere religious fanaticism, and the hopes founded
on the growing toleration they enjoyed.
Mr. Lecky enters upon a matter in some respects
more important, much more difficult to exhaust, and
with which his judicial calmness is much more
adequate to deal, when he passes from the distribution
of the blame attachable to the English Government
for the penal laws, to the wholly separate question of
the economic effects of those laws considered simply
as a cause of the continuous poverty and the later
miseries of Ireland. On this question he enumerates
facts and considerations which are of great weight.
We have all been accustomed to dwell on the economic
evils entailed on France by the expulsion of the
CH. VIII.] ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF PENAL LAWS. 215
Huguenots, and tlie loss to that country of so many
men of energy and resource in all the walks of civil
life. We cannot deny or dispute the possibility of
parallel effects from the very considerable emigration
of Irish Catholics, who could not endure the harassing
and often odious disabilities to which they were subject
during at least one generation, from the penal laws.
Mr. Lecky, however, fully admits that a long-estab-
lished habit of taking foreign service had grown
up among the Catholics of Ireland during previous
centuries, and that the emigration of Irishmen of the
higher classes during the earlier part of the eighteenth
century was by no means a new phenomenon. But
he succeeds in showing that it was intensified under
the penal laws, and that it took place at a time when
every resource of native intelligence and enterprise
was specially needed to inaugurate and reinforce the
resurrection of Ireland from a condition of the greatest
ignorance and impoverishment. Nevertheless, when
we consider how small was the number of native
Irishmen of the educated classes who were men of
any capital or of any previous disposition towards
industrial pursuits — when we consider how almost
exclusively military their habits had always been,
and how almost universally, when they did go abroad,
they addicted themselves to military service in France
and elsewhere; considering, too, the equally obvious
fact that it was the new settlers in Ireland who alone
had the resources of knowledge, of agricultural enter-
216 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. viii.
prise, and of at least some capital, — it is impossible
to doubt that the mere economic evils due to the emi-
gration of Irishmen under the pressure of the penal
laws, was quite a minor element among the causes
which delayed the improvement of Ireland, and tended
to prolong the poverty of its people.
We enter upon a much more important matter
when we turn to that other of the two great charges
against the conduct of England towards Ireland in
the eighteenth century, which rests upon the laws
she passed to suppress the freedom of Irish trade and
the success of Irish industry. There is only one
thing to be said about those laws — but that one thing
cannot be too strongly insisted upon, or too abso-
lutely asserted. It is that the doctrines of com-
mercial restriction — the doctrines which now we know
as Protection, — were the doctrines universally held and
universally practised at that time, not only by every
Government, but by every petty municipality in
Europe. Mr. Lecky refers to the policy as " selfish,"
but England was not one whit more selfish than all
other nations at the same time; and she acted on
precisely the same policy, not only towards Scotland,
but towards her own Colonies and Plantations. Most
of us are now convinced that the whole of these
doctrines were not so much selfish — for nations are,
and must be always, self-regarding — as intensely
stupid. But it is a stupidity by no means extinct in
our own day, — rather, on the contrary, as alive as
CH. VIII.] THE COMMERCIAL SYSTEM. 217
ever, and ready to be quite as " selfish " and exclusive
in action as England was in her dealings with Ireland
and Scotland in the early years of the eighteenth
century. Moreover, the Irish themselves were as
much under the influence of these stupid doctrines as
any other people, and acted upon them in their own
domestic legislation to a degree which had the worst
effect on their own prosperity. It is, therefore, not only
an injustice but almost an hypocrisy to dwell on this
part of England's conduct towards Ireland in all those
matters which come under the general head of what
Mr. Gladstone has called "Exclusive Dealing," and
of which commercial restrictions are harmless examples
indeed, when compared with other applications of the
same doctrines which he has done his best to excuse
and palliate.
But this is not all we have to say about the conduct
of England towards Ireland during the comparatively
very short period of her history when she was, at last,
responsible for the Government of the country. It is
much more important to observe that, exactly as with
the peiml laws, so also with the laws in restraint of
industry and commerce, a steady and even a rapid
progress was made during the years of English rule
towards the relaxation of those laws, ending in the
complete abandonment of them all. There had been
no restraints at all on trade with Ireland until about
the time of the Kestoration, — the first statute dating
from 1665 and shutting out Irish cattle from England.
218 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
One relaxation very important to Ireland, opening the
trade in bacon, took place so early as 1693, whilst
practically the whole Provision trade with England
was opened so early as 1758. But, as we all know,
the spirit of commercial monopoly died hard. It
has only been in our own time that it has ceased
to be largely represented v in the fiscal legislation
of England. It is even now as widespread as ever
on the Continent of Europe. It is rife among our
own Colonies at the present moment ; and there are
unmistakable symptoms that the doctrines of Pro-
tection are at the present time liable to burst
forth in the most short-sighted, selfish, and violent
forms amongst our own wage-earning classes at
home. But more than this : — the absurdity and
injustice of throwing any special blame on England
for her conduct towards Ireland in this matter,
during the earlier part of last century, is still
farther illustrated by the fact that the Irish Parlia-
ment and people were themselves saturated with the
doctrines of Protection and of commercial restriction,
and applied them inside their own country in forms
which were almost incredibly ignorant and perverse.
In the long catalogue of cases in which, first the
French Economists, and afterwards Adam Smith,
analysed, exhibited, and exposed the follies and the
suicidal consequences of the Protectionist system
of fiscal legislation, I know of no case, and no example,
more astonishing than that m which Arthur Young
CH. viir.] IRISH PROTECTIONISM. 219
has narrated and examined the results of certain acts
of fiscal legislation resorted to by the Irish Parlia-
ment at the time of which we are now speaking. In
the light of Arthur Young's narrative and exposure
those acts may well seem to us as if the Irish Parlia-
ment had been insane. And yet its acts are nothing
more than an extreme example of the ideas at that
time dominant all over the world ; and our only wonder
must be that the very extremeness of the consequences
to which they led did not produce the effect of a re-
duetto ad ahsurdum even in Irish eyes. The whole
circumstances are so curious and so instructive that it
is well worth while to recall them to the mind of
English politicians, and of Irish politicians who are
inclined to heap up reproaches against the English
government of Ireland on the ground of the laws in
restraint of trade which were resorted to in the end of
the seventeenth and at the beginning of the last
century.
A very few years after England had begun to relax
her " selfish " policy of excluding Irish produce from
her markets, the Irish began to open their eyes to the
fact that their own capital, Dublin, was largely fed by
wheat imported from England, just as also, in the
article of coals, they were enjoying the benefit of a
supply which they could not get so cheaply, or even
at all, from their own country. According to the
doctrines of the " Commercial system " this was a
great misfortune. Those doctrines always taught that
220 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ttti.
imports into any country were to be reckoned as a
loss to it, and that its exports alone were to be
counted as a gain. They had long been anxious to be
allowed to export their cattle, sheep, butter, cheese,
hides, and other produce of the richest pastures in
the world. But what they could not bear was that
England should send any of its own produce in return.
So a clever Irishman, who was still in high office in
the Irish Government when Arthur Young wrote in
the year 1780, suggested that the Irish should do two
things — first levy a duty on the import of English
wheat and flour ; secondly, give a large bounty out of
Irish taxes to all who would bring Irish, instead of
English, wheat and flour to Dublin ; and thirdly, limit
this bounty strictly to those who would bring in this
Irish wheat and flour by land carriage and not by sea.
This wonderful idea was adopted, and a law was passed
to carry it into efl*ect in 1761. The details were even
more wonderful than the conception. The bounty
was enormous in amount, and it was given in the form
of a mileage upon the distance of land carriage, but
excluding a radius of ten miles round Dublin. The
efi'ect, of course, was to offer a great bribe, paid out of
the public purse, to all tenants and farmers to break up
and plough the finest and richest pastures in Ireland,
which were best adapted for other produce. The effect,
moreover, was to increase the bribe in proportion to the
distance of those pastures from a city which lay at one
extremity of the Island, and thus to make it operate
CH. vm.] AN IRISH FOLLY. 221
most strongly on precisely those parts of Ireland in
which both soil and climate were least favourable to
the kind of produce which was favoured, and best
adapted to the kind of produce which was propor-
tionately discouraged. Another effect, of course, also
was to discourage Irish shipping — to direct the whole
export of the favoured produce in the southern and
western provinces out of its natural lines of transit by
sea from the great Irish harbours all along her coasts,
and to compel that produce to take the costly and
laborious route of the inland roads, which had to be
traversed by waggons and horses across the whole
length and breadth of Ireland, from Cork and
Limerick to Donegal and Antrim.
The examination and exposure of this supreme folly
by Arthur Young is one of the most instructive parts
of a most instructive book. And yet I have hardly
ever seen it referred to, or dwelt upon by Irish, or
even by English writers. He took, in the first place,
the ofiBcial records and parliamentary returns which
exhibited its more direct and immediate cost in
money, and in money's worth. His argument upon
this head may be summarised as follows : — " I will
admit for the sake of argument your assumption
that the import of English wheat and flour into
Dublin is a pure loss to Ireland, and that the Irish
people have a direct interest in checking it and in
reducing it to the lowest point. I will admit your
assumption that Ireland can best carry on trade by
222 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vm.
counting her exports only as gain, and her imports
as only loss. I will, therefore, add together all the
actual cost of your bounty on inland transit during
a term of seven years since it began. Against this
cost, and in diminution of it, I will agree to set off
as pure gain all the English wheat and flour that you
have succeeded in excluding during the same term of
years. But, on the other hand, you must admit as a
loss all the diminution in your exports in the various
productions of pasture land which has arisen during
the same term of years, and which has clearly been
due to the same cause. Calculating the balance on
this footing, you will find that you have paid out in
the direct form of hard cash upwards of £47,000 in the
seven years. You have lost another sum of upwards
of £53,000 in the decrease of your sales of beef, butter,
tallow, hides, and other produce of cattle : whilst on
your sales of wool and woollen yarn, you have lost a
third sum of more than £106,000 — making up the
total cost of your system of bounties on the inland
carriage of wheat and flour, to be the large amount
of £206,244. Now, taking the credit side of the
account, or rather that which you assume to be
credit, adding together as gain to you the value
of the decrease in imported English corn, some in-
crease in the export of your own corn, and some
increase in the export of pork, pigs, bread, and
other articles, I find that the whole of these items
of assumed gain amount only to £62,732 — leaving
CH. VTii.] RUmOUS EFFECTS. 223
an adverse balance of direct loss against your bounty
system of £143,510 in the course of only seven years." *
Commenting on this result, arrived at upon indis-
putable data, Arthur Young very truly observes that,
had these results arisen naturally, as a mere conse-
quence of unforeseen events and obscure causes, the
friends of Ireland would have been well employed in
devising means for remedying so great an evil, whereas
they had been busily employed in devising highly
artificial means of bringing those results about !
But the importance and significance of Arthur
Young's demonstration of the direct, visible, and
calculable losses in the form of money, are as nothing
compared with the much greater significance of the
observations he makes on the indirect, comparatively
invisible, and less easily calculable evils and losses,
which were quite as certain but far more lasting and
destructive. Arthur Young opens fire on this second
branch of the subject — by far the most important —
in the pregnant remark : '* It is the intention and
effect of this bounty to turn every local advantage
and natural supply topsy-turvy." Nothing more
graphic could be said. To fly in the face of the
facts and laws of nature — this is about the high-
water mark of human folly. Arthur Young asks
what would be thought in England, where imports
of foreign corn were then more than proportionately
large, if it were proposed as a remedy that London
* Arthur Young's " Tour in Ireland " (original edition), p. 267.
224 lEISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
should be fed, if possible, from the corn grown in
Devonshire and Northumberland in preference to that
grown in Kent or Essex. And then, too, the impera-
tive condition that it must be brought by land car-
riage in " a country blessed with such ports and such
a vast extent of coast " ! " The absurdity and folly
are so glaring that it is amazing that sophistry could
blind the Legislature to such a degree as to permit a
second thought of it." And then again the deliberate
discouragement of Irish ships and sailors ! He had
himself seen in Cork Harbour, above one hundred and
twenty miles from Dublin, a few cars being loaded for
that market in order to secure the bounty, when a
ship was lying at the quay waiting for a freight.
"Could invention suggest any scheme more prepos-
terous than this to confound at the public expense
all the ideas of common practice and common sense ?"*
But this is not all — it is not even the most impor-
tant part of all that Arthur Young brings before us as
to the indirect consequences of this system of bounties
in the inland carriage of corn to Dublin. It is but the
prelude to, and the vestibule of, the great subject which
lies in all the powerful economic causes thus set in
motion over the whole of Ireland. How ubiquitous it
was in its operation was indicated by the inducement it
held out to Capitalists to erect enormous flour-mills —
some of them costing £20,000 — in far distant parts of
Ireland. These brought home to the door of every
* Arthur Young's " Tour in Ireland " (original edition), p. 270.
CH. viii.] THOSE EFFECTS TRACED. 225
peasant occupier in Ireland the great bribe which was
annually offered out of the public taxes. And what
was it a bribe to do ? To devote his time and labour
to a kind of production which could not otherwise
have been conducted at any profit; — to plough up,
and thus to destroy the finest pastures, affording
the richest milk, and butter, and wool, in order to
grow a grain which was after all of very inferior
quality, and to do this on a system of husbandry which
was more than two hundred years behind even that
backward age. There was no rotation of crops : there
was bad ploughing, slight manuring, and the old
mediaeval, wasteful, system of land left fallow for
three years before it could be scourged again with the
grain crops which brought a tempting profit only
because it was paid for at an artificial price. And
what effect was all this system having on the rapid
increase of a very poor population, which was already
pressing hard upon the means of subsistence, and was
exposed to scarcities and famines whenever a bad
season came, in spite of the new and the immense re-
source opened up in the recently introduced potato ?
Not even the wise and sharp eyes of Arthur Young
could foresee all the disastrous results which, by steps of
natural and inevitable consequence, were being steadily
and even rapidly brought about by this destructive
system adopted by an Irish Parliament. But, although
Arthur Young did not or perhaps could not foresee
all those results, he at least saw some of them, and
Q
226 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
these amongst the most significant. " What," he ex-
claims, " is the tillage gained by this measure ? It is
that system which formed the agriculture of England
two hundred years ago, and forms it yet in the worst
of our ' common fields,' but which all our exertions of
enclosing and improving are bent to extirpate — the
fallow is a dead loss — one year in three yields nothing,
and another one only a trifle, whereas the grass yields
a full crop every year. Ought you to turn some of the
finest pastures in the world, and which in Ireland
yielded twenty shillings an acre, into the most exe-
crable tillage that is to be found on the face of the
globe ? " If now we bear in mind that, when Arthur
Young published his " Tour " in 1780, this disastrous
system had been not only in full, but in increasing
operation for eighteen years — that the area of its
operation was the whole of Ireland — that the popula-
tion on whom it acted was one in the lowest state of
education, and unacquainted with the very rudiments
of an improved agriculture — that it appealed to their
immediate cupidity as against all the motives which
are connected with a permanent or even a long-lasting
industry, — we may conceive what an immense effect
it must have had in exhausting the soil, in stimulating
a pauperised population, in causing an excessive com-
petition for land, and in thus preparing the way for
the great famine, which came at last to decimate that
population in our own time.
But it did not stop in 1780. The insanity of
CH. vni.] CONTINUITY OF VICIOUS POLICY. 227
confining it to land carriage was indeed abandoned.
Carriage by canals was first included, and then
came carriage coastways. But the bounty itself
went on increasing, and Young's calculation was
that, even at the time he wrote, it involved a direct
money loss to Ireland of £53,000 a year — besides
its vast and indirect effect in ruining her agri-
cultural resources for the future. And if any one
should now be disposed to say that I am exaggerating
the effects of this purely Irish cause of Irish miseries,
let him just look for a moment at the sequel of
Young's analysis. He supposes himself to be asked
the question whether he would advise this ruinous
bounty to be totally and immediately repealed ; — and
he replies that he could not do so, because of the
large amount of capital which had been invested in
the trade — in the great flour-mills erected at im-
mense cost all over Ireland. In 1792 they were two
hundred and twenty-five in number, one of them at
a distance of one hundred and thirty miles from
Dublin. He specifies also the prodigious number of
men and horses that would be thrown out of employ-
ment, and was afraid of the sudden diversion of the
supply on which the city of Dublin had so long been
fed. Considering the very strong opinion he held on
the ruinous effects of the whole policy, and the cor-
respondingly strong language which he uses in con-
demnation of it, there could be no more striking
evidence of the extent to which it had become rooted
228 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
in the political soil of Ireland, — had become identified
with popular interests all over the island, — and was
exerting its baneful influence on a future which was
then unforeseen.
But another most striking lesson is to be learned
from these facts — and that is the absurdity and
injustice of the charges made against England on the
ground of her selfish departure from sound economic
laws in her commercial dealings with Ireland. The
disastrous economic effects of this purely internal and
native legislation upon the future of the Irish people
was probably much greater than the English prohi-
bition against Irish industry of which we hear so
much. England had indeed most stupidly prohibited
the Irish wool trade, but she had also at least fostered
the linen trade. Her other prohibitions had already
been largely abated, and w^ere on the way to farther
limitation. At the very time when this supreme folly
was adopted by the Irish Parliament, England had
opened the whole provision-trade to the Irish farmers.
Nor is there the least ground for supposing that the
Irish Parliament in this matter of bounties and taxes
on foreign corn represented Protestant feeling or
interests alone. Quite the contrary ; it was the great
mass of the poor Irish tenantry, and of the poor Irish
of Dublin, who were directly interested in the system.
If the Irish Parliament had been as exclusively
Catholic as it was then exclusively Protestant, it is
quite certain that the economic follies it committed
CH. vni.] IRISH INCONSISTENCY. 229
would have been, if possible, even greatly aggravated.
The whole ideas embodied in these bounties were
neither Protestant nor Catholic, but simply Irish, and —
it must be confessed — in a great measure European at
that time.
There is one thing, however, which is purely Irish —
and that is the grotesque inconsistency and confusion
of thought, in the language of many Irish writers and
of English platform orators who now copy them,
involved in their bitter reproaches against England
for her commercial legislation at this time. We could
not have a better illustration of this than in the
language of a well-known authority on the growth of
Irish population in the eighteenth century. I refer to
Mr. Newenham, who also published in 1805 an
elaborate and very interesting book on the whole
history of Ireland during that century. He rages
against England for her Protectionist system against
Ireland ; yet he not only defends the system of native
bounties, but he specially complains that it was com-
paratively ineffective because they were not accom-
panied by such heavy duties on the importation of
English corn as might have effectually put an end to
that injurious interference with the monopoly of Irish
farmers. He triumphs over the fact that the moment
the Parliament of Ireland acquired a really independent
power in 1782, it immediately adopted this doubly
Protectionist policy — increased the native bounties,
and also did its best wholly to exclude all English
230
IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
grain. As to any knowledge of economic laws, or any
even dawning intelligence on the virtues of Free-
trade, Nowenham's book is a proof that all parties in
Ireland lay in the very depth of darkness even in the
present century. There was indeed one most illus-
trious Irishman, whose powerful intellect and generous
spirit are among the glories of his age and country,
who did see the follies of the restrictive system. That
Irishman was the great thinker Bishop Berkeley, who,
long before the days of Adam Smith, had seen his
solitary way to the doctrines of free exchange. But
all Irishmen except himself were then in the depths
of ignorance on the subject. Even later, at a time
when wakeful minds were beo^innino^ to take in the
great ideas of Adam Smith, and some real pro-
gress had been made in planting them in the appre-
hension of the British people, Newenham repudiates
what he calls the "ingenious arguments of Dr.
Smith," and actually has the blindness to argue that
his reasoning against the system of bounties was
inapplicable to Ireland, because the bulk of the
population had then come to feed almost entirely on
potatoes, and nothing they could do in the way of corn
could do them any harm ! * And yet this writer is
one who, in other parts of the same book, gives the
most emphatic evidence as to the miserable and waste-
ful character of the _^tillage which was thus diligently
extended, and of the splendid richness of the pastures
* Newenham's " Ireland " (1809), p. 210, and jpassim.
CH. viil] an irishman's EVIDENCE. 231
which were thus as diligently destroyed.* Nor is he
less emphatic on the ignorance and improvidence of
his countrymen. What could be a more dreadful
account of any people, as indicating the steady pre-
paration of some terrible natural retribution at the
hands of Nature, than, for example, this sentence of
Newenham : " The general aim of the Irish farmers
is rather to extract a capital from the land than to
render a capital previously acquired, productive of
extraordinary annual profit by the instrumentality of
the land." f It would be easy to heap passages upon
passages out of this book, and out of other books
written by Irishmen, which prove that none of them
had, or have to this day, the slightest notion of the
most elementary principles on which the doctrines of
Free-trade are founded, or have the slightest power
of reasoning in respect to the natural and artificial
causes which were determining the domestic condition
of the Irish people.
But there was another cause of special aggravation
closely connected with the corn bounties which I have
not seen alluded to by any Irish historian or poli-
tician. It was a cause lying in the conduct of the
great mass of the Irish people, and not merely of the
Irish Parliament. The mass of the Irish sub-tenants
and cottier cultivators had, indeed, learnt by the follies
of the Irish Parliament the secret of getting all its
* Newenham's « Ireland " (1806), pp. 66-68.
t Ibid., p. 78.
232 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. vin.
capital out of tlie land without returning anything to
its fertility. But they improved upon this lesson by
an invention which was really infernal. They found
out that by peeling off the turf from good land, by
stacking this cut turf, and then by setting it on fire,
they could reduce it to ashes in which all the virtue
of the land was concentrated and made cheaply acces-
sible to farther exhaustion. Rich crops of wheat and
abundant crops of potatoes could thus be raised with no
expenditure on other manure. Accordingly all over
the richest as well as the poorest parts of Ireland, this
hideous waste came to be systematically practised. Mr.
William Pilkington, himself an Irish farmer, has given
a startling account of it as it prevailed for more than
one hundred years — from 1728 to 1846, but it seems to
have been at its height from fifty to sixty years ago.
So long as a Parliament continued in Ireland it tried
to prohibit the practice. Numerous Acts were passed
for the purpose — but all in vain. In defiance of law
and of contract the ignorant and improvident pea-
santry persisted in it — the larger tenants derived
enormous rents from it, whilst their sub- tenants
revelled and bred in a temporary and treacherous
plenty. " I have known," says Mr. Pilkington, " the
banns of marriage published for thirty-seven young
couples in one day in a local chapel, one of three in
the same parish." * When any Government tried to
* " Help for Ireland," sixth edition, p. 6. (Deansgate and Ridge-
field, Manchester, and 11, Paternoster Buildings, London, 1889.)
CH. vm.] HEREDITARY SURVIVALS. 233
enforce the law, they were encountered by the usual
resources of Irish outrage. There is a cowardly fear
now of attributing to " the masses " any blame. " The
majesty that doth hedge a king" now hedges the
conduct and position of popular majorities. And so
the richest lessons of history are missed. In the
practice exposed by Mr. Pilkington we have un-
doubtedly one of the most fruitful causes of Irish
over-population, poverty, and subsequent famine.
And it was a cause purely native — characteristically
Irish.
I turn, however, to another aspect of this great
question in respect to which an extraordinary forget-
fulness prevails even among writers of the highest
rank in literature and in politics. In estimating the
causes of Irish poverty and misfortune, not only in the
ninety-two years of English rule, but ever since, we
must not fail to take into account those facts and
influences which had arisen from the purely native
conditions which had prevailed during the five hun-
dred and twenty years which had run their course
between a.d. 1170 and a.d. 1690, and especially those
which had come to the front during the centuries
immediately preceding the final suppression of Irish
rebellions by William III. The effect of survivals is
great in every nation ; but it is enormous among
Celts especially, and most enormous of all among Irish
Celts who had been practically unconquered for so
many centuries, and had been so geographically
234 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
situated as to be cut off from all the reforming
and renovating currents of European history. We
have seen the estimate which English statesmen
formed of the impoverishing effects of the old Irish
customs in respect to the inheritance of property, as
well as in respect to the dues, services, and exactions
attached to the occupation of land. But now we come
across a curious proof of the perfect consciousness of
the Irish themselves of the truth of this opinion of
English Statesmen. I have before alluded to the
circumstances in which this new proof appears. It
was the object, as we have seen, of the penal laws to
prevent the growth of wealth in the hands of Catholics,
and in particular of that kind of wealth — landed
property — which was most directly contributory to
political influence and power. And how did the Pro-
testant Parliament act in devising the means of
attaining this end ? They acted on the principle that
nothing could be more fatal to the prosperity of
Catholics in respect to landed property than simply to
insist, in this case, on the retention of the old Irish
custom and law of succession. Their conduct may be
thus translated into words : " You, Catholic land-
owners, wish to keep your old Irish religion: very
well, gentlemen, if you do, you must keep also your
old Irish customs of succession to property. If you
wish to have the benefit of the English law of suc-
cession you must conform to the English Church."
This was an ingenious device — considered as a measure
CH. viil] penal effects OF AN IKISH CUSTOM. 235
of purely religious persecution, it might hardly be
too severe to call it a devilish invention. But, at
least, do not let us mistake its immense significance
as indicating and admitting the impoverishing and
damaging effect, of one of the most prominent of all
native usages, on the economic condition of the people.
So universal was this admission — so instinctive — so
undeniable in its truth, that Mr. Lecky tells us that
no one of the penal laws was so effective in the way
of inducing conversions to Protestantism, or, as they
may be rather called, apostatisms from Rome.
We have only to carry this lesson with us into
another branch of old Irish customs, to enable us to
judge how very little power the Government of England
had, or could have, over the causes which were deter-
mining the condition of the people during the only
century in which she had any effective power at all.
The laws and usages of succession to landed property
are, as regards short periods of time, of secondary
importance as compared with the laws and usages
affecting the occupation of land by the mass of the
people. Laws and usages of succession, however bad,
take some time to come into operation so far as the
production of widespread effects are concerned. But
laws, usages, and established customs affecting the
relations between the owners and occupiers of land,
have an immediate, continuous, and a permanent
result on the whole condition of an agricultural people.
Now, it is an unquestionable fact — admitted by all
236 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viir.
Irish historians, and proved by all Irish records — that
the old Irish usages of this kind were not less, but
infinitely more severe and exhausting to the occupiers
than the corresponding laws and usages of the new
English landowners in Ireland. The great feature of
the old Irish rents, services, and exactions, was that
they were absolutely unfixed, indefinite, and unlimited.
As Mr. Prendergast says, the occupiers were "eaten
out of house and home." Their one cry was, " Spend
me, but defend me " — " defend me from having my
cattle stolen, my corn burnt, and very likely my own
throat cut — and if you do this you may take all I
have beyond the bare means of sustenance." That was
the Irish system of landlord and tenant, — or of chief
and retainer, — if these titles are fancifully preferred.
In so far, therefore, as England was powerful enough
to substitute her own tenures for the old Celtic
tenures, she conferred an immense benefit on the Irish
people.
But it was too late. Many centuries of archaic
usages surviving, — prolonged and even aggravated —
into times when elsewhere they had been gradually
giving way, had left the Irish people in a condition
of extreme poverty, and of utter helplessness as re-
garded any power of emerging from that condition.
When Irish writers and many English writers heap
epithet upon epithet to describe the " degraded "
condition as to habitations, as to food, and as to
clothing, in which they saw the Irish peasants, when
CH. Yiii.] SURVIVAL NOT DEGRADATION. 237
such things were seen and thought of in the earlier
part of the eighteenth century, they are — quite
unconsciously — not so much exaggerating the facts
as wholly misrepresenting them in one point of
paramount importance. The word ** degraded'* implies
a fall from a former condition of comparative wealth
and comfort to the actual later condition of poverty
and barbarism. And this, beyond doubt, is a very
common belief as to the condition of Ireland in the
eighteenth century. But it has absolutely no foundation
in historical fact. The Irish people all through the
Middle Ages lived in cabins of mud and wattles. Even
the richer classes did so, only in constructions a little
more carefully put together. The habitations of the
people had always been mere hovels, and these, when
seen by civilised men in the eighteenth century, were
very naturally regarded as an indication of some great
decline. There is, however, no evidence of this, and
abundant evidence to the contrary. It was simply
a survival of conditions which were immemorially
old. But neither the habitations, nor the food, nor
the clothing of the people are in the nature of causes,
but only of effects. They were the indications of
poverty : they did not operate in producing it. But
there was another peculiarity of the Celtic people of
Ireland at that time which was also a survival of
mediaeval times, and this was a cause, and not
a mere consequence of poverty indeed — a cause of
insuperable power on the condition of the people.
238 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viii.
This was the system of communal tillage, or town-
ship occupation — otherwise called in its detail the
"rundale" system of cultivation. Under this system
agricultural improvement was impossible. Each man
had his dozen or his score of little patches of arable
land changed every year, so that he could never
be sure of reaping any fruits from any improved
practice. The tillage was what Young described as
wretched in the extreme — exhaustion of the land, and
producing, even for the shortest time, nothing but
the most miserable grain. What could England do
to remedy such a state of things? Nothing, — unless
it had been to veto the fatuous laws, which Irishmen
of all parties concurred in passing in the Irish Parlia-
ment, whereby these miserable cultivators were bribed
all over Ireland still farther to scourge their land, and
to produce more bad grain ; — all of which, however
bad in quality, had the full benefit of the bounty.
Newenham himself admits that the indiscriminate
payment of the bounty was an error in a system
which he otherwise admires; and Young says dis-
tinctly that the grain produced in Ireland under the
system was of a very inferior quality. All writers
are agreed that these bounties did produce a great
increase of tillage in Ireland, — that it displaced more
than a corresponding amount of much more valuable
produce, — that it did terribly scourge and exhaust the
ground, — and that it did tend to stimulate artificially
that rapidly swelling population living on the lowest
CH. vm.] THE POTATO. 239
possible diet, which had ultimately to be swept off
by famine and emigration.
Then, concurrently with this powerful combination
of causes, there was another which, so far as I know,
is unique in the history of the world — and that was
the introduction of the potato and the discovery of
its easy cultivation and of its immense feeding proper-
ties. No such sudden and enormous addition to the
subsistence of any people has ever been made before,
or one which made so little demand for either skill
or capital. It came, too, in conjunction with many
other circumstances tending to rapid increase of popu-
lation without any corresponding increase in other
resources. The consequences were an object lesson
in the breeding capacities of the human race, and on
the data of Malthus's famous theory, which stands
absolutely alone. The broad fact is, that at the
beginning of the century the whole population of
Ireland is now generally held not to have exceeded two
millions ; at the end of it, the population is well known
to have reached 4,500,000. But these figures do not
represent the whole wonder of the facts if Mr. Lecky's
account of them — the result of a careful balancing of
all the evidence — be correct. All writers seem agreed
that the population of Ireland declined to its lowest
point after the massacres of 1641 and during the long
and bloody civil wars which followed. At the end of
that century, in 1695, it was supposed to be little more
than one million. But this is impossible — if it had
2^0 IRISH NATIONALISM, [ch. vm.
really crept up to two millions in 1700. Newenliam's
calculation is that it did not reach the two millions
till 1731. Mr. Lecky says that it had reached that
figure, or nearly so, in the beginning of the century ;
but that during the first half of it, the population
remained almost stationary — the total in 1750 being
about 2,370,000.* If this be so, the enormous increase
to four millions and a half in the end of the century
had arisen in the course of fifty years. Then in the
course of forty-six years more, as we all know, this
prodigious number had again doubled, so that, in
1846-47, the population of Ireland is computed to
have been eight millions and a quarter. Such a
prodigious rapidity of increase has probably never
been exhibited in any human society, when it is
remembered that the whole of it was due to breeding,
and none of it, practically speaking, to immigration.
Nay, more ; it is to be considered that not only was
there no immigration, as in the case of the American
States, and as in the case of all great cities whether
in the Old or in the New World, but, on the contrary,
there was always a very considerable and often a very
large emigration from Ireland, and even a very con-
siderable loss by famine and by the diseases consequent
on scarcity of food.
On this last point there is, at first sight, a dis-
crepancy between the best authorities. Newenham
begins his very interesting book on Irish population
* Lecky's " Ireland," vol. i. p. 239.
CH. viii.] IRISH FAMINES. 24-]
with the broad statement that it is not until we
enter on the opening of the eighteenth century
that we can study the problem as it is presented
by undisturbed conditions, — there having been, he
says, during that century no wars and no famines.
Mr. Lecky, on the contrary, tells us that there were
some severe famines in the course of that century,
and one, in particular, of exceptional destructiveness
in the year 1741-42.* In support of this statement
he produces the most conclusive evidence. But
Newenham's counter-statement is reconcilable with the
facts if we unders1;and him to refer only to famines
of the same kind as those which had been constant all
through the Middle Ages, and down to the end of the
times of rebellions and of civil wars. He, — evidently
from the context, — had in his mind only famines pro-
duced by the ravages and devastations of chronic wars
— during which local famines constantly occurred, and
there had been some which even prevailed over large
provinces, and affected the whole Island in succession.
Famines, it is certain in this sense, wholly ceased with
the establishment of English sovereignty. But those
on which Mr. Lecky dwells are all the more striking
and significant as indicating the emergence of those
more permanent economic causes, which had their
origin in the survival of medigeval customs, and in the
aggravated effect of those customs when tliey operated
under new conditions of population. These are pre-
* Lecky's " Ireland," vol. i. pp. 182, 186, 187.
R
242 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viit.
cisely the causes which are most apt to be overlooked,
and the effects of them are most apt to be confounded
with others, which are of quite inferior, or even of
trifling power. The enormous increase of population
in Ireland during the eighteenth century is, of course,
all the more striking and instructive that it was
effected in spite of large emigration, of frequent
dearth, and of some severe famines. It is, in an
immense degree, the predominant factor in all the
results which followed, combined as it was with the
low level of poverty in which it began, the low level
of agricultural knowledge which prevailed throughout,
the insuperable difficulties in the way of improvement
presented by communal tenures, and the wide-spread-
ing effects of the most ignorant economic legislation.
In this last item England had a share, not only as
regards Ireland, but as regards herself also. But the
largest and most effective share in this cause was
undoubtedly that taken by the Irish Parliament in
its ruinous system of corn bounties, and other fiscal
follies of a kindred nature. These follies had nothing
to do with religion nor with English rule, but were
the product of that total ignorance of economic laws
which prevailed in both countries and in all parties,
whether religious or purely political, at that time.
It is, however, always to be remembered that, as
in the case of the individual organism, deleterious
ingredients in food, or injurious habits of life, may be
almost wholly counteracted and defied by exceptional
CH. VIII.] COMBINATION OF CAUSES. 243
individual health and strength, but operate with fatal
effect on organisms which are less robust, so, in the
body politic of human society, causes, tending to
deterioration, or to slacken the pace of progress, may
be so neutralised by causes of an opposite tendency as
to become altogether invisible ; whilst in a poorer and
feebler community they may operate with fatal effects.
This was exactly the case in Ireland, as compared
with England and Scotland, during the whole of the
eighteenth century, and especially during the earlier
half of it. All the three kingdoms had to deal with
the same evils in the course of their respective
histories ; but both in England and in Scotland
centuries of gradual progress enabled the constitution
of both countries to overcome them. In Ireland they
all existed from natural causes in an aggravated
degree; and there was no amelioration until it was
too late to stop or to check unforeseen developments.
"It would be difScult," says Mr. Lecky, with perfect
truth, " in the whole compass of history to find another
instance in which such various and such powerful
agencies concurred to degrade the character and to
blast the prosperity of a nation." * And no writer
has, I think, on the whole, given so fair an enumeration
of those " depressing influences." It is an enumeration
which, at least so far as intention and spirit are con-
cerned, is conspicuously conscientious. But it is an
enumeration, nevertheless, governed and inspired by
* Lecky's " Ireland," vol. i. p. 240.
244! IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. viit.
this foregone conclusion, that "the greater part of
them sprang directly from the corrupt and selfish
government of England." This he lays down as
incontestable. I hold it, on the contrary, to be in the
highest degree contestable, and that the balance lies
enormously on the other side. That the adverse
influences were, during six out of the proverbial " seven
centuries," almost exclusively of native Irish origin,
I think, has been clearly shown in the preceding
pages. And although the balance may seem to
incline against England if we look to the history of
the eighteenth century alone, I am convinced that a
closer investigation will show that the deeper-seated
and most powerful causes were all such as lay entirely
autside the conduct, or even the influence, of the
English Government.
( 245 )
CHAPTEK IX.
CONCLUSIONS.
Foe the purpose of bringing tlie conclusion intimated
at the close of the last chapter within the reach of some
definite process of analysis, I shall now enumerate the
causes of Irish misfortune which are specified by Mr.
Lecky himself in his sincere desire to omit none. He
expresses regret that his narrative has assumed "so
polemical a character." But he need not do so. It
has undoubtedly been polemical on the other side;
and perhaps he is even justified in his opinion that
the anti-Irish accounts have assumed " a very unusual
amount and malignity of misrepresentation." For my
own part, I am disposed to look at all the causes as
quite separate from either praise or blame — to consider
only what it was but natural and even justifiable for
men to do under given conditions of mind and circum-
stances, and above all to look to the effects of those
ancient traditionary customs out of which no men can
ever be lifted, except by some external agency or power.
I look, therefore, to Mr. Lecky 's list of causes operating
246 ' IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ix.
adversely on the condition of the Irish people, with
the greatest interest and curiosity — to see how far he
has duly appreciated the comparative power of each.
The first and most fundamental of all Irish dis-
advantages is its geographical position. It was a
condition involving a long train of consequences. It
segregated Ireland from the great stream of European
history. It precluded her from the unspeakable
benefits of Roman conquest. It kept her away from
the civilisation of the Latin Church. It effectually
prevented her later subjugation by any superior race.
It stereotyped barbarous customs, and prolonged them
even to our own day. All happier influences seemed
to stop when they landed on the shores of England.
There they remained, and nobody cared to push across
that narrow^ sea, into a land covered with dense forests
and bogs, inhabited by fierce tribes with no possessions
tempting to a comparatively civilised invader. In
later days, England seemed to intercept geographically
even the benefits of commerce. I have heard the
feeling on this matter strikingly expressed by a
very clever woman of Irish blood, and of Irish
marriage, the late Lady Clanricarde — the daughter
of George Canning, and the sister of Lord Canning,
Governor-General of India. " You," she said, address-
ing an Englishman, "have always been like a high
garden wall standing between us and the sun."
But the geographical position of Ireland had a more
positive effect than this. It made that island the
CH. IX.] GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION. 247
back door of England, through which every enemy
tried to steal or to force his way. It made it impos-
sible for England to give up the policy of ultimate
conquest. On the other hand, it was a perpetual
incitement to the Irish to invite the foreign enemies
of England when they desired to throw off her
dominion or her suzerainty. In short, it has been a
dominant factor in the whole history of the two
countries.
But, dominant and insuperable as have been the
effects of geography, the closely related facts of
geology have been not less powerful in the case of
Ireland. Almost wholly wanting in the great mineral
resources of England and of Scotland, Ireland was
destitute of the most fruitful of all the causes which
broke the strain of a growing population in both those
countries — just at the time when it was causing distress,
scarcities, and even famines, closely resembling those
of Ireland. All over the Celtic area of Scotland,
which was much larger than it is now, and even in
the low country where township-cultivation prevailed,
there were scarcities and seasons of distress, which
have been testified to and recorded by a great cloud of
witnesses. The incorporating Union with England, in
1707, opened to the population of Scotland the immense
resources of free commerce. And all through that cen-
tury the rising industry of the towns, largely founded
on the development of coal-fields, was a resource of
enormous value. Ireland had no such resource ; so
24S IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ix.
that continual breeding on a potato diet went on
unchecked, and with no native outlet for the population.
England was certainly not the cause of these two
great determinating conditions of Ireland — her geo-
graphical position, and her geological structure. Yet
no other causes were even comparable with these as
acting on the economic condition of the people.
Next comes an Irish condition closely connected
with the two last, namely, the tenacious survival of
the mediaeval custom of communal tillage and pasturing
in Townships, or as they were called in Ireland, " Town-
land " holdings. This indeed was of native origin
all over Europe. But in England and Scotland it
gradually gave way, in the latter end of the seven-
teenth and in the first half of the eighteenth centuries,
to enclosed and divided farms. In Ireland it survived
all through the century, and survives still in the most
impoverished districts of the country. Few inquirers
have had their eyes fully opened to the deep-seated
effects of this system in perpetuating poverty, in
wasting the soil, and in making the processes of
improvement impossible. Professor Marshall of Cam-
bridge is the only man — so far as I know — who has
seen and expressed it as a universal truth.
Next comes the injurious fiscal legislation of the
Irish Parliament under the received doctrines of that
time ; but applying them, as we have seen, with even
exceptional blindness, and with exceptionally dis-
astrous effects. Mr. Lecky does mention this policy
CH. ix] BAKBAROUS AGRICULTURE. 249
of corn bounties, and calls it " a very strange tillage
law ; " but he mentions it in connection with quite
another subject, namely, the desire of the Irish Parlia-
ment to spend all its revenue so as to leave no surplus
that could go to England. Of course, in the abstract,
the objection to the bounties depends on whether we
do or do not really believe in the doctrines of Free-
trade, — as founded on natural laws, — whether, in this
last decade of the nineteenth century, we are as uncon-
vinced as our grandfathers were in the beginning of
the eighteenth century, that direct money bribes to a
very poor and ignorant people, inducing them to spend
their labour on a kind of production which would not
otherwise be remunerative, is, or is not, a ruinous
policy. But eveu this abstract doctrine is not the
only decisive question to be considered in this par-
ticular case. I am ready to admit that there may
possibly be cases in which industry may be thus
turned into some new channel, such as the suggestions
of voluntary enterprise would not have discovered.
But in the case of the Irish corn bounties we have
not only a typical case of violence done to all the
teaching of Ad-am Smith, but a case also in which we
have the direct evidence of a most competent witness
that the policy was actually and visibly doing enor-
mous harm to the soil of Ireland. We have, moreover,
our own later knowledge and experience of the effect
it had in producing a terrible evil which not even
Arthur Young foresaw — and that is the power it had
250 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ix.
in stimulating the increase of a population living
mainly on potatoes. The evidence is, I think, con-
clusive that this violation of all economic laws was
one which had an immense effect in all the causes
which have led to agrarian poverty in Ireland; and
although Englishmen at this time were only just
beginning to awake to any knowledge of economic
laws, it must be at least acknowledged that England
had no responsibility whatever in this matter.
Now let us pass to another great source of poverty
in Ireland — a cause fully and repeatedly admitted
by Mr. Lecky — and that is the universal custom of
sub-letting land, and of sub-sub-letting it over and
over again, until there often came to be four or five
occupiers between the lowest of them and the head
landlord. This was essentially and wholly Irish in
its origin. England had nothing whatever to do
with it. It prevailed all over the Island in defiance
of every attempt of the landowners to prohibit it.
Even the Irish courts of law took their share in it
by discouraging the enforcement of any clause in
leases which prohibited sub-letting. Such clauses
were supposed to involve a prohibition which was at
variance with public policy. There could not possibly
be a stronger evidence of the ignorance prevalent in
the native atmosphere of Irish opinion. At one time
Protestant Ulster was as bad in this way as Catholic
Gonnaught. "It is certain," says Mr. Lecky, "that
the competition for land, aggravated by the inveterate
CH. IX.] IRISH SUB-LETTING. 251
habit of sub-lettiug, had reduced a great part of Ulster
to intolerable misery." * The truth is that without it
probably the swelling population could not have been
fed at all, and the- mere increase of numbers without
any reference to the condition or standard of life
was then regarded as a decisive test of prosperity.
The breeding and the subdivision thus acted and
reacted upon each other in an inseparable tangle of
reciprocal causes and effects. English Protectionist
legislation had, of course, its share in limiting em-
ployment. But Irish bounties of all kinds had a
much more direct and more powerful effect in at
once stimulating the breeding of the people, and in
impoverishing the land out of which alone they could
be fed.
Then, upon another closely related point, — the rents
paid in Ireland, — Mr. Lecky is almost the only his-
torian who represents the facts with any tolerable
fairness. He does, indeed, quote numerous authors
who talk about cottars '* ground down to the very
dust" by middlemen; and neither he, nor almost
anybody else, can ever keep steadily in mind the
obvious economic truth that rents are determined,
not by those who let the land, but by those who hire
it. If Irishmen were " ground down " at all they were
ground down by the jostling of each other. High
rents are nothing but an index of the great fact of a
population pressing hard on the means of subsistence.
* " Ireland," vol. ii. p. 49.
252 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. ix.
They are not the cause of that fact, but its conse-
quences. Of this pressure, high rents, offered and
accepted, are simply the external indication. The
fact would not be altered by one hair's-breadth if the
index could be artificially kept from working. If the
price of land, or the price of any other article, could
possibly be kept down at a low point in spite of
multitudes of men competing to get it, then the only
result would be more speedy famine, because there
would be a still more rapid increase of population.
But besides all this, Mr. Lecky fairly recognises the
fact that, to begin with, land in Ireland was not let
either at high rents, or for short and uncertain
tenures ; but, on the contrary, at very low rents, and
for long periods of time. And — contrary to a very
widespread popular impression — to this very fact was
due in a great degree the excessive breeding. He
quotes from Arthur Young the pregnant observation
that " if long leases at low rents, and profit incomes
given, w^ould have improved it, Ireland had long ago
been a garden." The ignorance on this subject among
writers and politicians, is profound, but natural. It
is true, no doubt, that long tenures at low rents given
to men of skill and capital, and of a high standard
of life, may lead to great improvement. But it is
equally true that the same advantages given to a very
poor and ignorant people, with no capital, and with a
very low standard of desire, are, on the contrary, the
most powerful of all means for ensuring the rapid
CH. IX.] IRISH EDUCATION. 253
growth of a pauperised population. In the one case,
they are a stimulus to industry : in the other case, they
mean nothing but idleness made easy, and improvi-
dence encouraged. All this, again, was purely Irish —
England had nothing to do with it. The Irish corn
bounty system had much to do with it — in aggravating
other natural and inevitable results.
I pass to Education — and here again the blame, if
blame there be in any proper sense of the word, lay
with the native Irish. Through long centuries the
Irish had neglected what we now call popular educa-
tion. They had indeed, at one ancient time, some
celebrated seminaries, and for the higher education
men are said to have once come from all parts of
Europe. But this had long passed away — and as
regards the mass of the people there had never been
anything like a general system of education. The
Eeformation was too closely and too obviously con-
nected with the revival of secular learning in Europe,
to give Catholic priests in general, after that event, any
great enthusiasm for education. Mr. Lecky justly
refers by way of contrast to the admirable system of
parochial education which sprang up in Scotland, and
which had a large share in arming the people to contend
with all the same economic changes which operated at
the same time in that country. But the system of
Scotch education was purely the product of the Eefor-
mation. It did not exist before : it was no part of the
Catholic system, — and there were no materials out of
254 IRISH NATIONALISM. [oh. ix.
which to construct any such system in Ireland. It is
absurd to blame the English Government for this defect.
It is not mv intention to dwell here on the last
scene of all — the great Irish Eebellion of 1798. Mr.
Gladstone and others who write and speak in the
same spirit of reckless partisanship in order to buttress
and vindicate their new policy of surrender to the
forces of anarchy, have dwelt on the cruelties perpe-
trated by the Government troops in the suppression
of that rebellion. But they never allade to the earlier
horrors perpetrated by the rebels. In this as in all
other cases of civil war, — of rebellions, and of sup-
pressions of rebellion — we must look first at the
broader aspect of the cause which was fought for by
either side, and then at the comparative conduct of
the two parties in the strife. Looking at the rebellion
of 1798 in the first of these two points of view, one
thing to be noted above all others is this — that it was
not a Catholic rebellion — it was not a national re-
bellion — it was not even an agrarian rebellion. It
was essentially a Jacobin rebellion. Sympathy with
the French Revolution in its wildest excesses, and in
its fiercest passions, was the heart and soul of that
rebellion. Of course it took advantage of, and allied
itself with, every element of discontent and disaffec-
tion which had survived from the said history we have
here shortly traced. Bat the Catholics of Ireland
held aloof from it, and the genuine old Irish Catholics,
who swarmed in the armies of the Continental
cii. IX.] REBELS OF 1798. 255
Kingdoms, never lent it their aid. Its whole spirit
was incarnated in Wolfe Tone, whose autobiographic
memoirs present to my mind the most striking picture
in our language of a villainous and destructive temper
directed against all that can hold human society
together. I have no horror of political rebellions
merely as such. I am the direct descendant of men
who staked all, and lost all, in the armed defence of
their country's liberties. But this has little to do
with the spirit which animated Wolfe Tone and his
"United Irishmen." He had twice offered to sell
himself to Mr. Pitt if he were allowed to organise a
filibustering expedition for the plunder of the rich
Catholic churches on the coast of the Spanish Main.
When this piratical offer was contemptuously refused,
he conceived a mortal hatred of England. He then
tried to sell his country to the French Directory —
bargaining with them for his own share in the results
of an invasion. He suggested the fiercest measures.
He approved of a proclamation warning Irish loyalists
that every man taken as prisoner of war would be put
to death. He gloated over the prospect of seeing the
cities of England and of Scotland at the mercy of the
fiends who had murdered the people of La Vendee,
and had burnt and devastated that fair province of
France. He was, in short, the prey of passions which
made him an incarnate fiend. Mr. Lecky treats this
man, in my opinion, far too philosophically. It is
quite right to be judicial. But there are occasions
256 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. ix.
when the coolest of judges has a public duty to charge
the jury strongly against a prisoner. There are occa-
sions when the black cap is inseparable from the
ermined robe. And so there are occasions when History,
in order to be true, must be severe in the judgments
it pronounces. Mr. Lecky says that Wolfe Tone's
patriotism was largely compounded of hatreds — that
he hated the Parliament of Ireland — that he hated
the Irish country gentry, and contemplated their
massacre — that he hated the Whig Club — that he
hated England, above all things, and looked forward
with passionate eagerness to her downfall.* Yes —
he did indeed hate all those things and persons. But
it ought to be added that he hated and despised
religion, and all the restraints it could impose on
conduct. He was willing to use it as one of his
tools whenever it was convenient for his purpose. He
could go to Mass in a Catholic church — profaning the
holiest rite of Christianity — in order to deceive a
genuine Catholic people. He was a villain, in short,
of the deepest dye — caring for nothing except the
gratification of his own fierce hatreds, and willing to
wade through oceans of blood to some share in the
rule of his own country under the Jacobin Chiefs of
Paris. Yet this is the man to whom Mr. Gladstone
seems to have referred in a letter when he said that
unfortunately many of the rebels in 1798 were among
the noblest characters in Ireland.
* " History," vol. iii. pp. 507, 508.
CH. IX.] POSITION OF GOVERNMENT. 257
But what is the light which this revelation of
character and purpose throws on the conduct of the
Irish Government and of the Irish loyalists ? The
Government was in the secret of every movement
through an informer of whose character Mr. Lecky
draws a picture of the most striking and subtle dis-
crimination. They knew all that the country and the
English nation were threatened with. Half-measures
would have been a crime in such a case. Then, what
was the ocular demonstration set before their eves, of
the true character of the rebellion, in the very first
acts of the insurgents ? We must remember that we
are now looking to causes rather than to reason, as
dominating the conduct of men in times of imminent
danger, and of great excitement. The opening scenes of
any contest — the first acts in any tragedy — are always
those which largely determine the temper and the
conduct of men. What, in this respect, were the facts
as recorded by history ? The outbreak began on the
23rd of May, and on the 24th numerous armed bodies
were in motion in the counties next to Dublin. On
that very first day of action, a small body of forty or
fifty militia soldiers were surrounded and burnt to
death, or piked, in a small town called Prosperous.
A number of civilians were murdered in cold blood.
Almost at the same time, an officer of the militia force
itself, of a high Catholic family, was discovered to be
a traitor. On the 26th of May — only three days after
the outbreak — some nineteen Protestants, including a
s
258 IRISH NATIONALISM. [en. ix.
magistrate, were butchered with the utmost delibera-
tion, and often " with circumstances of aggravated
brutality." * On the 27th of May a serious defeat of
a picked body of militia still more alarmed the whole
country. Enniscorthy was taken by the rebels on
the 28 th. The important town of Wexford fell on
the 30th. A savage mob of armed men was in com-
plete possession of a town full of Protestant and panic-
stricken prisoners. The whole jargon of French
Jacobin phraseology was in full play. Revolutionary
tribunals were sitting. Then came, on the 20th of
June, the horrible massacre of Wexford Bridge. The
unfortunate Protestant prisoners were brought out to
be murdered in batches of ten, fifteen, and twenty at
a time. "They were placed in rows of eighteen or
twenty, and the pikemen pierced them one by one,
lifted them writhing into the air, held them up for a
few moments before the yelling multitude, and then
flung their bodies into the river. Ninety-seven
prisoners are said to have been so murdered, and the
tragedy was prolonged for more than three hours." "f*
I have read the account given by more than an eye-
witness — by one of the intended victims, who was
waiting his turn to be so 'tortured and butchered, and
Avas only saved by an alarm among the rebels, which
stopped the massacre. His account makes one's blood
run cold — and boil — by turns.
* " History," vol. iii. p. 337.
t Ibid., vol. iv. [-p. 455, 456.
CH. IX.] DATES IN THE REBELLION. 259
Now let us remember that all these horrors and
events took place — some of them within a week of the
first outbreak — all of them within twenty-four days.
We may try to imagine, if we can, what a colour they
must have given to the whole rebel cause, in the eyes
of the vast majority of the people of Ireland, — both
Catholic and Protestant, — and what furious but natural
passions they must have roused. It is all very well to
say, as Mr. Lecky philosophically does, that we may
find some "difficulty in striking the balance between the
crimes of the rebels, and the outrages of the soldiers."
But we are bound to remember which of the two
parties set the first example, as well as which of the
two parties was representative of the highest interest
of Society. Happily the great mass of the people
were loyal to the Government. The Eebellion was
suppressed largely by the aid of the native yeomanry
and militia corps. Many of the Catholic priests and
bishops risked their lives in the cause of humanity to
both parties. Twice, as is well known, Wolfe Tone
brought a French fleet to the west coast to effect
the subjugation of his native country by the French.
The people did not respond to his infamous invitations.
And yet almost all parties are agreed that, if a large
French force had succeeded in effecting a landing, and
had met with even one temporary success, no human
being could have been confident that a very poor, a
very ignorant, and a very excitable population might
not have joined them, in spite of every effort on the
260 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ix.
part of their own clergy, and of all by wliom, in times
of peace, they had been accustomed to be influenced.
Mr. Gladstone's Essay, No. IX. in his " Special
Aspects," called " Plain Speaking on the Irish Union,"
is passionately one-sided and unfair ; and he does not
scruple to endorse the absurd allegation that " there
was a plot of the Government against Ireland to make
her condition intolerable, as the only possible means
of contriving the surrender of her nationality." * I
could easily fill as many pages as he has filled, on the
other side, with details of rebel atrocities, and of still
more atrocious rebel hopes and aspirations, and with
words of passionate invective. But it would be only
stupid as well as wicked work to do so. What we
want now is a disposition to condemn, as equally
horrible, all excesses on both sides, whilst yet keep-
ing a clear hold on the principles and prospects of
everlasting right which lay on the Imperial side.
The spirit of candour and fairness with which Mr.
Gladstone handles this sad epoch in history may be
judged by the single fact that in one of his speeches
he quoted a passage from a pamphlet published by
Mr. Lecky when he was a very young man, which
passage Mr. Lecky himself had cancelled in a sub-
sequent edition. Yet Mr. Gladstone quoted it, with
no intimation to his hearers of this significant re-
tractation. Nobody could possibly suspect what lay
hid under such a quotation. The pleasure of quoting
* " Special Aspects," p. 321.
CH. IX.] IKISH HISTORY RE-READ. 265
the past and in the experience of our own time. Still,
it was not bad advice. Every hour spent in the study
of Irish history has only confirmed me in the opinions
which we had held before, — and of which Mr. Gladstone
was a foremost exponent until he was confronted by a
large addition to the number of Irish members. Sur-
render to a supposed political necessity is always
conceivable. But the passionate espousal of a whole
code of doctrines, and opinions, uniformly before
rejected, is inconceivable to any man who respects
his own intellectual integrity. Submission to the
inevitable is one thing : acceptance of the untrue is
quite another thing.
We cannot throw on former generations the burdens
of our own day. We must judge and think for our-
selves on the tendencies of human nature, and on
the inevitable effects of certain political experiments.
Still, it is no small satisfaction to read the following
lines, penned by the greatest Irishman who has ever
lived, except perhaps two others — Bishop Berkeley
and the Duke of Wellington — lines written by Burke
very near his death. Setting aside the " Catholic
Question," which has long ago been settled even
more liberally and completely than to Burke seemed
possible, he says — ■
"For, in the name of God, what grievance has
Ireland, as Ireland, to complain of with regard to
Great Britain ; unless the protection of the most
powerful country upon earth — giving all her privileges.
266 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ix.
without exception, in common to Ireland, and reserving
to herself only tlie painful pre-eminence of tenfold
burdens, be a matter of complaint. The subject, as a
subject, is as free in Ireland, as he is in England. As
a member of the empire, an Irishman has every privi-
lege of a natural-born Englishman, in every part of it,
in every occupation, and in every branch of commerce.
No monopoly is established against him anywhere ;
and the great staple manufacture of Ireland is not only
not prohibited, not only not discouraged, but it is
privileged in a manner that has no example. I say
nothing of the immense advantage she derives from
the use of the English capital. In what country
upon earth is it that a quantity of linens, the mo-
ment they are lodged in the warehouse, and before
the sale, would entitle the Irish merchant or manu-
facturer to draw bills on the terms, and at the time,
in which this is done by the warehouseman on
London? Ireland, therefore, as Ireland, whether it
be taken civilly, constitutionally, or commercially,
suffers no grievance." If this was true in the last
days of Burke, how much more true must it be
now — when so much has been done which he could
never contemplate as even possible. I conclude in the
words of the same great Irishman — this being indeed
the sum and substance of the preceding pages : " I
MUST SPEAK THE TRUTH. I MUST SAY THAT ALL
THE EVILS OF IRELAND ORIGINATE WITHIN ITSELF :
BUT IT IS THE BOUNDLESS CREDIT WHICH IS GIVEN
CH. IX.] SENTENCE OF EDMUND BURKE. 2G7
TO AN Irish cabal that produces whatever
MISCHIEFS BOTH COUNTRIES MAY FIND IN THEIR
RELATION." The particular faction which English
parties may be tempted to patronise, may vary from
time to time. But the principle of giving what Burke
called " boundless credit " to any one of them, is
equally vicious. Never, assuredly, was a worse selec-
tion made of those who are to have supreme power
over their fellow-subjects, than the selection made by
the Cabinet of Mr. Gladstone. Every member of that
Cabinet of any note is steeped to the lips in former
denunciations of their doctrines and of their doings.
Not a fraction of evidence has been produced of any
change. On the contrary, the unanimous vote for
condoning the most horrible form of indiscriminate
murder which they lately gave, shows them to be
unchanged. We have the rare evidence of a judicial
investigation held under circumstances which com-
pelled the judges to limit their finding within the
strictest rules of evidence. The giving of a " bound-
less credit" to them will renew the old desolations of
Ireland due to similar causes. What Ireland wants
above all things is the rule of a Government which is
above all her factions, and which will maintain the
authority of just and equal laws. The minority of
the Irish people do not now seek any ascendancy.
But they have a right to protection — and that, too,
as a condition of their allegiance.
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18 LIST OF WORKS
JAPAN. [See Bird — Handbook.]
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JESSE (Edward). Gleanings in Natural History. Fep. 8vo. 3«. 6d.
JOHNSON'S (Dr. Samuel) Life. [See Boswell.]
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22 LIST OF WORKS
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