in Europe,—to say nothing of the gross ravages of civil war, in far eastern and western quarters,—in China and in America. But, after being in the Queen’s train in Ireland last month, it becomes more possible than before to hope good things for even Naples and Sicily,—for even Russia and Poland. The lesson for just-minded rulers and for a patriotic people is, “Never say die!”
We need not expect the lesson to be made use of much beyond our own country, because the state of the case is not understood where Ireland is most prated about. Austrians, French, Russians, and Americans, assumed that Ireland was still, and always had been, cruelly oppressed; and that the word oppression comprehended all the mischief, and was the key to the whole difficulty. They can hardly go on thinking so any more now; but, up to this time, ninety-nine out of a hundred American and European sympathisers have had no other association with Ireland. The Irish, having a passion for liberty, were cruelly oppressed:—that was the case in brief. If it had been so, the task of the rulers of Ireland would have been comparatively easy: but the points of the case were nearly the reverse of those stated. The Irish people are not supremely fond of freedom; and they might, at any time within this century, have had much more political liberty and privilege than they ever realised.
The present generation may imagine something of the misery and turbulence of fifty years since when, in the chronicles and memoirs of the time, they come upon the occasional wish that the Green Isle was submerged seven feet in the green sea. The reason why all governments, and all thoughtful men, were at their wits’ end what to do was, that Irish human nature was unique, and, as far as appeared, unmanageable. If the people had been really lovers of freedom, they would have been lovers of law. The most practically free nation is always a law-abiding nation. But the Irish have a constitutional tendency to illegality which is embarrassing beyond measure to any kind of government; and the more from its being accompanied by a passion for meddlesome law-making in favour of classes. The same government had to rule the English, who stand by the laws as their own work and their own precious possession, and therefore give little trouble when legislation is once accomplished; and the Scotch, who can argue, and expatiate like so many special pleaders on points which they treat as texts from a talismanic book; and the Irish, who have had but too much reason to protest against disqualifying laws, but who also were exceedingly prone to commit treason, murder, and arson, while clamouring for new laws to settle every social transaction between man and man. Amidst all the mouthing of their orators about liberty, the Irish people had no sort of notion of political ethics. They meant, when singing their liberty songs, or giving three or nine groans for tyrants, that they wanted each to have his bit of ground for his own, and to send a member to a Dublin parliament to make Ireland somehow great and glorious, and do something for him. It was not that the peasantry (and there was scarcely anything that could be called a middle class) were clownish, ignorant, and without political imagination, like the English rural labourer of sixty years since. The people, young and old, were brisk and sharp, fond of education, and full of notions of native kings and chiefs, and laws about land: but they thought of laws only as a privilege, and not at all as involving any duty. So they either pined or clamoured, according as they were or were not allowed public speech, and talked big about law and liberty while they were murdering landlords and agents, and houghing cattle, and burning homesteads, and smuggling, and taking even more pleasure in defying the laws they lived under than in clamouring for more.
From this state of things it necessarily followed that all the world, but a handful of sensible Englishmen, took for granted that the woes of Ireland were due to political causes; whereas the most radical mischiefs were social and economical. How this came to pass I need not now inquire: it is enough that it was the fact even in those dark political days when Pitt and his successors found it impossible to fulfil the promise about Catholic emancipation under which the Union had been agreed upon. Shocking and shameful as were the political disabilities of sixty years ago, they were of less importance than the social mischiefs which caused prevalent poverty and occasional famine, with the crimes which belong to them. A well-fed people, encouraged in industry, could have certainly obtained political equality in a short time; whereas no amount of political liberty could have released the soil from the burden of a crowded population which it could not feed. Under such circumstances, Ireland might well be the nightmare of successive cabinets, the dread of every parliament, and the cause of heartache to every kindly-hearted man.
We did not travel much in Ireland in those days. It was a terrible thing to encounter the beggars: the inns, horses and carriages were not very tempting. There were no roads to some of the finest districts of scenery; and the aspect of decay was too dreary to be encountered without stringent reasons. Except in a few ports there seemed to be no trade: the sea was left unfished (as it is too much at this day), and the great mansions were crumbling into ruin, as their lands lapsed into waste.
What the traveller did not see, when any artist or eccentric hunter of scenery ventured to the wild glories of the North and West, was worse than anything that met his eye, even though his car was mobbed by a crowd of half-naked and hungering women and children. There were tithe-proctors in ditches having their ears cut off: there were cabins on the moors where peasants met after midnight, not daring to refuse the summons thither, and where it was appointed by lot who should shoot an obnoxious agent, or the landlord himself, and who should batter out the brains of an interloping tenant, or cut out the horses’ tongues, or hough the cows. There was the slavery of the men on whom the lot fell, or who dared not refuse the commission; and of the neighbours who saw the deed done, and dared give neither notice beforehand, nor information afterwards. There were Protestant clergymen sitting in their glebe