Irish descent

“ For these reasons very little is said about pedigree in Ireland these days. The army that is advancing does not look back. The decaying nobility dare not question nor criticise lest they may be trampled upon. The only people who talk about their ancestors are the peasants, who trace their descent from the Irish kings. ”

“ Those who love Ireland nobly desire for her the highest of human destinies. They would ransack the ages and accumulate wisdom to make Irish life seem as noble in men’s eyes as any the world has known. The better minds in every race, eliminating passion and prejudice, by the exercise of the imaginative reason have revealed to their countrymen ideals which they recognized were implicit in national character. It is such discoveries we have yet to make about ourselves to unite us to fulfill our destiny. ”

“ It is very certain that Ireland of all countries, if left to itself, would never of its own will allow history to lie in a backwater among the flotsam of the current. History was the early study of the Irish, the inspiration of their poets and writers. Every tribesman of old knew, not only the great deeds and the famous places of his own clan, but of the whole of Ireland. In the lowliest cabin the songs of Irish poets lived on for hundreds of years, and dying fathers left to sons as their chief inheritance the story of their race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And there are, beyond question, three millions of former Irishmen, citizens to- day of the United States, on whom the glance of many an English statesman, with any just pretension to the name, must fall. Therefore do we say that now England must respect Ireland.
That respect is daily heightened by the greater comfort and easier circumstances, though still far too wretched on the whole, of the Irish at home, which have been mainly brought about by the help received from their exiled countrymen. ”

“ There were only four million Irish altogether, and they were nearly all in Ireland, friendless, voiceless, voteless, landless, powerless, disarmed, disorganized, ignorant, forgotten by the world, misreported and misrepresented by their rich and powerful enemy, and held up in English books, newspapers, schools, at home and abroad, as a race of wild, weak, witty, brave, quarrelsome, purposeless incapables. ”

“ One had only to remember the history of Ireland to realise that many of the differences between the English and the Irish were no more than the differences between the hunter and the hunted, the persecutor and the persecuted. How could the Irish help having a lower standard of life than the English when their lives had been so disrupted and disturbed that it was difficult for them to have a standard of life at all? ”

“ The English were unused to such sights as Ireland in her best times presents, besides they never had oppressed these poor ones, while the rich, powerful Irish, like our slaveholders in the United States, had long held them writhing in their grasp, some of them beside had been too lavish, their means for sporting and pleasure were lessening, and why not take their share of what they wanted, while it was in their hands? ”

“ For hundreds of years after the Invasion, people continued to come from England to live in Ireland both Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon. After settling down they became good friends with the native Irish, intermarried with them, learned to speak and read the Irish language, and quite fell in with the customs and modes of the country, so that it was said of them that they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves." A large proportion of the present inhabitants of Ireland are of this race, mixed up however by intermarriage, with the older Milesian stock. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In some ways the spirit of nationality is stronger in Ireland to-day than it was at any time during the last century. It has certainly penetrated to classes which used to have no consciousness of nationality at all. There are fewer Irishmen now who are ashamed of being Irish. ”

“ How is it that it never occurs to these emphatical denouncers of the whole negro race that the Irish at home are esteemed much as they esteem their slaves, and that the sentence pronounced against their whole country by one of the greatest men of our age, an Irishman, was precisely, that nothing could save, redeem, or regenerate Ireland unless, as a preparatory measure, the island were submerged and all its inhabitants drowned off? ”

“ It could not to-day be fearlessly affirmed that sixty Irishmen were more than a match for one hundred Englishmen; yet depleted as it is by the emigration of its strongest and healthiest children, by growing sickness and a changed and deteriorated diet, the Irish race still presents a type, superior physically, intellectually and morally to the English. ”

“ The Irish are a noble race, degraded by slavery, and bearing the insignia of persecution, extreme savageness, or the lowest servility; yet they are ingenious and active, and seem to me to possess all the elements of power and usefulness; but amongst the lower orders there is a most unfortunate equality, destructive of all great and efficient exertion; and amongst the higher classes the greatest degree of activity is awakened only by the desire of imitating the English, and that not so much in their virtues and talents, as in their luxuries and follies. ”

“ The story of the Irish in America, of those millions of Americans who trace their ancestry back to the Emerald Isle, is typical of so many American immigrants, yet is also uniquely influenced by the rich culture of Ireland. Like so many of our forebears, they came to this land seeking a better future. In the process of becoming Americans, they changed themselves, changed America, and changed the world. ”

“ The modern Irish, who in historical falsification certainly rival, if they do not excel, the Hindús, claim for their ancestry an exalted grade of culture. They found their pretensions upon illuminated manuscripts and similar works of high art; but it is far easier to account for these triumphs as the exceptional labours of students who wandered to the classic regions about the Mediterranean. If ancient Ireland ever was anything but savage, where, let us ask, are the ruins that show any sign of civilisation? ”

“ It is not, however, for the Conquest only that this knowledge of the true state of Ireland ought to be acquired. The light it throws on the Irish people, their inherited and unchangeable tendencies, is of value from the parallel it presents to the latest modern developments. ”

“ I, too, would like to see the Irish in possession of Ireland, but for other reasons. First and chiefly, because they are good patriots, and, though in a foreign land, even naturalized Americans, they do not forget their beloved country. Americans though they be in their new home, they yet remain Irish. They give their allegiance to America; but their hearts remain true to Ireland.
What a contrast to the Germans whom you find in the United States! These forget their mother-tongue, and their children do not speak it. They abuse their country. ”

“ Again we are told that “the Irish, by being held always at arm’s length, had become more Irish and less civilised than ever”; held at arm’s length is an ingenious phrase for evicting a people from their homes, and throwing them out on bogs and mountains. The hardships of hunted famine-stricken outlaws hanging round their old homes, is represented in this kind of history as the life which would be naturally chosen by wild Irish “nomads.” ”

“ It is perfectly true that the courtly deference and polished reserve of old French manners, its thousand observances, and its unfailing devotion to ladies, were not the striking features of Irish country-house life; but there was a great deal in common between them, and perhaps no country of Europe in that day could so easily, and with such little sacrifice, have conformed to the French standard of good-breeding as Ireland ”

“ In Ireland, on the contrary, the new comers found no kindred system. Its tribal polity had placed between its people and themselves a gulf impassable because dividing two wholly different stages of civilization. With no common foundation on which to build, they could only hope to become Irish by cutting themselves off from their own people. ”

“ And it is most true that in Ireland nothing can be more savage, brutish, filthy, idle, and incorrigibly and hopelessly helpless and incapable, than the Irish appear; and yet, transplanted to your northern states, freed from the evil influences which surround them at home, they and their children become industrious, thrifty, willing to learn, able to improve, and forming, in the course of two generations, a most valuable accession to your labouring population. ”

“ Wherever it has been liberated from the English yoke, has not, on the contrary, the Irish race displayed abundant energy, activity, genius? Do not the Irish hold the first rank in the United States, in Canada, in Southern America, in Australia, wherever emigration has carried them. In England even are they not at the head of all liberal professions, letters, the daily press, the bar, science? Those who have seen and closely studied that nation, crushed under its secular burden, ground under the heel of the conqueror, cannot but feel surprised at the bare fact that it survives ”

“ It is certain that in the beginnings of Irish history we find the tradition of the tribal group, just as we find it in the history of the Hebrews, the Greeks, the 291Romans, the Germans, and their offshoots the Anglo-Saxons. It is also certain that Ireland, not having been overrun and shaken up by any of the great migrations after the migration of the Celts, and not having been steam-rolled by the levelling weight of Roman imperialism, preserved a great deal of the old tradition. ”

“ AND ITS EFFECTS. The stream of Irish emigrants, starting from the one source, separated now and continued flowing to the four quarters of the globe, and, at length, its influence was beginning to be felt in England itself, the last of the lands whither the Irish exiles could think of turning. The poorest, unable to pay their passage- money to North America, began to show themselves among the thick populations of the great manufacturing centres of Great Britain. ”

“ The labor involved in this from its very nature is such as can only be performed by an organization such as the American-Irish Historical Society.
The true status of the Irish in America, notwithstanding the fact that their brain and brawn have been interwoven in the woof and web of our nation’s fabric, has never been fully appreciated, by reason of the prejudices which have been associated with anything that bore an Irish name. This prejudice, in no small part, arose from misconception and misunderstanding of the Irish nature, temperament, and characteristics. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Again Ireland appeared when the barbarians had spread over Europe, still unconquered, sending back across the Ocean the learning she had stored up, the free distributor on the Continent of the classics and science and Christian teaching. We have seen the island again on the fringe of the Scandinavian Empire, even now unconquered, and still in the mid-stream of European traffic. When a new revolution came, [97] and trade swelled under the Normans, every Irish port was full. Irishmen sailed every sea. Their fabrics were sold in every country as far as Russia and Naples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let those who wish to understand the present history of Ireland, read Mr. Maguire's Irish in America, carefully and thoughtfully. If they do so, and if they are not blinded by wilful prejudices, they must admit that the oft-repeated charges against Irishmen of being improvident and idle are utterly groundless, unless, indeed, they can imagine that the magic influence of a voyage across the Atlantic can change a man's nature completely. Let them learn what the Irishman can do, and does do, when freed from the chains of slavery, and when he is permitted to reap some reward for his labour. ”