Anglo-Irish people

“ The motives which form the distinctive characteristics of the Irish people are, and always have been, enthusiastic devotion to their religious convictions, unflinching loyalty to the principle of nationality, and a passionate attachment to the soil of their fatherland. Is not the history of England's rule in Ireland a heart-breaking record of systematic oppression upon each and all of these inherent principles of Irish character? ”

“ The reform of Irish history must begin in our own country, among our own people. Since it is public opinion that at the last decides what our people shall learn of their father-land, we ourselves must be the keepers of our fame and the makers of our history. Let us in Ireland therefore remember that we have an ancestry on which there is no need for us to cry shame. Chivalry, learning, patriotism, poetry, have been found there, even “in huts to which an Englishman [62] would have hesitated to give the name of a house.” ”

“ While they have grown to love their country as much as any of Gaelic origin, and their peculiarities have been modified by centuries of life in Ireland and by intermarriage, so that they are much more akin to their fellow-countrymen in mind and manner than they are to any other people, they still retain habits, beliefs and traditions from which they will not part. They form a class economically powerful. They have openness and energy of character, great organizing power and a mastery over materials, all qualities invaluable in an Irish State. ”

“ An Irish body, on Irish soil, no matter what its constitution, could not remain aloof from the needs, and blind to the facts, of Ireland, like strangers in another land. The good-will of the people abounded; even the poorer farmers showed in a better dress, in cleanliness, in self-respect, how they had been stirred by the dream of freedom, the hope of a country. The connection with England, the dependence on the king, was fully accepted, and Ireland prepared to tax herself out of all proportion to her wealth for imperial purposes. ”

“ Thus the English of the towns must have toiled day and night to supply the mantles which the English Government forbade to loyal people, and to provide cloaks and cloth for the foreign trade, since in their incessant struggle to preserve themselves intact from Celtic influences they refused the aid of Irish hands to work for them. It is an idyllic picture of high purpose and endeavour, of the way to develop a country, and to make an empire. ”

“ The purpose of our Society is not to attribute all our splendid traits and achievements alone to the Irish element in our composition. Unlike our Anglomaniac brethren, who contend that everything great and good must be Anglo-Saxon, we merely claim credit for a just share in the upbuilding of the nation. ”

“ The English Crown and Parliament the Irish have never learnt, nor have they had any chance of learning, to love, or to regard as national, notwithstanding the share which was given them, too late, in the representation. The greatness of England is nothing to them. Her history is nothing, or worse. The success of Irishmen in London consoles the Irish in Ireland no more than the success of Italian adventurers in foreign countries (which was very remarkable) consoled the Italian people. The drawing off of Irish talent, in fact, turns to an additional grievance in their minds. ”

“ This is not because governments are more generous to the Irish in the matter of titles. The explanation is to be found in the fact that untitled people in Ireland tend to disappear, thinned out by famine, emigration, and various diseases, while the earls survive. In England it is the noblemen who die away, being, as every reader of popular English novels knows, a degraded set of men, addicted to frightful vices, whereas the working men and the great middle class increase rapidly, their morality being of a very superior kind. ”

“ The children of the immigrant Irish receive the education of Americans, and enter, more rapidly and completely than would have been possible in the country of their descent, into the benefits of a higher state of civilization. In twenty or thirty years they are not mentally distinguishable from other Americans. The loss, and the disgrace, are England's: and it is the English people and government whom it chiefly concerns to ask themselves, how far it will be to their honour and advantage to retain the mere soil of Ireland, but to lose its inhabitants. ”

“ There is no doubt that, taking the Irish nation as a whole, we find in it features which are visible in no other European nation; and that, taking Europe as a whole, in all its complexity of habits, manners, tendencies, and ways of life, we have a picture wholly distinct from that of the Irish people. England has striven during the last eight hundred years to shape it and make it the creature of her thought, and England has utterly failed. ”

“ The present condition of England is the result of centuries of steady progress. Her people have always had leaders to guide them, her laws have generally been in accordance with the moral feeling of the community, in no direction has her material development been checked. But Ireland at the present day is the result of centuries of oppression and neglect. She has been robbed of her natural leaders, for more than a century the law of the land was in direct opposition to the religion of the people, the development of the country has been checked on all sides. ”

“ The Irish remained outside the Empire, as free as the men of Norway and Sweden. They showed that to share in the trade, the culture, and the civilisation of an empire, it is not necessary to be subject to its armies or lie under its police control. While the neighbouring peoples received a civilisation imposed by violence and maintained by compulsion, the Irish were free themselves to choose those things which were suited to their circumstances and character, and thus to shape for their people a liberal culture, democratic and national. ”

“ The one egregious thing which the reading of English history teaches is the English historian’s palpable inability to be candid and unbiased when he comes to deal with Ireland and the Irish. With the true-born Englishman this innate prejudice against his neighboring island and her people comes to him as a heritage of many ages. ”

“ In a few years later a large proportion of the Irish Presbyterians, with a limited number of Catholics in Ulster, became engaged in commerce and various manufacturing interests. But all these people were ultimately ruined by England’s policy, that Ireland should not prosper, and they were gradually forced to leave the country to better their condition by emigration to the American colonies. ”

“ If I am still honored by your Society, I will be glad to read it at a future meeting, with a view to showing not only the influence of this immigration on the history of the United States, but the fact that these immigrants considered themselves Irish without any qualifying clauses, and were so regarded in America, England and Ireland.
Modern political exigencies are playing sad havoc with ethnology. If an Irishman becomes distinguished at home or abroad, in field, forum, market or shop, he is immediately made an Anglo-Saxon ”

“ Any increase in Irish wealth necessitated an increase in the King's hereditary revenue, and therefore rendered him more independent of the English legislature. It was all this which made England nervously anxious to restrict Irish resources in all those directions which might even indirectly interfere with the growth of English power.
The religion of the mass of the Irish people naturally complicated matters still further and gave England fresh political reasons for interfering in Ireland. ”

“ The refusal of the Irish to merge their sense of nationality in a common British whole cannot be explained by any difference in blood or race. We shall get nearer to the heart of the problem if we can discover why the people on the north-east of Ireland, particularly in counties Antrim and Down, in contrast with the rest of Ireland, are sharers in the common British spirit. It is true that, even in ancient times, there was a community of feeling between Ulstermen and the West Scotch. Even in Neolithic times their cultures show a free intercourse. ”

“ The Irish in Ireland are not Fenians in the American sense: they hate us, perhaps, but they may be mollified; they are discontented, but they may be satisfied; customs and principles of law, the natural growth of the Irish mind and the Irish soil, can be recognized, and made the basis of legislation, without bringing about the disruption of the empire.
The first Irish question that we shall have to set ourselves to understand is that of land. Permanent tenure is as natural to the Irish as freeholding to the English people. ”

“ As the different sections of Great Britain are separated by purely artificial frontiers, they do not differ as profoundly as do the people of Ireland from those of the neighboring island. We observe in this republic people who claim a direct descent from English and other stocks producing a people as widely separated in thought, ideals, and physical appearance, and other distinctive features from the stock of the old countries as the Russian is from the Spaniard. ”

“ There can be no mention of the five hundred years of Irishmen’s fame in Europe as classical scholars, philosophers, saints, merchants, or travellers. The centuries of Ireland’s history as a free and independent country are blotted out, and he may catch no glimpse of his people save in the various phases of their material subjugation. During his entire course he can turn [47] no wandering eye on an Ireland that had any art, literature, or industry of its own—a place where anything may have happened on its own account, or where any interest may lie detached from an English book of chronology. ”

“ The persistent distrust of the Irish people, despite all they can do, comes simply to this, that they are to be pressed below the level of civilized mankind. When the boon of self government is given to the British colonies is Ireland alone to be excepted from its blessings? ”

“ At the least the Irish tribal scheme of government contained as much promise of human virtue and happiness as the feudal scheme which became later the political creed of England, but which was never accepted in Ireland. Irish history can only be understood by realising this intense national life with its sure basis on the broad self-government of the people. ”

“ But the whole policy of England towards Ireland after 1691 can naturally not be judged from a modern standpoint; it can only be judged in the light of the prevailing theories and ideas of the age. It was a period of intense class and national egotism; it was a time when the interests of the mass of the people were sacrificed as a matter of course to the desires of the ruling class and the interests of subordinate parts of an empire to those of the centre ”

“ By steadily neglecting everything written in the native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of the inhabitants, secured to themselves the sole place in the later history of Ireland. A false history engendered a false policy, which in the long run held no profit for the Empire, England, or Ireland.
Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish [187] tradition was carried across the years of captivity by these exiles in their own land. Descendants of literary clans, historians and poets and scribes were to be found in farmhouses, working at the plough and spade. ”

“ Hardly do we open them to each other. We are, unlike the English, a silent people about the things that affect us most deeply; which is, perhaps, the reason that we are, on the whole, considered to be good company. It is in keeping with the contradictiousness of Ireland that the most inherently romantic race in the British Isles is the least sentimental, the most conversational people, the most reserved, and also that Irish people, without distinction of sex or class, are pessimists about their future and that of their country. ”

“ A century later the grudge between the settlers and the natives was still bitter, but they had become so closely assimilated that it was hard for a stranger to distinguish them. The one were as turbulent, clannish, fierce, and barbarous as the other. Only on the east coast round Dublin, in the district that was afterwards known as the English 'Pale,' did the Anglo-Irish dwell in a settled and civilized manner of life, and obey the King of England's mandates. The larger part of the island had to be reconquered four centuries after. ”

“ Driven forth by poverty, Irishmen emigrate in great numbers, and in whatever quarter of the world an Irishman sets his foot, there stands a bitter, an implacable enemy of England. That is one of the results of the wide- spread disaffection that exists in Ireland. There are hundreds of thousands—I suppose there are millions—of the population of the United States of America who are Irish by birth, or by immediate descent; and be it remembered, Irishmen settled in the United States have a large influence in public affairs. ”

“ A clearer example of the egoistic use of one nation by another could hardly be found in history. From the day when the first English raiders descended upon the Irish coast down to the day when George III ascended the throne the paramount object of the English Government in Ireland had been the maintenance of English and not of Irish interests. It was no longer a case of subjugation and forcible repression. But it was still a case of conscious and deliberate employment of the territory and resources of a conquered people for the benefit of the conquerors. ”