Irish question

“ It is a commonplace that there are two Irelands, differing in race, in creed, in political aspiration, and in what I regard as a more potent factor than all the others put together—economic interest and industrial pursuit. In the mutual misunderstanding of these two Irelands, still more than in the misunderstanding of Ireland by England, is to be found the chief cause of the still unsettled state of the Irish Question. ”

“ This is the shape which the Irish problem has assumed in America. Here at home the question is, is England to govern Irishmen? It has obviously failed to make Englishmen of us. On the other side of the Atlantic the question is: Are Irishmen to govern America? America has not succeeded in making Americans of all of us so far. ”

“ The question of Ireland remains a perplexing one. We have two Irishmen in our mess, one a Unionist, the other a Nationalist. The impression one gets from them at least is the hopelessness of our being ever able to settle the Irish problem. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not only so, but the same wretchedness has sent millions of emigrants to form an Irish nation in the United States, where the Irish are a great political power, swaying by their votes the councils of the American Republic, and in immediate contact with those Transatlantic possessions of England, the retention of which it is now patriotic to applaud, and will one day be patriotic to have dissuaded. ”

“ We do not think it possible to get a real insight into the Irish questions that loom so very large in politics to-day without reading of some of the methods adopted in ‘settling Ireland’ in Tudor times. ”

“ I have but one wish under heaven, and that is for the liberty and prosperity of Ireland. I am for leaving England to the English, Scotland to the Scotch; but we must have Ireland for the Irish. I will not be content until I see not a single man in any office, from the lowest constable to the lord chancellor, but Irishmen. This is our land, and we must have it. ”

“ Men who love Ireland ignobly brawl about her in their cups, quarrel about her with their neighbor, allow no freedom of thought of her or service of her other than their own, take to the cudgel and the rifle, and join sectarian orders or lodges to ensure that Ireland will be made in their own ignoble image. 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. ”

“ What of beauty, of happiness, or of virtue did each civilization in fact offer to man? What was gained, what was lost? Here would have been a history of fire and flame, a new outlook on the fate of commonwealths, a theme worthy of an English or an Irish patriot.
In the long task of giving its true balance to the history of Ireland, by the discovery of all the facts, and the adjudging of their place, controversy will be lively. Every Irishman for certain will be ready for a battle of wits. But let us keep our intelligence perfectly clear on one point. ”

“ No Irishman can read the history of his country from 1691-1775 without a feeling that is almost akin to horror. But these dreary annals form very instructive reading for the man of to-day who would wish to understand modern Ireland. It is always unjustifiable to blame England in any treatment of Irish history. She was, after all, the conquering nation, and the age was not an age of humanity or toleration. Still the fact must be looked squarely in the face that it was under English rule that the Irish people underwent sufferings hardly paralleled in history. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Ireland never is, but only always has been cursed by English rule. He himself, the Englishman of the day, is always a simple, bluff, good-hearted fellow. His father if you like, his grandfather very probably, misgoverned Ireland, but never he himself. Why, just look at him now, his hand never out of his pocket relieving the shrill cries of Irish distress. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We may bravely fight all the battles of all the peoples of the earth, but while Ireland’s battle for Ireland’s freedom remains unsuccessfully fought—while England continues to rule Ireland—all the historical bravery of our race in every land, and in every age will not save us from the slur of the unfriendly chronicler who writes that we fight well as “mercenaries,” that we fight bravely the battles of every land on earth, except the battle of our own land.
The Irish language was the language of the house at my grandfather’s place. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We need not seek far for instances; but the singular pertinacity with which some of our Irish fellow subjects still assert that Ireland is the most oppressed and injured country under heaven, is a curious proof of indifference to the realities of life. At the present moment there is not one spot upon the earth’s surface where there is more real liberty than in Ireland—where men can more freely go where they like, write what they like, do what they like, and say what they like; but, for all that, the Irish are still a persecuted, the English a persecuting 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ We can no more deduce the political character of the Irish from the history of the past seven hundred years than we can estimate the quality of genius in an artist whom we have only seen when grappling with a burglar. The political character of a people emerges only when they are shaping in freedom their own civilization. To get a clue in Ireland we must slip by those seven centuries of struggle and study national origins, as the lexicographer, to get the exact meaning of a word, traces it to its derivation. ”

“ Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of their past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people who alone in Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but illuminated and adorned with all that fancy could suggest in ballad, and tale, and rude epic, the history of the mound-raising period, are not justly liable to this taunt. Until very modern times, history was the one absorbing pursuit of the Irish secular intellect, the delight of the noble, and the solace of the vile. ”

“ If the Protestant religion had spread in Ireland as it did in England, and if there had never been any difference of faith between the two countries—can it be believed that the Irish, ill-treated and infamously governed as they have been, would never have made any efforts to shake off the yoke of England? ”

“ The Irish, nevertheless, have by long effort been brought under authority to the English mind in history, and an Anglicised Ireland now lies in the wake of England, a laggard in the trough of the wave, rocked by the old commonplaces of the early Victorian age. The hope that our people may win out of that trough lies to a great extent in the new sails set by the National University, if they may at last catch the fresh breezes of Heaven, and be swept into the open sea of free knowledge and candid thinking. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The state of Ireland—not the present state merely, but the habitual state—is hitherto the most unqualified instance of signal failure which the practical genius of the English people has exhibited. We have had the Irish all to ourselves for five hundred years. No one has shared with us the privilege of governing them, nor the responsibilities consequent on that privilege. No one has exercised the smallest authority over them save by our permission. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do assert that from several experiments I have made in travelling in both England and Ireland, I have found the poor cottagers in the latter kingdom, who could speak our language, to have a much better natural taste for good sense, humour, and raillery than ever I observed among people of the sort in England. But the million of oppressions the national Irish lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, the ridiculous zeal of their priests and [Pg 9] the general misery of the whole nation, have been enough to damp the best spirits under the sun. ”

“ So with that she called me a fool, and repeated, it was all for the good of the country—to show the boundless nature of the ”Cranley Hurst Charity“—that it took in even the Irish. Oh, how my blood boiled; and I up and told her, that it was true the English now and again did a great deal for Ireland, and very good it was of them, for no doubt the Irish were a mighty troublesome people; and indeed, it was hard to think how any people could sit down quiet and cheerful that had only potatoes to eat, and rags to cover them. ”

“ The people will be with you in a body. The people, not of Ireland only, but of Britain equally—for we know that unless the Irish are placed in a condition to maintain themselves, upon us will fall the burden of their maintenance. ”

“ The Irish are, unfortunately, not so; and yet, what is English or Scottish history to compare with Irish? Ireland was a land of saints and scholars when Britons were painted savages. Wise and noble laws, based upon the spirit of Christianity, were administered in Erin, and valuable books were written ere the Britons were as far advanced in civilization as the Blackfeet Indians. In morals and intellect, in Christianity and civilization, in arms, art, and science, Ireland shone like a star among the nations when darkness enshrouded the world. ”

“ The Irish attribute their misery to England’s tyranny; the English, indignant at the accusation, reply that the laws which rule Ireland are the same which render the English people rich and prosperous; they assert that the Irish have only themselves to blame for their misery. ”

“ The position of an Irish chieftain--with his practically limitless powers of life and death, his wild retinue of retainers whose only law was the will of their chief--offered an irresistible temptation to men of their type, and had many more charms than the narrow and uninteresting rôle of liegeman to a king whom they never saw, and the obeying of whose behests brought them harm rather than good. England had shown only too plainly that she had no power to protect her Irish colonists, of what use therefore, it was asked, for them to call themselves any longer English? ”