Alais

“ And our surprise would be the measure of the deepest difference between England and Ireland. To express it in the same idle imagery it would be the fact that even a casement is a part of a house, as a kettle is a part of a household. Every word in Irish is a household word. ”

“ If the mind could be carried back on the track of time, and we could see what we now call France as it existed twenty centuries before the Christian era, we should behold the same natural features: the same mountains rearing their heads; the same rivers flowing to the sea; the same plains stretching out in the sunlight. But instead of vines and flowers and cultivated fields we should behold great herds of wild ox and elk, and of swine as fierce as wolves, ranging in a climate as cold as Norway ”

“ In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India, bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. ”

“ On account of this perpetual silence about Ireland, all Europe looks upon her as under a constant fog, the seat of dulness, and the dismal mansion of ignorance and distress. Scarce any people are taken for mere Irish, either in England or on the continent, but the vulgar of the country, and the few unfortunate exiles. ”

“ Ireland is yours for ages yet, on the condition that you will be Irishmen—in name, in faith, in fact. Refuse it, and you commit yourselves, in the position of paupers, to the mercy of English Ministers and English members; you throw your very existence on English support, which England soon may find too costly to afford; you lie at the feet of events; you lie in the way of a people and the movement of events and the march of a people shall be over you. ”

“ But how much more noble is the boast of the Englishman, that England is not circumscribed by the walls of her capital, nor even by the four seas that gird her cliffs, but that wherever, under her red-cross flag, her laws are observed, her institutions retained, and her memory cherished, there England does in fact exist. ”

“ Yes, among the nations of the earth, Ireland stands number one in the physical strength of her sons and in the beauty and purity of her daughters. Ireland, land of my forefathers, how my mind expands, and my spirit walks abroad in something of majesty, when I contemplate the high qualities, inestimable virtues, and true purity and piety and religious fidelity of the inhabitants of your green fields and productive mountains. ”

“ By dowering the crown of England with as fair a cluster of flourishing towns and loyal centres of industry as are to be found in any portion of the Empire. Would you see what Ireland might have been—go to Derry, to Belfast, to Lisburn, and by the exceptional prosperity which has been developed, not only within a hundred towns and villages, but for miles and miles around them, you may measure the extent of the injury we have sustained. ”

“ In England, we have immense tracts of common in many of the counties;—in Scotland; we have our barren hills, our mosses, and moors;—in America, the cultivation bears but a small proportion to the wilds, the swamps, and the forests. In our beautiful provinces in the East Indies, the cultivation forms but a speck in the wide extent of common, and forest, and jungle. Why should France furnish a different spectacle? Why should the face of the country there wear a continual smile, while its very heart is torn with faction, and its energies fettered by tyranny? ”

“ The name of Ireland reads as fair as England; its sons are as brave and politic, able to defend, to rule themselves: blot England from the world, and Ireland stands free and glorious, sufficing to herself. ”

“ England has been left behind, with pleasant memories that it wouldn't take much reflection to transform into regrets; yet all is lighted up with good anticipations, for we two Bostonians are soon to stand on the soil of Imperial France. The thought even now kindles peculiar emotions. Sunny France! an elastic people, brilliant in exploit; its great metropolis the epitome of a remarkable civilization! ”

“ It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope—the thing all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. ”

“ Now because the glorious stories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland have been nearly lost in that of mighty England, men have at times, almost forgotten about the leek, the thistle, and the shamrock, which stand for the other three divisions of the British Isles. ”

“ To come to a latter-day aspect of Ireland, in its relation to world affairs, let us pray that there are signs that the night of hatred and the twilight of suspicion are brightening into a new dawn in partnership between Great Britain and Ireland—into a day of mutual understanding, respect, and, in the end, affection. ”

“ They look to England as their mother-country. But Ireland is an ancient nation and a mother-country in her own right. She has herself peopled the earth with her children. Her empire is as far-flung as England’s. ”

“ The utmost recesses of Scotland, or Ireland, or Wales would look quite tame and domesticated contrasted with these rugged solitudes. Not a house nor a hut anywhere, not a trace of the presence of man, not even—so it chanced—another sail upon the sea! ”

“ England will be just as good to live in though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous, nightingale. ”

“ And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past forty-eight hours.
England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh, Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's heel—that ancient England slept. ”

“ France brings the Alsatians into a social system so full of the goodness and agreeableness of life; we offer to the Irish no such attraction. It is the secret, finally, of the prevalence which we have remarked in other continental countries of a legislation tending, like that of France, to social equality. ”

“ France has a small debt and an immense army; while England has a vast debt and scanty forces. France has five millions of kindly, merry, well-fed yeomen. England swarms with dark and withered artisans. Every seventh person you meet in France is a landowner in fee, subject to moderate taxation. Taxes and tenancies-at-will have cleared out the yeomanry of England. France has a literature surpassing England's modern literature. France is an apostle of liberty—England the turnkey of the world. France is the old friend, England, the old foe, of Ireland. ”

“ Ireland is no mere pendant to England, like Anglesea or the Isle of Wight; she is a separate and different country, scarcely smaller in size, complete in herself, and peopled by a nation of different creed, different temperament, and different race. ”

“ So that in France they watch for a distinguished intellect, while in England we look for an individuality that is at once powerful, strange, and intimate, its expression intelligible only to those who have explored the farthest recesses of consciousness. In France we find a garden, in England a wilderness. ”

“ Thus England, without being at the pains of assuming it, is allowed a right to all those who have either written or fought in English with any distinction, as Scotland impudently whips away from Ireland all her old saints and her sophists, on account of having shared with her the same name of Scotia. ”

“ What need to speak of Ireland; setting at nought, as it does, the difficulties of the sea, and coming almost in a body to our shores, with its crowd of philosophers, the most intelligent of whom are subjecting themselves to a voluntary exile. ”

“ You have been told that Ireland had been subject to England, ever since the time of Henry the Second; but there had constantly been quarrels and warfare between the native Irish, and the new Irish, who were the descendants of the English, who had settled there, after the conquest.
40. Then the new Irish were just as ready to quarrel with new English settlers, as the old Irish were with them; and, till the last fifty years, little had been done to make the people of Ireland a better or a happier race. ”

“ The Bretons and Alsacians, who do not all understand the language of her government, have not been the least devoted of her children in the hour of tribulation. Among the great nations France is the nation par excellence. Elsewhere the nationality blends, or tends to blend, with the race, a natural development and, hence, one devoid of merit. ”

“ By emigration, conquest, settlement, slavery, and intermarriage, and all those causes that mix races, Dane, Norse, German, Norman-French, Dutch, French, Walloon, and Flemish were mingled and intermingled with the original race, the constituent elements varying with time, place, and circumstances. So we have to-day in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England four distinct peoples different in characteristics, temperaments, thought, and methods, peoples made up practically from the very same elements. ”

“ To one unacquainted with the present division of society, and the condition of each of its branches in France; to one who had only cast his eye, in travelling, over the immense tracts of cultivated land, with scarcely an acre of waste to diversify the scene, and who had permitted first impressions to influence his judgement, it might appear, that in agriculture, France far excelled every other country in the world. ”

“ Finally, we come to the age whose progress we have just recorded, which covers the whole of the Middle Ages. For this period, which was for Ireland an epoch of foreign influence much more than of foreign rule, we have many beautiful Abbeys, built for those foreign orders whose coming was in a sense a return tide, a backward flow of the old missionary spirit which went forth from Ireland over nascent modern Europe. ”

“ A long peace, the sterility of Germany, the interesting activities of the Catholic Church, have perhaps not yet changed, but have at least disturbed the mind of the north, and ours, a northern people's, with it. The unity, the passionate patriotism, the close oligarchic polity, the very silence of the English has arrested the eyes of France. ”

“ Then the Norman barons built castles and married Irish ladies, and they no more desired to return to England, for Ireland was a country abounding in treasure.
"The old chieftains of Erin prospered under these princely English lords, who were the chief rulers and who had given up their surliness for good manners, their stubbornness for sweet-mildness and their perverseness for hospitality." ”

“ ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE ROMANS
If you look at a Map of the World, you will see, in the left-hand upper corner of the Eastern Hemisphere, two Islands lying in the sea. They are England and Scotland, and Ireland. England and Scotland form the greater part of these Islands. Ireland is the next in size. The little neighbouring islands, which are so small upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland,—broken off, I dare say, in the course of a great length of time, by the power of the restless water. ”

“ Ireland and Scotland, remember, are always included in this preference. But we do not understand society, even imitating the French, as we prove, alas, that we can do continually, in their faults, while we cannot throw off our whalebone and buckram. In France there is much less of gossip than in England ”

“ To judge of Ireland by the conversation one sometimes hears in England, it would be supposed that one-half of it was covered with bogs, and the other with mountains filled with Irish ready to fly at the sight of a civilised being. ”

“ Territory as France, and what Planted Land the King of France hath also in America. And if any Man will be Heterodox in behalf of the French Interest; I would be contented against my knowledge and judgment, to allow the King of France's Territories, to be a seventh, sixth, or even a fifth greater, than those of the King of England; believing that both Princes have more Land, than they do employ to its utmost use. ”

“ If, for instance, in Scotland, the lower ranks, the labouring classes, like those of France, had transplanted the fictitious manners of the higher classes into the innocence of their cottage, or the sequestered solitude of their vallies—where, under such a state of things, could there ever have arisen such gifted spirits as Burns, or Ramsay, or Ferguson? ”

“ Early Britain.—The land we call England is that part of the Island of Great Britain south of the River Tweed, with the exception of a small area on the western side, known as Wales. England covers about 50,000 square miles, and Wales a little over 7,000. Yet a great many people live in this little space, and a great many more have left its shores and settled all over the globe. ”

“ Ireland, in ancient times linked by bonds of culture and of friendly intercourse with every nation to which the ambit of travel could carry her farventuring missionaries and men of learning has to-day formally, yet none the less practically, entered into a new bond of union with her sister nations, great and small, who are represented in this magnificent world-concourse. ”