Irish Rebellion

“ Would Ireland know the solution of her vexed question? Then let history repeat itself; and instead of the torch of the incendiary, or the knife of the assassin, let the Irish tenantry take in their hands, as did their ancestors thirteen hundred years ago, the Bible of the blessed Savior, and convert again the English land-owners to the doctrines of him who taught, ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ They have tried sullen submission, careless indifference, crafty counsels, and armed rebellion, none of which have been successful. ”

“ In our fallen state, with an island reeking with blood, and the sword at our throat, directed by an administration in the best and in the worst of times hostile to Ireland, we call upon you to assist in rescuing our country from utter and irretrievable ruin—we implore you to interfere [Pg 78] for us with our common Sovereign—to solicit at his paternal hand the removal of those wicked men, who by abusing the confidence of their Sovereign, and sacrificing their duty to his people, to the gratification of ambitious views or native malevolence, have belied the Irish nation ”

“ The Irish indeed prepared for an insurrection without waiting for continental assistance. They had been ripe for rebellion through a long succession of ages, and no concessions made to them soothed their chafed minds. Their turbulence had manifestly increased from the time of the American war, when the Irish volunteers had been allowed to arm themselves; and, “whether acting wisely or unwisely, liberally or illiberally—whether granting concessions or withholding them, nearly every act of government had tended to augment the disaffection.” ”

“ The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was one of many unfortunate occurrences which precipitated the revolution at home, for not only did the Republican party take advantage of the King's difficulties to increase its own power, but the Irish rebels envenomed the bitterness between King and Commons by declaring that they were empowered, by Royal Commission, to defend his Majesty's prerogatives against a Puritanical, levelling Government. ”

“ He then traced the history of the Irish Confederation, establishing, from the manifestoes published in the Felon and Nation newspapers, that the determination of these confederates was to entirely abolish the imperial government; to take away from the queen all authority in Ireland; to annihilate all the rights of property; to hold up the hope of plunder to those who would break their oaths of allegiance and join in rebellion; and to hold up the threat of depriving all those of their property who would remain fast to their allegiance, and refuse to assist in the insurrection. ”

“ Some have it that it was caused by the resentment that grew out of the Dublin Strike of 1912-13; others, that it was the threatened Ulster rebellion, and there are many other equally wrong explanations. All these writers ignore the main fact that the Revolution was caused by the English occupation of Ireland.
So many people not conversant with Irish affairs ask: Why a revolution? Why was it necessary to appeal to arms? Why was it necessary to risk death and imprisonment for the self-government of Ireland? ”

“ Public opinion in Ireland may be said for the moment to have been dead. The mass of the people were lying crushed and exhausted by their own violence. Fresh from a contest waged with gun and pike and torch, a mere constitutional struggle had probably little or no interest for them. The popular enthusiasm which the earlier triumphs of the Irish Parliament had awakened had all but utterly died away in a fratricidal struggle. To the leaders of the late rebellion it was an object of open contempt, if not indeed of actual aversion. ”

“ The Irish rebellion has at last, during the past few years, come into practical politics, and it has found shape in a measure which has now passed through the House of Commons and through the House of Lords, giving what the Irishmen so long wanted, home rule to Ireland. ”

“ When one thinks how very much abler were the leaders of the Irish rebellion in 1798 than are the present heads of the Irish party in Parliament, how much greater the provocations to rebellion given the Irish people then were than they are now even alleged to be—how little the Irish people in general have now to gain by rebellion, and how much to lose, it is hard to resist a suspicion that [pg 49] it must be even easier now than it was in 1798 for the Government to tap the secrets of the organisations opposed to it. ”

“ The suppression of the rebellion burned into the Irish heart the belief that the English government was their implacable enemy, that the law was their oppressor, and Englishmen the haters of their race. ”

“ Under these circumstances, the charge of sottish discontent, which has been so confidently made against the Irish nation, will appear to be one of those foul calumnies by which a desperate and enraged faction strive to cover their own enormities. Englishmen, and the world, will see, that had Ireland at that critical moment adopted the advice of those who had always acted as enemies to her best interests, and rejected the counsels and opinions of those to whom she owed the most important obligations, she would then indeed have been incorrigibly sottish. ”

“ But with the administration of Ireland, or the Irish House of Commons of that day, advice and remonstrance were vain. They boldly ventured on a measure of which these consequences were foreseen, yet now profess to wonder why such consequences have happened. On the folly of their counsels, then, the people of Ireland are justified in charging the assassinations—the sedition—the conspiracy, which have disgraced their country: they are not the [Pg 38] native growth of her soil! They have been begotten only by insolence and injury upon the stifled indignation of a volatile and feeling people! ”

“ We confess ourselves at a loss for an answer. The only insurrection which has done Ireland any real service was the one headed by Father Mathew. The true office of the Irish Washington would be to head a rebellion against thriftlessness, superstition, and dirt. The sooner the barricades are thrown up against these the better. Ireland is in want of a revolution which shall render troops less necessary rather than more so. ”

“ The truth is that this rebellion has grown out of the corrupt interposition of individuals in Great Britain with Irish politics, and the strange and preposterous experiments which have been made upon Ireland by the British Cabinet for the last six years, against the strong and repeated remonstrances of every kind friend of British government in this country. And it is plain that the desperate gang of opposition in England have determined to play the game out. ”

“ When bad men raised disturbances here, when a Chartist rabble fired on the Queen's soldiers, numerous regiments could, without the smallest risk, be spared from Ireland. When a rebellion broke out in one of our colonies,—a rebellion too which it might have been expected that the Irish would regard with favour, for it was a rebellion of Roman Catholics against Protestant rulers,—even then Ireland was true to the general interests of the empire, and troops were sent from Munster and Connaught to put down insurrection in Canada. ”

“ Within the Repeal Association there was another organization called the Young Irelanders, which published a paper called The Nation. This paper was an immense factor in arousing and keeping alive a firm nationalist opinion in Ireland. The Young Irelanders were revolutionists, and by their writings counseled the people to adopt military uniforms, to study military tactics, to march to and from the meetings in military order. They made no secret of their belief that the freedom of Ireland must be won by force of arms. ”

“ And from the beginning of the war the Irish Volunteers spent all the time they could in intensive drilling, not knowing at what time their hand might be forced, or the opportune moment for the Rising might arrive.
For in Ireland we have the unbroken tradition of struggle for our freedom. Every {xviii} generation has seen blood spilt, and sacrifice cheerfully made that the tradition might live. ”

“ The common people use a sort of food so very cheap that they can rear families who cannot procure employment, and who have little more of the comforts of life than food. The Irish are light-minded—want of employment has made them idle; they are irritable and brave, have a keen remembrance of the past wrongs they have suffered, and the present wrongs they are suffering from England. The consequence of all this is, eternal riot and insurrection, a whole army of soldiers in time of profound peace, and general rebellion whenever England is busy with her other enemies or off her guard! ”

“ The attempts of the Irish at physical resistance to English authority have been steadily diminishing in gravity during the present century—witness the descent from the rebellion of 1798 to Smith O'Brien's rebellion and the Fenian rising of 1867. On the other hand the power of the Irish to act as a disturbing agency in English politics has greatly increased, and the reason is that the stream of Irish discontent is fed by thousands of rills from the United States. ”

“ Government was told by the lord-lieutenant, that the exhausted state of the public revenues rendered it impracticable to embody a militia, whence the people were given to understand that they might take measures to protect themselves. This was an ill-omened step for ministers to take, when the people of Ireland were everywhere displaying the feelings of rebellion. By it the serpent’s teeth were sown, and they sprang up armed men. The Irish obeyed the call with alacrity. ”

“ As I read all this once again during the height of the rebellion, with the rattle of the maxims playing upon Boland's mills immediately behind me, where a couple of [Pg 87] hundred of the men he had described were now fighting Labour's first war under the name of an Irish Republic, at once the whole aspect of the rebellion changed. ”

“ If it be granted that such conduct in the popular representation of a nation was calculated to excite discontent and destroy confidence, what followed that transaction must have had a much more powerful tendency to alienate the affection of the people, and produce those direful consequences which are now boldly said to have arisen unprovoked. When the Irish Catholics perceived, from the manner in which their petition for the elective franchise was treated, that in the Irish House of Commons they were not to look for friends, they resorted to the Throne. ”

“ The rebellion was defeated by the gallantry of the Irish loyalists and the few English troops which supported them. No help had as yet been sent from England. Decisive as the battle of Arklow proved to be, the Irish ministers believed that the rebellion was still likely to grow, and wrote urgently for reinforcements. Five regiments were despatched, and several militia regiments volunteered for service in Ireland. The crown could not accept their offer without the consent of parliament. The opposition in the commons raised objections, and were defeated by a large majority. ”

“ As a prelude, Ireland was incited by the enemy to premature [195] rebellion; and as Archbishop Hughes, of New York, said when delivering a lecture on Irish starvation in ’46—‘Martial law for the people—a bayonet or a gibbet for the patriot who loved Ireland—a bribe for the traitor who did not—led to that act called the Union, in which the charter of Irish nationality was destroyed—I trust not forever.’ Irishmen have since experienced the happiness of being an integral portion of the disunited kingdom ”

“ They had already been forced into such courses by the intolerable taxation necessary to support the Parliament’s army, and by the violence and oppression of some soldiers which often went unpunished. Most of the really active rebels were dead or exiled, and it was unwise as well as unjust to assume universal guilt. The Irish nation, indeed, ‘were generally engaged in the rebellion, either through ignorance of the design and apprehending they acted by the King’s commission and for his and God’s service ”

“ The rebels came here, captured the police barracks, took every rifle and all the ammunition, and marched away to Dublin or Wexford. But before they did that they cut down all the telegraph wires and stopped all communication between this town and any other. They made a good job of it—every man of them got away. ”

“ By this time the Rebels had collected a very considerable force and every night committed some outrage and depredation. They encamped upon an Island in the bog of Timahoe, and also at Mucklin and Dreihid; they plundered almost every 9 house in the neighbourhood of their respective places, drove away all the fat cattle and horse they could meet, and intercepted the supplies for the Dublin market. ”

“ Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.The Catholics were still shut out from this Parliament; but, excepting in Ulster, nearly all the poorer Irishmen were Catholics. Pitt, as I told you, wanted to admit Catholics to both Parliaments; but it was not the time to make such a great change, when Britain was in the middle of a dangerous war, and when the mass of the Irish peasants, poor, disloyal and ignorant, were quite ready to welcome a French invasion of Ireland. Civil war and rebellion in Ireland, 1798.From 1795 there was almost a state of civil war between Irish Protestants and Catholics ”

“ It was, for all who had Irish blood in their veins and Irish sympathies in their hearts, a serious consideration that once again the banner of insurrection against English rule had been unfurled in Ireland, and that on many a spot of Irish earth the organized forces of England were in conflict with the hastily collected, ill-supplied, and almost unarmed levies of Irish patriotism. ”