Part 72

"The Catholics were at length emancipated in 1829; and now, surely, their enemies suggested, they must be contented and grateful for evermore? Perverse must the people be who, having got what they asked, are not satisfied. Let us see. What they asked was to be admitted to their just share, or, at any rate to some share, of the government of their native country, from which they had been excluded for five generations. But on the passing of the Emancipation Act not a single Catholic was admitted to an office of authority, great or small. The door was opened, indeed, but not a soul was permitted to pass in. There were murmurs of discontent, and the class who still enjoyed all the patronage of the State, the Church, the army, the magistracy, and the public service, demanded if there was any use in attempting to conciliate a people so intractable and unreasonable? The Catholic Association, which had won the victory, was rewarded for its public spirit by being dissolved by Act of Parliament. Its leader, who had been elected to the House of Commons, had his election declared void by a phrase imported into the Emancipation Act for this special purpose. The forty-shilling freeholders, whose courage and magnanimity had made the cause irresistible, were immediately deprived of the franchise. By means of a high qualification and an ingeniously complicated system of registry, the electors in twelve counties were reduced from upwards of 100,000 to less than 10,000. Englishmen cannot comprehend our dissatisfaction. … Emancipation was speedily followed by a Reform of the House of Commons. In England a sweeping and salutary change was made both in the franchise, and in the distribution of seats; but Ireland did not obtain either the number of representatives she was demonstrably entitled to by population and resources, or such a reduction of the franchise as had been conceded to England. The Whigs were in power, and Ireland was well-disposed to the party. … But the idea of treating Ireland on perfectly equal terms, and giving her the full advantage of the Union which had been forced on her, did not exist in the mind of a single statesman of that epoch. After Emancipation and Reform, O'Connell had a fierce quarrel with the Whigs, during which he raised the question of Ireland's right to be governed exclusively by her own Parliament. The people responded passionately to his appeal. The party of Protestant Ascendancy had demanded the Repeal of the Union before Emancipation, but that disturbing event altered their policy, and they withheld all aid from O'Connell. After a brief time he abandoned the experiment, to substitute for it an attempt to obtain what was called 'justice to Ireland.' In furtherance of this project he made a compact with the Whigs that the Irish Party under his lead should support them in parliament. The Whigs in return made fairer appointments to judicial and other public employments, restrained jury packing, and established an unsectarian system of public education; but the national question was thrown back for more than a generation. In 1840-1 O'Connell revived the question of Repeal, on the ground that the Union had wholly failed to accomplish the end for which it was said to be designed. Instead of bringing Ireland prosperity, it had brought her ruin. The social condition of the country during the half-century, then drawing to a close was, indeed, without parallel in Europe. The whole population were dependent on agriculture. There were minerals, but none found in what miners call 'paying quantities.' There was no manufacture except linen, and the remnant of a woollen trade, slowly dying out before the pitiless competition of Yorkshire. What the island chiefly produced was food; which was exported to richer countries to enable the cultivator to pay an inordinate rent. Foreign travellers saw with amazement an island possessing all the natural conditions of a great commerce, as bare of commerce as if it lay in some byeway of the world where enterprise had not yet penetrated. … The great proprietors were two or three hundred—the heirs of the Undertakers, for the most part, and Absentees; the mass of the country was owned by a couple of thousand others, who lived in splendour, and even profusion; and for these the peasant ploughed, sowed, tended, and reaped a harvest which he never shared. Rent, in other countries, means the surplus after the farmer has been liberally paid for his skill and labour; in Ireland it meant the whole produce of the soil except a potato-pit. If a farmer strove for more, his master knew how to bring him to speedy submission. He could carry away his implements of trade by the law of distress, or rob him of his sole pursuit in life by the law of eviction. He could, and habitually did, seize the growing crop, the stools and pots in his miserable cabin, the blanket that sheltered his children, the cow that gave them nourishment. There were just and humane landlords, men who performed the duties which their position imposed, and did not exaggerate its rights; but they were a small minority. … Famines were frequent, and every other year destitution killed a crowd of peasants. For a hundred and fifty years before, whoever has described the condition of Ireland—English official, foreign visitor, or Irish patriot—described a famine more or less acute. Sometimes the tortured serfs rose in nocturnal jacquerie against the system; and then a cry of 'rebellion' was raised, and England was assured that these intractable barbarians were again (as the indictment always charged) 'levying war against the King's majesty.' There were indeed causes enough for national disaffection, but of these the poor peasant knew nothing; he was contending for so much miserable food as would save his children from starvation. There were sometimes barbarous agrarian murders—murders of agents and bailiffs chiefly, but occasionally of landlords. It would be shameful to forget that these savage crimes were often the result of savage provocation. … The country was naked of timber, the cabins of the peasantry were squalid and unfurnished. Mr. Carlyle reproves a lazy, thriftless people, who would not perform the simple operation of planting trees; and Mr. Froude frowns upon cottages whose naked walls are never draped by climbing roses or flowering creepers. But how much more eloquent is fact than rhetoric? The Irish landlords made a law that when the tenant planted a tree it became not his own property but his master's; and the established practice of four-fifths of the Irish landlords, when a tenant exhibited such signs of prosperity as a garden, or a white-washed cabin, was to reward his industry by increasing his rent. {1787} Peasants will not plant or make improvements on these conditions, nor, I fancy, would philosophers. … It was sometimes made a boast in those days that rank, property, station, and professional success distinguished the minority in Ireland who were imperialists and Protestants. It was not an amazing phenomenon, that those upon whom the law had bestowed a monopoly of rank, property, and station, for a hundred and fifty years, should have still maintained the advantage a dozen years after Emancipation. It was a subject of scornful reproach that the districts inhabited by Protestants were peaceful and prosperous, while the Catholic districts were often poor and disorderly. There is no doubt of the facts; the contrast certainly existed. But the mystery disappears when one comes to reflect that in Down and Antrim the Squire regarded his tenantry with as much sympathy and confidence as a Squire in Devon or Essex, that their sons were trained to bear arms, and taught from the pulpit and platform that they belonged to a superior race, that all the local employments, paid out of the public purse, were distributed among them, that they had certain well understood rights over their holdings on which no landlord could safely trench, and that they met their masters, from time to time, in the friendly equality of an Orange lodge; while in Tipperary, the farmer was a tenant at will who never saw his landlord except when he followed the hounds across his corn, or frowned at him from the bench; whose rent could be raised, or his tenancy terminated at the pleasure of his master; who, on the smallest complaint, was carried before a bench of magistrates, where he had no expectation, and little chance, of justice; and who wanted the essential stimulus to thrift and industry, the secure enjoyment of his earnings. As a set-off to this long catalogue of discouragements, there were two facts of happy augury. In 1842 half a million of children were receiving education in the National Schools under a system designed to establish religious equality, and administered by Catholic and Protestant Commissioners. And the Teetotal movement was at its height. Thousands were accepting every week a pledge of total abstinence from Father Mathew, a young priest whom the gifts of nature and the accidents of fortune combined to qualify for the mission of a Reformer. … There was the beginning of political reforms also. The Whigs sent a Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary to Ireland who, for the first time since the fall of Limerick, treated the bulk of the nation as the social and political equals of the minority. The minority had been so long accustomed to make and administer the laws, and to occupy the places of authority and distinction, that they regarded the change as a revolt; and Lord Mulgrave and Thomas Drummond as the successors of Tyrconnel and Nugent. In the interval, since Emancipation, a few Catholics were elected to Parliament, two Catholic lawyers were raised to the bench, and smaller appointments distributed among laymen. … The exclusion of Catholics from juries was restrained, and the practice of appointing partisans of too shameful antecedents to public functions was interrupted. … It was under these circumstances that O'Connell for the second time summoned the Irish people to demand a Repeal of the Union."

_Sir C. G. Duffy, A Bird's-Eye View of Irish History, revised edition, pages 242-275._

ALSO IN: _Lord E. Fitzmaurice and J. R. Thursfield, Two Centuries of Irish History, part 4, chapters 1-2._

_R. M. Martin, Ireland before and after the Union._

IRELAND: A. D. 1841-1848. O'Connell's last agitation. His trial, imprisonment and release. His death. The "Young Ireland" Party and its rebellion.

In 1841, O'Connell "left England and went to Ireland, and devoted himself there to the work of organization. A succession of monster meetings were held all over the country, the far-famed one on Tara Hill being, as is credibly asserted, attended by no less than a quarter of a million of people. Over this vast multitude gathered together around him the magic tones of the great orator's voice swept triumphantly; awakening anger, grief, passion, delight, laughter, tears, at its own pleasure. They were astonishing triumphs, but they were dearly bought. The position was, in fact, an impossible one to maintain long. O'Connell had carried the whole mass of the people with him up to the very brink of the precipice, but how to bring them safely and successfully down again was more than even he could accomplish. Resistance he had always steadily denounced, yet every day his own words seemed to be bringing the inevitable moment of collision nearer and nearer. The crisis came on October the 5th. A meeting had been summoned to meet at Clontarf, near Dublin, and on the afternoon of the 4th the Government suddenly came to the resolution of issuing a proclamation forbidding it to assemble. The risk was a formidable one for responsible men to run. Many of the people were already on their way, and only O'Connell's own rapid and vigorous measures in sending out in all directions to intercept them hindered the actual shedding of blood. His prosecution and that of some of his principal adherents was the next important event. By a Dublin jury he was found guilty, sentenced to two years' imprisonment, and conveyed to prison, still earnestly entreating the people to remain quiet, an order which they strictly obeyed. The jury by which he had been condemned was known to be strongly biassed against him, and an appeal had been forwarded against his sentence to the House of Lords. So strong there, too, was the feeling against O'Connell, that little expectation was entertained of its being favourably received. Greatly to its honour, however, the sentence was reversed and he was set free. … The enthusiasm shown at his release was frantic and delirious. None the less those months in Richmond prison proved the death-knell of his power. He was an old man by this time; he was already weakened in health, and that buoyancy which had hitherto carried him over any and every obstacle never again revived. The 'Young Ireland' party, the members of which had in the first instance been his allies and lieutenants, had now formed a distinct section, and upon the vital question of resistance were in fierce hostility to all his most cherished principles. The state of the country, too, preyed visibly upon his mind. By 1846 had begun that succession of disastrous seasons which, by destroying the feeble barrier which stood between the peasant and a cruel death, brought about a national tragedy, the most terrible perhaps with which modern Europe has been confronted. This tragedy, though he did not live to see the whole of it, O'Connell—himself the incarnation of the people—felt acutely. {1788} Deep despondency took hold of him. He retired, to a great degree, from public life, leaving the conduct of his organization in the hands of others. … In 1847 he resolved to leave Ireland, and to end his days in Rome. His last public appearance was in the House of Commons, where an attentive and deeply respectful audience hung upon the faltering and barely articulate accents which fell from his lips. In a few deeply moving words he appealed for aid and sympathy for his suffering countrymen, and left the House. … The camp and council chamber of the 'Young Ireland' party was the editor's room of 'The Nation' newspaper. There it found its inspiration, and there its plans were matured—so far, that is, as they can be said to have been ever matured. For an eminently readable and all things considered a wonderfully impartial account of this movement, the reader cannot do better than consult Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's 'Four Years of Irish History,' which has the immense advantage of being history taken at first hand, written that is by one who himself took a prominent part in the scenes which he describes. The most interesting figure in the party had, however, died before those memorable four years began. Thomas Davis, who was only thirty at the time of his death in 1845, was a man of large gifts, nay, might fairly be called a man of genius. … The whole movement in fact was, in the first instance; a literary quite as much as a political one. Nearly all who took part in it Gavan Duffy, John Mitchell, Meagher, Dillon, Davis himself—were very young men, many fresh from college, all filled with zeal for the cause of liberty and nationality. The graver side of the movement only showed itself when the struggle with O'Connell began. At first no idea of deposing, or even seriously opposing the great leader seems to have been intended. The attempt on O'Connell's part to carry a formal declaration against the employment under any circumstances of physical force was, the origin of that division, and what the younger spirits considered 'truckling to the Whigs' helped to widen the breach. When, too, O'Connell had partially retired into the background, his place was filled by his son, John O'Connell, the 'Head conciliator,' between whom and the 'Young Irelanders' there waged a fierce war, which in the end led to the indignant withdrawal of the latter from the Repeal council. Before matters reached this point, the younger camp had been strengthened by the adhesion of Smith O'Brien, who, though not a man of much intellectual calibre, carried no little weight in Ireland. … Early in January, 1847, O'Connell left on that journey of his which was never completed, and by the middle of May Ireland was suddenly startled by the news that her great leader was dead. The effect of his death was to produce a sudden and immense reaction. A vast revulsion of love and reverence sprang up all over the country; an immense sense of his incomparable services, and with it a vehement anger against all who had opposed him. Upon the 'Young Ireland' party, as was inevitable, the weight of that anger fell chiefly, and from the moment of O'Connell's death whatever claim they had to call themselves a national party vanished utterly. The men 'who killed the Liberator' could never again hope to carry with them the suffrages of any number of their countrymen. This contumely, to a great degree undeserved, naturally reacted upon the subjects of it. The taunt of treachery and ingratitude flung at them wherever they went stung and nettled. In the general reaction of gratitude and affection for O'Connell, his son John succeeded easily to the position of leader. The older members of the Repeal Association thereupon rallied about him, and the split between them and the younger men grew deeper and wider. A wild, impracticable visionary now came to play a part in the movement. A deformed misanthrope, called James Lalor, endowed with a considerable command of vague, passionate rhetoric, began to write incentives to revolt in 'The Nation.' These growing more and more violent were by the editor at length prudently suppressed. The seed, however, had already sown itself in another mind. John Mitchell is described by Mr. Justin McCarthy as 'the one formidable man amongst the rebels of '48; the one man who distinctly knew what he wanted, and was prepared to run any risk to get it.' … To him it was intolerable that any human being should be willing to go further and to dare more in the cause of Ireland than himself, and the result was that after awhile he broke away from his connection with The Nation,' and started a new organ under the name of 'The United Irishmen,' one definitely pledged from the first to the policy of action. From this point matters gathered speedily to a head. Mitchell's newspaper proceeded to fling out challenge after challenge to the Government, calling upon the people to gather and to 'sweep-this island clear of the English name and nation.' For some months these challenges remained unanswered. It was now, however, '48,' and nearly all Europe was in revolution. The necessity of taking some step began to be evident, and a Bill making all written incitement of insurrection felony was hurried through the House of Commons, and almost immediately after Mitchell was arrested. Even then he seems to have believed that the country would rise to liberate him. The country, however, showed no disposition to do anything of the sort. He was tried in Dublin, found guilty, sentenced to fourteen years' transportation, and a few days afterwards put on board a vessel in the harbour and conveyed to Spike Island, whence he was sent to Bermuda, and the following April in a convict vessel to the Cape, and finally to Tasmania. The other 'Young Irelanders,' stung apparently by their own previous inaction, thereupon rushed frantically into rebellion. The leaders—Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Dillon, and others—went about the country holding reviews of 'Confederates,' as they now called themselves, a proceeding which caused the Government to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and to issue a warrant for their arrest. A few more gatherings took place in different parts of the country, a few more ineffectual attempts were made to induce the people to rise, one very small collision with the police occurred, and then the whole thing was over. All the leaders in the course of a few days were arrested and Smith O'Brien and Meagher were sentenced to death, a sentence which was speedily changed into transportation. Gavan Duffy was arrested and several times tried, but the jury always disagreed, and in the end his prosecution was abandoned. The 'Young Ireland' movement, however, was dead, and never again revived."

_E. Lawless, The Story of Ireland, chapters 55-56._

ALSO IN: _Sir C. G. Duffy, Young Ireland._

_Sir C. G. Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845-1849._

_Sir C. G. Duffy, Thomas Davis: Memoirs of an Irish Patriot, 1840-1846._

{1789}

IRELAND: A. D. 1843-1848. The Devon Commission. The Encumbered Estates Act.