Chapter 24
Among the pioneer ecclesiastics were Father William Kelly of Melbourne and Father John McEncroe, a native of Tipperary and a Maynooth man, who for thirty years and more was a prominent figure in the religious and civic life of New South Wales. Father John Brady, another pioneer priest, became Bishop of Perth. Irish names occupy a conspicuous and honored place in the roster of the Australian episcopate. Notable on the list are Bishop Francis Murphy of Adelaide, who was born in Co. Meath, and Archbishop Daniel Murphy of Sydney, a native of Cork, the man who delivered the eulogy on the occasion of Daniel O'Connell's funeral at Rome. But scant reference can here be made to the illustrious primate of Australia, Cardinal Moran, archbishop of Sydney from 1884 to 1911, who was such a potent force in the land of his adoption, and whose masterly _History of the Catholic Church in Australasia_ puts him in the forefront of ecclesiastical historians. On his death he was succeeded in the see of Sydney by another Irishman, Archbishop Michael Kelly of Waterford. Archbishop O'Reily of Adelaide is a recognized authority on music, and has written several pamphlets on that subject. A Galway man, Dr. T. J. Carr, a great educator, is now (1914) archbishop of Melbourne, and a Clare man, Dr. J. P. Clune, holds sway in Perth.
Irishmen in Australia have figured largely in the iron and coal industries, in the irrigation projects, in the manufacturing activities, and in the working of the gold mines. But they have likewise distinguished themselves in other fields of endeavor. Prominent on the beadroll of Australian fame stand the names of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (1816-1903), founder of the _Nation_ newspaper in Dublin, member of the British house of commons, and afterwards premier of Victoria and speaker of the legislative assembly, and his sons, John Gavan Duffy and Frank Gavan Duffy, public-spirited citizens and authorities on legal matters. The Currans, father and son, active in the public life of Sydney, were afterwards members of the British parliament. Distinguished in the records of the Australian judiciary are Judges Quinlan, Casey, Brennan, and O'Dowd. The Rev. J. Milne Curran, F.G.S., is a geologist who has achieved more than local fame. Other Irishmen who have loomed large in Australasian affairs are Daniel Brophy, John Cumin, Augustus Leo Kenny, James Coghlan, Sir Patrick Buckley, Sir John O'Shannessy, and Nicholas Fitzgerald. Louis C. Brennan, C.B., who was born in Ireland in 1852, emigrated to Australia when a boy and while working in a civil engineer's office in Melbourne conceived the idea of the "Brennan Torpedo", which he afterwards perfected, and then in 1897 sold the invention to the British Admiralty for £110,000. Another Brennan, Frank by name, is president of the Knights of Our Lady of the Southern Cross and has been a labor member of the federal parliament since 1911; a third, Christopher John, is assistant lecturer in modern literature in the University of Sydney; and a fourth, James, of the diocese of Perth, was made a Knight of St. Silvester by Pius X. in 1912. Young Australia and New Zealand may be as the world goes, but already both have much to their credit in the domains of music, art, and literature; and here, as usual, the Irish have been to the fore. In the writing of poetry, history, and fiction the Celtic element has been especially distinguished. Not to speak of the writers mentioned elsewhere in this sketch, scores of Irish men and women have been identified with the development of an Australian literature which, though delightfully redolent of the land whence it sprang, nevertheless possesses the universal note which makes it a truly human product. Many years ago one of the most gifted of Irish-Australian singers, "Eva"' of the _Nation_, voiced a tentative plaint:
"O barren land! O blank, bright sky! Methinks it were a noble duty To kindle in that vacant eye The light of spirit--beauty-- To fill with airy shapes divine Thy lonely plains and mountains, The orange grove, the bower of vine, The silvery lakes and fountains; To wake the voiceless, silent air To soft, melodious numbers; To raise thy lifeless form so fair From those deep, spell-bound slumbers. Oh, whose shall be the potent hand To give that touch informing, And make thee rise, O Southern Land, To life and poesy warming?"
Mrs. O'Doherty herself, who long lived in that Queensland which she thus apostrophized, helped in no uncertain way to answer her own question. So did John Farrell, the author of the truly remarkable "Jubilee Ode" of 1897 and of a collection of poems which include the well known "How He Died." And so, long before, had the non-Catholic Irishman, Edward O'Shaughnessy, who went to Australia as a convict, but who laughed in lockstep and made music with his chains.
James Francis Hogan, author and journalist, was born in Tipperary in 1855 and shortly afterward was brought by his parents to Melbourne where he received his education. On his return to Ireland he was elected to represent his native county in parliament. He is an authority on Australian history and in his book on _The Gladstone Colony_ has given us a fine specimen of modern historical method. With him must be mentioned Roderick Flanagan, whose _History of New South Wales_ appeared in 1862.
Other Irish names distinguished in Australasian literature are those of the New Zealand poet, Thomas Bracken; Roderick Quinn; Desmond Byrne; J.B. O'Hara; the eccentric convict-writer, George "Barrington" Waldron; Victor J. Daley; Bernard O'Dowd; Edwin J. Brady; the Rev. J.J. Malone; and the Rev. W. Kelly.
Finally, the Irish in Australia have done more than their share in the work of education and social service. Under Irish auspices several of the Catholic teaching congregations, including the Christian Brothers and the Presentation Nuns, were introduced, and their work has borne goodly fruit. A mighty power for good is the Hibernian Australasian Benefit Society. The organization, which was founded in 1871, has spread rapidly and has a large active membership.
Truly the land of the Southern Cross is not the dimmest jewel in the coronet of Ireland's glories.
REFERENCES:
Hogan: The Irish in Australia (1888), The Gladstone Colony (1898); Mennell: Dictionary of Australian Biography (1892); Duffy: Life in Two Hemispheres (1903); Kenny: The Catholic Church in Australia to the Year 1840; Moran: History of the Catholic Church in Australasia (1898); Davitt: Life and Progress in Australasia (1898); Bonwick: The First Twenty Years of Australia (1883); Flanagan: History of New South Wales (1862); Byrne: Australian Writers (1896); Wilson: The Church in New Zealand (1910); Hocken: A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand (1909).
THE IRISH IN SOUTH AFRICA
By A. MILLIARD ATTERIDGE.
The tide of emigration from Ireland has set chiefly towards America and Australia. In South Africa, therefore, the Irish element among the colonists has never been a large one. But, despite its comparatively small numbers, it has been an important factor in the life of South Africa. Here, as in so many other countries, it has been the glory of the sons of Erin to be a missionary people. To their coming is due the very existence of the Catholic Church in these southern lands.
When Dr. Ullathorne touched at the Cape on his way to Australia in 1832, he found at Cape Town "a single priest for the whole of South Africa," an English Benedictine, who soon afterwards returned to Europe in broken health. Few Irish immigrants had by that time found their way to the Cape. They began to arrive in numbers only after the famine year.
The founder of the Catholic hierarchy in South Africa was the Irish Dominican, Patrick R. Griffith, who, in 1837, was sent to Cape Town by Gregory XVI. as the first Vicar Apostolic of Cape Colony. His successors at the Cape, Bishops Grimley, Leonard, and Rooney, have all been Irishmen, and nine in every ten of their flock have from the first been Irish by birth or descent. In the earlier years of Bishop Griffith's episcopate there was a large garrison in South Africa on account of the Kaffir wars. Many of these soldiers were Irishmen. At Grahamstown in 1844 the soldiers of an Irish regiment stationed there did most of the work of building St. Patrick's Church, one of the oldest Catholic churches in South Africa. They worked without wages or reward of any kind, purely out of their devotion to their Faith, giving up most of their leisure to this voluntary labor.
Ten years after Bishop Griffith's appointment, Pius IX. separated Natal and the eastern districts of Cape Colony from Cape Town, and erected the Eastern Vicariate Apostolic. Once more an Irish prelate was the first Bishop--Aidan Devereux, who was consecrated by Bishop Griffith at Cape Town in the Christmas week of 1847. The great emigration from Ireland had now begun, and a stream of immigrants was arriving at the Cape. Bishop Devereux fixed his residence at Port Elizabeth, and of his four successors up to the present day three have been Irish. Bishop Moran, who went out to Port Elizabeth in 1854, was consecrated at Carlow in Ireland by Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) Cullen. The third Vicar Apostolic was Bishop Ricards, and the present bishop is another Irishman, Dr. Hugh McSherry, who received his consecration from the hands of Cardinal Logue in St. Patrick's Cathedral at Armagh.
Until the discovery of the diamond deposits in what is now the Kimberley district, some forty years ago, the Irish immigrants had chiefly settled in the ports and along the coast. But among the crowds who went to seek their fortunes at the diamond fields were large numbers of adventurous Irishmen. The mission church established at Kimberley became the centre of a new bishopric in 1886, when the Vicariate of Kimberley, which for some time included the Orange Free State, was established, and an Irish Oblate, Father Anthony Gaughran, was appointed its first bishop. He was succeeded in 1901 by his namesake and fellow countryman, the present Bishop Matthew Gaughran.
The gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand about Johannesburg produced another rush into the interior in the days after the first Transvaal war. A great city of foreign immigrants--the "Uitlanders"--grew up rapidly on the upland, where a few months before there had been only a few scattered Boer farms. Irishmen from Cape Colony and Natal, from Ireland itself, and from the United States formed a large element in the local mining and trading community. They were mostly workers. Few of them found their way into the controlling financier class, which was largely Jewish. The Irish were better out of this circle of international gamblers, whose intrigues finally produced the terrible two years' bloodshed of the great South African war. Many engineers of the mines were Irish-Americans. Huge consignments of mining machinery arrived from the United States, and many of the engineers who came to fit it up remained in the employ of the mining companies. Until after the war, the Transvaal and Johannesburg had depended ecclesiastically on the Vicar Apostolic of Natal, but in 1904 a Transvaal Vicariate was erected, and once more the first bishop was an Irishman, Dr. William Miller, O.M.I.
We have seen how Irish the South African episcopate has been from the very outset. Most of the clergy belong to the same missionary race, as also do the nuns of the various convents, and the Christian Brothers, who are in charge of many of the schools. Of the white Catholic population of the various states of the South African Union, the greater part are Irish. There are about 25,000 Irish in Cape Colony in a total population of over two millions. There are some 7,000 in Natal, I,500 in Kimberley, and about 2,000 in the Orange River Colony. In the Transvaal, chiefly in and about Johannesburg, there are some 12,000 Irish. A few thousand more are to be found scattered in Griqualand and Rhodesia.
As has been already said, the total numbers are not large in proportion to that of the population generally, and they belong chiefly to the industrial and trading classes. The most notable names among them are those of prelates, priests, and missionaries, who have founded and built up the organization of the Catholic Church in South Africa. But there are some names of note also in civil life. Sir Michael Gallwey was for many years Chief Justice of Natal; the Hon. A. Wilmot, who has not only held high official posts, but has also done much to clear up the early history of South Africa, is Irish on the mother's side; Mr. Justice Shiel is a judge of the Cape Courts; Eyre and Woodbyrne are Irish names among the makers of Rhodesia; and amongst those who have done remarkable work in official life may also be named Sir Geoffrey Lagden, Sir William St. John Carr, and the Hon. John Daverin. Lagden was for many years British Resident in Basutoland, the Switzerland of South Africa, where the native tribes are practically independent under a British protectorate. Griffith, the paramount chief of the Basuto nation, has been a Catholic since 1911. Sir Geoffrey's tactful policy and wise counsels did much to promote the prosperity of this native state, and during the trying days of the South African War, he was able to secure the neutrality of the tribesmen.
In the Boer wars, Irishmen fought with distinction on both sides. General Colley, who fell at Majuba in the first Boer War, was a distinguished Irish soldier. Another great Irishman, General Sir William Butler, has written the story of Colley's life. Butler himself was in command of the troops at the Cape before the great war. If his wise counsels had been followed by the Government, the war would undoubtedly have been avoided. He refused to have any part in the war-provoking policy of Rhodes and Chamberlain, and warned the Home Government that an attack on the Dutch republics would be a serious and perilous enterprise. When the war came, England owed much to the enduring valor of Irish soldiers and to the leadership of Irish generals. One need only name General Hart, of the Irish Brigade; General French, who relieved Kimberley, and who is now (1914) Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the British army in France; General Mahon, who raised the siege of Mafeking; Colonel Moore, of the famous Connaught Rangers, now (1914) commandant and chief military organizer of the Irish National Volunteers; and, finally, Lord Roberts, who took over the chief command and saved the situation after the early disasters. Lord Kitchener, who acted as Roberts's chief-of-staff, succeeded him in the command, and brought the war to an end by an honorable treaty with the Boer leaders, is a native of Ireland, but of English descent, and he passed most of his boyhood in Ireland, in Co. Kerry, where his father had bought a small property. I used to know an Irish Franciscan lay brother who told me he had taught the future soldier "many games" when he was quite a little fellow.
Of the regiments which took part in the war none won a higher fame than the Munster and the Dublin Fusiliers and the Connaught Rangers. It was in recognition of their splendid valor that the new regiment of Irish Guards was added to the British Army.
But the majority of Irishmen sympathized with the Boer republics, and many of them fought under the Boer flag, of these were legally British subjects, but many were naturalized burghers of the Transvaal, and many more were United States citizens, Irish-Americans from the Rand gold mines. There were two small Irish brigades under the Boer flag, those of McBride and Lynch (the latter now a member of the British House of Commons), and an engineer corps commanded by Colonel Blake, an American. At the first battle before Ladysmith it was one of the Irish brigades that kept the Boer guns in action, bringing up ammunition under a rain of shellfire. During the Boer retreat and Roberts's advance on Pretoria, Blake's engineers were always with the Boer rearguard and successfully destroyed every mile of the railway as they went back. Blake had served in the United States cavalry, had learned mining while on duty in Nevada, and had then gone to seek his fortune at Johannesburg. The great leader of the Boer armies, now the Prime Minister of the new South Africa which has happily arisen out of the storm of war, has Irish connections. Louis Botha lived before the war in the southeast Transvaal, not far from Laings Nek, and near neighbors of his were a family of Irish settlers bearing the honored name of Emmet. The Emmets and the Bothas were united by ties of friendship and intermarriage, and one of the Emmets served with Louis Botha during the war.
The Irish colonists of South Africa keep their love for faith and fatherland, but, as in the United States, they have thoroughly and loyally thrown in their lot with the new country of which they have become citizens. Few in number though they are, they are an important factor in the new Dominion, for their national tradition inspires them with civic patriotism, and their religion gives them a high standard of conduct and puts before them, as guides in the work of life and the solution of the problems of the day, the Christian principles of justice and charity.
REFERENCES:
Government Census Returns, South Africa; Catholic Directory for British South Africa (Cape Town, since 1904); The Catholic Magazine, Cape Town; Wilmot and Chase: History of Cape Colony (London, 1896); Theal: History of South Africa (5 vols., London, 1888-1893); for the war period, the _Times_ History of the South African War, and the British Official History.
IRISH LANGUAGE AND LETTERS
By DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D., M.R.I.A.
The Celtic languages consist of two divisions, (a) the Gaelic or Irish division, and (b) the Kymric or Welsh division. Between them they comprise (a) Irish, Scotch-Gaelic, and Manx, and (b) Welsh, Armorican, and Cornish. All these languages are still alive except Cornish, which died out about a hundred years ago.
Of all these languages Irish is the best preserved, and it is possible to follow its written literature back into the past for some thirteen hundred years; while much of the most interesting matter has come down to us from pagan times. It has left behind it the longest, the most luminous, and the most consecutive literary track of any of the vernacular languages of Europe, except Greek alone.
For centuries the Irish and their language were regarded by the English as something strange and foreign to Europe. It was not recognized that they had any relationship with the Greeks or Romans, the French, the Germans, or the English. The once well-known statesman, Lord Lyndhurst, in the British parliament denounced the Irish as aliens in religion, in blood, and in language. Bopp, in his great Comparative Grammar, refused them recognition as Indo-Europeans, and Pott in 1856 also denied their European connection. It was left for the great Bavarian scholar, John Caspar Zeuss, to prove to the world in his epoch-making "Grammatica Celtica" (published in Latin in 1853) that the Celts were really Indo-Europeans, and that their language was of the highest possible value and interest. From that day to the present it is safe to say that the value set upon the Irish language and literature has been steadily growing amongst the scholars of the world, and that in the domain of philology Old Irish now ranks close to Sanscrit for its truly marvellous and complicated scheme of word-forms and inflections, and its whole verbal system.
The exact place which the Celtic languages (of which Irish is philologically far the most important) hold in the Indo-European group has often been discussed. It is now generally agreed upon that, although both the Celtic and Teutonic languages may claim a certain kinship with each other as being both of them Indo-European, still the Celtic is much more nearly related to the Greek and the Latin groups, especially to the Latin.
All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one another. We Irish must acknowledge a relationship, or rather a very distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic. Thus we find the Irish _dia_ (god) in the Anglo-Saxon _tiw_, the god of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-däg, now "Tuesday", and we find the Irish _déad_ in the Anglo-Saxon "toth", now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,--as, for example, the _b_-future, the passive in-_r_, the genitive singular and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for "man", nom. _fer_, gen. _fir_, dat. _fiur_, acc. _fer n_--, plur. nom. _fir_, gen. _fer n_--, is derived from the older forms _viros, viri, viro, viron_, nom. plur. _viri_, gen. plur. _viron_, which everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely to the Latin inflections, _vir, viri, viro, virum_, nom. plur. _viri_, etc.
So much for the language. When did this language begin to be used in literature? This question depends upon another--When did the Irish begin to have a knowledge of letters; when did they begin to commit their literature to writing; and whence did they borrow their knowledge of this art?
The oldest alphabet used in Ireland of which remains exist appears to have been the Ogam, which is found in numbers of stone inscriptions dating from about the third century of our era on. About 300 such inscriptions have already been found, most of them in the southwest of Ireland, but some also in Scotland and Wales, and even in Devon and Cornwall. Wherever the Irish Gael planted a colony, he seems to have brought his Ogam writing with him.