Goldwin Smith

“ The Spaniards brought tardy aid to their Irish allies. They landed in force at Kinsale, and for a moment the fortune of war seemed to waver, but it soon inclined again to the side of the deputy and England. The force of the rebellion was broken, and Tyrone was compelled to surrender.
Of all the wars waged by a half-civilized on a barbarous and despised race, these wars waged by the English on the Irish seem to have been about the most hideous. No quarter was given by the invader to man, woman, or child. The butchering of women and children is repeatedly and brutally avowed. ”

“ Gladstone had made the mistake of treating the alarm caused by those outrages as a motive for doing justice to Ireland. The motive for doing justice to Ireland was justice.
The assassination of Cavendish and Burke, it is right to say, was the act, not of the Land League or of any conspiracy in Ireland itself, but of the Invincibles, a club of frenzied Irish in the United States. By the Irish leaders it was heartily condemned. That it was regarded with utter abhorrence in the Irish quarters of English cities was denied by observers at the time. Fierce and blind were the passions of those days. ”

“ The small farmer to live must have something to sell. Is there reason to look in any other direction than farming for a speedy extension of Irish industries such as would provide bread sufficient for the population? Is the water-power of Ireland, now that electricity has been developed, likely to do what has been done for England by coal? Is the shipping trade, for which the Irishman has had little opportunity of showing a turn, likely to increase? These are questions which it is for economists, not for politicians or patriotic orators, to decide. ”

“ Scotland, cut off by the repeal of Cromwell’s union from trade with England and the dependencies, had so suffered commercially and industrially that she swarmed with vagrants, and the ardent patriot, Fletcher of Saltoun, proposed slavery as a remedy for the evil. The union, opening free trade with England, brought commercial prosperity in its train. The English in Ireland stretched out their hands to the British government for a union like that which was being made with Scotland, and were coldly repelled. To English protectionism the chief blame for the refusal no doubt is due. ”

“ Death is in every hovel; disease and famine, its dread precursors, have fastened on the young and the old, the strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant; whole families lie together on the damp floor devoured by fever, without a human being to wet their burning lips or raise their languid heads; the husband dies by the side of the wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly suffering ”

“ It would be necessary first to cut the United Kingdom in two and create an Irish government in order that negotiations for a federal union might be set on foot. But how could there be a federation of two states, one of them enormously superior in power to the other? What sort of deliberative assembly would the federal council be?
Another plan is to form a federation of the four nationalities, as they are assumed to be, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; wrenching apart the members of a great nation which have long been united and cancelling the highest work of British statesmanship. ”

“ The Irish Parliament joined in the impeachment of the man who had trampled on it, and when Strafford pleaded in defence of his arbitrary measures, that Ireland was a conquered country, Pym’s retort was, “They were a conquered nation! There cannot be a word more pregnant or fruitful in treason than that word is. There are few nations in the world that have not been conquered, and no doubt but the conqueror may give what law he pleases to those that are conquered; but if the succeeding pacts and agreements do not limit and restrain that right, what people can be secure? ”

“ The revival of Erse as a national language is surely a patriotic dream. How is it possible to revive a language all but dead, with no valuable literature or wealth of printed books, in face of a language which has a grand literature, is spoken by all the educated classes, indeed almost universally, in Ireland, and is necessary for intercourse with Great Britain. O’Connell, we are told, had no great sympathy with the revival of Irish archæology, and no sympathy at all with the project of reviving the Irish language. ”

“ Even Macaulay appears to think that if the popular religion of Ireland had been treated at the union as the popular religion of Scotland was treated, all in Ireland, as in Scotland, might have been well. The result was disappointing. The Irish cotter had voted and shouted for Catholic emancipation at the bidding of the priests and the platform; but what he wanted and hoped to get by a revolution of any kind was, not so much political or religious change, as more oats and potatoes. His real grievances were hunger and nakedness. ”

“ Landlordism, as mere drawing of rent, is an evil. It is not desirable that any man should own land as a non-resident or own more land than he can manage or superintend. The old feudal law attaching service to lordship of land was sound in principle. But if the Irish gentry would accept that principle, be resident, look after their estates, and do their duty to their tenants, they would probably be accepted by their people as social leaders, and they might play that part with good effect. ”

“ Cut off from manufactures and from trade, the people were thrown for subsistence wholly on the land, and land for the most part better suited for pasture than for tillage. For the land they competed with the eagerness of despair, undertaking to pay for their little lots rents which left them and their families less than a bare subsistence. On such a scene of misery as the abodes of the Irish cotters the sun has rarely looked down. ”

“ Irish patriots are apt to talk of England as a single person or, rather, fiend, actuated in her dealings with Ireland by hatred and contempt. England is a nation divided into parties and swayed by varying influences from time to time. The England of Peel and Gladstone is not the England of the Georges, the Stuarts, the Tudors, the Plantagenets, or responsible for the doings of those dynasties. In the evil days of her political history, England, if she oppressed Ireland, also suffered herself. ”

“ The worst part of emigration is that it carries away the pith and sinews of a nation, taking the strong and leaving the weak, the aged, and unsupported women. It is a pleasant proof, already noticed, of the warmth of the Irish heart that there has been less of solitary and more of family emigration in their case than in those of some other emigrating races. After all, how has the earth been peopled, how have all the nations been formed but by migration?
To turn to the political question. The danger of insurrection has probably passed away. ”

“ The O’Neill, upon his elevation to the earldom of Tyrone, is required with his heirs to forsake the name of O’Neill, to use English habits and the English language. The age, however, was one of growing light. Education was a passion of the hour. A decree in favour of the establishment of a system of free schools in Ireland went forth. Unhappily it remained a decree. No homilies, no peerages, no flatteries or marks of confidence could permanently avail to quiet the intractable ambition of the great chiefs. ”

“ The progress of pastoral countries, political and general, as they have little city life, is slow. With beauty Ireland is well endowed. The interior is flat, with large peat bogs and brimming rivers. But the coast is mountainous and romantic. The western coast especially, where the Atlantic rolls into deep inlets, has a pensive charm which, when troubles end and settled peace reigns, may attract the villa as they do the wanderer now. ”

“ The old and sick were everywhere dying by cold and hunger, and rotting amidst filth and vermin. When the potato failed, as it often did, came famine, with disease in its train. Want and misery were in every face; the roads were spread with dead and dying; there were sometimes none to bear the dead to the grave and they were buried in the fields and ditches where they perished. ”

“ Ireland was again reduced to the state of a dependency, and of a dependency unloved and unrespected, whose interests were to be always sacrificed to those of the country which was the seat of power. Of this she was soon made fatally sensible. Protectionism was the creed of that dark age. Ireland as a fine grazing country had been doing a profitable export trade with England in cattle, pork, bacon, and dairy produce. The English grazier demanded of his Parliament protection against the free importation of food, denounced by him as a “nuisance.” ”

“ To repress what was in fact a rebellion fed by foreign aid, to uphold the law, and rescue life and industry in Ireland from the lawless tyranny of the National League, as it was called, the government, as was its plain duty, sought and obtained extraordinary powers, and threw a number of the leaders of the rebellion into prison. It was time, when loyal citizens were joining the League for protection in their callings, which the queen’s government could no longer afford. When the Irish rose against the draft in New York, the Americans shot down several hundreds of them without process of law. ”