Chapter LX: Act V: ――The curtain rises on a prison chamber in the Tower, where (3)

Had the descendants of the Scotch and English settlers planted by Elizabeth, James, and Cromwell been permitted or encouraged to develop the natural resources of the country, they would not only have grown strong, but opportunities of remunerative labor and hope of gain would have attracted new settlers, and in this way Ireland would have been filled with Protestants, whose loyalty would have been firmly secured by this wise and conciliating policy. The agitations which rendered some amelioration of the condition of the Catholics unavoidable as part of a general system would not have taken place; the strength of the Protestant Ascendency would have grown with increasing numbers and wealth; exile would have remained the only refuge of the Catholic remnant from misery and death; and Ireland to-day might be as Protestant as was Ulster in the reign of Charles I.

But no motive of religion or humanity has ever influenced the policy of the English government when there was question of English interests. The desire of acquiring wealth or the necessity of defending one’s possessions are, in the opinion of Englishmen, the only sufficient reasons for going to war.

“Even in dreams to the chink of his pence
This huckster put down war.”

It was not to be expected that Ireland, with her harbors and rivers, her fertile fields and unnumbered flocks, would be permitted to tempt capital to her shores or to stimulate enterprise. Nothing seemed more shocking to the English traders and manufacturers than the thought of having to compete in the home and foreign markets with the products of Irish industry. It was deemed intolerable that this nest of popery, this den of ignorance and corruption, should be dealt with in the same manner as England. The Parliament was therefore called upon to “make the Irish remember that they were conquered.”

England had assisted the Protestants of Ireland to crush the Catholics; she had for this purpose placed at their service her treasures, and her armies; and now the Irish Protestants were required, in evidence of their gratitude, to sacrifice the commercial and industrial interests of their country to English jealousy.

At the end of the seventeenth century the manufacture of woollen stuffs had attained to considerable importance in the southern provinces of Ireland. The superiority of the Irish broadcloths, blankets, and friezes was recognized, and it was therefore resolved that they should no longer be manufactured. The Lords and Commons, in 1698, called upon William III. to protect the interests of English merchants; and his majesty replied in the well-known words “I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen manufacture of Ireland.” Accordingly, an export duty of four shillings in the pound was laid on all broadcloths carried out of Ireland, and half as much on kerseys, flannels, and friezes. This, in fact, was equivalent to a prohibition, and the ruin of the Irish woollen manufactures which followed was not an unforeseen, but the directly intended, consequence of this measure. The linen manufacture, since there were at the time no rival English interests, was opposed only in an indirect way by offering large bounties for the making of linen in the Highlands of Scotland, bounties on the exportation of English linen, and by imposing a tax of 30 per cent. on all foreign linens, with which most of the Irish linens were classed.

Still other measures were needed for the complete destruction of Irish commerce and industry. The _Navigation Laws_ forbade all direct trade between Ireland and the British colonies; so that all produce intended for Ireland had first to be unloaded in an English port. The Irish were not allowed to build or keep at sea a single ship. “Of all the excellent timber,” said Dean Swift in 1727, “cut down within these fifty or sixty years, it can hardly be said that the nation hath received the benefit of one valuable house to dwell in, or one ship to trade with.” The forests of Ireland, which so greatly added to the beauty of the country, were felled and carried to England to build ships which were to bring the wealth of the world into English ports. Even the Irish fishery “must be with men and boats from England.”

By these and similar measures, commercial and industrial Ireland was blotted out of existence, and even the possibility of her ever entering into competition with England for the trade of the world disappeared. The unjust legislation by which Irish industry was repressed was not inspired by religious passion nor directed against the Catholic population. Their condition was already so wretched and helpless that it would have been difficult to discover anything by which it could have been made worse. “The aboriginal inhabitants,” says Macaulay――“more than five-sixths of the population――had no more interest in the matter than the swine or the poultry; or, if they had an interest, it was for their interest that the caste which domineered over them should not be emancipated from all external control. They were no more represented in the Parliament which sat at Dublin than in the Parliament which sat at Westminster. They had less to dread from legislation at Westminster than from legislation at Dublin.… The most acrimonious English Whig did not feel towards them that intense antipathy, compounded of hatred, fear, and scorn, with which they were regarded by the Cromwellian who dwelt among them.”[193]

Molyneux, who at this time came forward as the champion of Ireland and of liberty, demanded nothing for the Irish Catholics but a more cruel slavery; and Dean Swift, who gained much popularity for his advocacy of Irish rights, declared he would as soon think of consulting the swine as the aboriginal inhabitants of the island.

Indisputable as the fact is that the Irish Catholics had no direct interest in the contest in which the commerce and industry of their country were destroyed, the consequences of the iniquitous policy of England proved nevertheless most disastrous to them. Manual labor was the only work which they were permitted to do, and there now remained for them nothing but the tillage of the soil, either as tenants-at-will or common laborers. Ireland was to supply England with beef and butter, and the work of exterminating the Irish Catholics was not to be pushed further than the exigencies of successful cattle-grazing might demand. Society was constituted in the simplest manner. There were but two classes――the possessors of the soil and the tillers of the soil: the lord and the peasant; the master and the slave; the Protestant and the Catholic; the rich man and the beggar. There were but two kinds of human dwellings――the castle, with its high walls and splendid park, and the mud cabin, in which it was impossible that there should be anything but filth and rags. The multitude lived for a few men, by whom they were valued as their horses or their dogs, but not treated so humanly. A contrast more absolute has never existed, even in the despotisms of Asia. The picture is revolting; it cannot be contemplated even in imagination without loathing, or thought of with any composure. It is a blot on humanity, an infamy which no glory and no services can condone. Ireland was in the hands of the worst class of men whom history has ever made odious――an aristocracy which hated the land from which it derived its titles, despised the people from whom it received its wealth, shirked the duties and responsibilities imposed by its privileges, and used its power only to oppress and impoverish the nation. The Irish people were thus under the weight of a double tyranny――that of England and that of their lords; and the fiend best knows which was the worst.

The Southern planter felt a kind of interest in his slaves――they were his property; an Irish landlord felt no interest of any kind in the people by whom he was surrounded. It was important that they should remain slaves, beggars, and outcasts; that the chasm which separated him from them should in no way be diminished; but for the rest he gave no thought whether they starved or murdered one another or were drowned in the deep. He spent most of his time in England, living in luxury, leaving his estates to the care of brutal agents, who pleased him the better the more cruel and grinding their exactions were. English in origin and sympathy, Protestant in religion, there was no bond of union between him and his people. He cared neither for the country nor its inhabitants. He was unwilling to risk capital even to improve his own lands; for he had no faith in the permanence of a social and political state which was possible only because it outraged the holiest and best instincts of mans nature. When it was proposed to take steps to drain the bogs and bring the waste lands of Ireland under cultivation, the Protestant party strenuously opposed the measure, on the ground that this would be an encouragement to popery. Nothing, therefore, was done either by the government or the landlords to improve the soil or to introduce better methods of tillage. The great proprietors, living in London, spending their time and fortune in a life of pleasure and display, let out their estates to land speculators, who were generally capitalists. These speculators sublet them, in lots of several hundred or a thousand acres, to a class of persons called middlemen, who divided them up into portions of five, ten, or twenty acres, and rented them to the poor Catholics. By neither the proprietors nor the speculators nor the middlemen was any risk of capital made. The peasant was therefore compelled to rent his little plot of ground, bare of everything――he found on it neither dwelling nor stabling, nor implements of any kind. He had nothing himself, and those whose interest it would have been to advance him money were unwilling to risk a penny. All that he could do was to put up a mud-cabin, and to get a wretched spade with which to begin work. If by honest labor he could have looked forward to an improvement in his condition, his lot would not have been altogether comfortless. The pioneers who in this new world have led the army of civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific began life almost as poor as an Irish peasant of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century; but for them no law of man reversing nature’s first law made labor sterile. How was the poor Irish Catholic, with but a few acres of ground, and without the necessary means for proper cultivation, to pay the exorbitant rent which was to support the landlord, the speculator, and the middleman?――for upon him alone rested the burden of maintaining all three in a life of ease and luxury. The soil refuses to satisfy the unreasonable demands made upon it; the tenant finds that he is unable to pay his rent; and without the least ceremony he and his wife and children are turned upon the road. England having destroyed the commerce and manufactures of Ireland, he can find nothing to do, and, if he is unwilling to see his wife and children starve, he must beg. And even beggary, with its frightful degradations, affords little relief; for the rich spurn him and the poor have nothing to give. Few words are needed to bring home to us the significance of this state of affairs. We have only to recall the tragedy Which was enacted under our eyes in 1849. In that one year _fifty thousand families_ were turned upon the road to die; _two hundred thousand human beings_, without shelter, without bread, sent up their piteous moan of hunger and despair to God from the midst of a Christian nation, the richest in the world. The terrible famine of 1847 and 1848, which was only an unusually startling outbreak of an evil that has long been chronic in Ireland, was not caused by excess of population. The country, if its resources were properly developed, is capable of supporting a far larger number of inhabitants than it has ever had. There were but eight millions of people in Ireland in 1847, and it has been conclusively proven that under favorable circumstances fifteen millions would not be an excessive population. In fact, in the so-called years of scarcity, when the people were dying, by thousands, of starvation, the country produced enough to feed its inhabitants; but they had to sell their wheat, barley, and oats to pay the rent, and, the potato crop having failed, they had nothing to eat. In 1846 and 1847 enormous quantities of grain and live-stock were exported from Ireland to England, and yet the people of Ireland were starving. During the four years of famine Ireland exported four quarters of wheat for every quarter imported. The food was in the country, but it had to be sent to England to pay the rent of the landlords. The people were starving, but that was no concern of these noble gentlemen, so long as their rent was paid. The cry of hunger has rarely been hushed in Ireland. All through the eighteenth century the people died of starvation. In 1727 Boulter, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh, declared that thousands of families were driven from their homes by hunger; and Dean Swift has given us an account of the condition in his time of even the better class of tenants. “The families,” he says, “of farmers who pay great rents live in filth and nastiness, upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house as convenient as an English hog-sty to receive them.” In 1734 the famous Bishop Berkeley asked this question: “Is there on the face of the earth any Christian and civilized people so destitute of everything as the mass of the people of Ireland?” In 1741 the cemeteries were too small for the burial of the multitudes who died of hunger.

In 1778, while we were struggling for freedom from English tyranny, Lord Nugent declared, in the House of Commons, that the people of Ireland were suffering all the destitution and misery which it is possible to human nature to endure. Nine-tenths of them earned no more than fourpence a day, and had no nourishment but potatoes and water. In 1817 the fever, brought on by hunger, attacked one million five hundred thousand persons――nearly half of the entire population of the country. In 1825, 1826, 1830, 1832, 1838, 1846 to 1850, and finally in 1860, 1861, and 1862, the melancholy cry of multitudes dying of hunger was heard throughout the land. In 1843 Thackeray, travelling in Ireland, declared that “men were suffering and starving by millions”; and a little later we know from the most accurate statistics that more than a million of the Irish people died of hunger within a period of two years. The history of Ireland is, we are persuaded, the sublimest and the saddest of all histories. It has never been written, and the grandest of themes awaits the creative power that will give it immortal life on the pictured page. It will be written in the English language, and it will link the English name and tongue for all time with the greatest social crime which one people ever committed against another. In another article we hope, by the aid of the faint and glimmering light that shines so fitfully in this blackness, to be able to trace the doubtful and devious way along which this providential race seems to be slowly rising into the promise of a better day. For the present we shall conclude with a quotation from De Beaumont, whose careful and conscientious studies on the _Social, Political, and Religious Condition of Ireland_ we recommend to all who are interested in this subject.

“I have seen,” he wrote in 1835, “the Indian in his forests and the negro in chains, and I thought, in beholding their pitiable state, that I saw the extreme of human misery; but I did not then know the fate of poor Ireland. Like the Indian, the Irishman is poor and naked; but he lives, unlike the savage, in the midst of a society which revels in luxury, and adores wealth. Like the Indian, he is deprived of every material comfort which human industry and the commerce of nations procure; but, unlike him, he is surrounded by fellow-creatures who are enjoying all that he is forbidden even to hope for. In the midst of his greatest misery the Indian retains a kind of independence which is not without its charm and its dignity. Destitute as he is, and famishing, he is yet free in his wilderness; and the consciousness of this freedom softens the hardships of life. The Irishman suffers the same destitution without having the same liberty. He is subject to laws, has all kinds of fetters; he dies of hunger, and is under rule; deplorable condition, which combines all the evils of civilization with the horrors known elsewhere only to the savage! Doubtless the Irishman who has shaken off his chains, and still has hope, is less to be pitied than the negro slave. Nevertheless he has to-day neither the liberty of the savage nor the bread of the slave.”[194]

[191] “A View of the State of Ireland,” by Edmund Spenser.

[192] _History of the United States_, vol. v. chap. iv. p.
73.

[193] _History of England_, vol. v. p. 45.

[194] _L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse._ Par
Gustave de Beaumont, Membre de l’Institut. Tom. i. p. 222.

A MARCH PILGRIMAGE.

On Provence’ hills the touch of southern spring――
No laggard she with footstep faltering――
Awoke with sunny blessing drowsy earth,
Filled soft green glades with carollings of mirth.

In western lands, o’er turbulent seas afar,
Inclement March, with blustering notes of war,
Through naked trees whirled fruitless flowers of snow
All scentless drifting to the earth below.

Alike on Provence’ violet-studded fields,
And that bright land where loath fond winter yields,
Hung the gray shadow of a solemn Lent――
The church’s sorrow with spring’s promise blent.

Yet, breaking through the penitential shade,
With shining altars in glad white arrayed,
In those far, frosty lands the church’s voice
Bid, with all joyousness, her sons rejoice.

Through the deep, Lenten sadness of her song
Notes strong and jubilant swift poured along:
The long-hushed “Gloria” wond’ring echoes woke,
The angels’ chant the mournful silence broke.

Without, the wild and gusty whirls of snow;
Within, the throng of reverent knees bent low,
And faithful hearts, that from their dear green isle
Brought Patrick’s faith to make their new home smile――

In rich possession of the “Unknown God”;
Blessing the rivers and the prairies broad
With cities populous and cross-crowned spires,
And ever-kindling sanctuary fires.

So rose, exultant, on the bleak March day
The joyous notes across Lent’s sombre way:
Adoring souls, before the altar shrine,
Thanking for Patrick’s faith their Lord divine.

Not Provence’ blossoms such glad music woke
Though happy birds in spring-time laughter broke;
Veiled the sad altar in its purple pall,
And church and people, sorrow-laden all.

Yet joyful echoes from that western land
Spoke ’mid the lapsing waves on Nice’s strand;
Stirred, with the broken sweetness of that praise,
The heart of one who, through long busy days

Of years unresting, had with patience toiled,
With love and zeal, to keep his flock unsoiled
Amid the strong new world’s tumultuous life.
With such persuasion his wise words were rife

As if the grace of Savoy’s bishop-saint
Were his to loving guide the weak and faint;
As if, like Padua’s dear saint benign,
He bore the burden of the Child divine.

He saw afar his Irish children kneel,
The clinging reverence of their hearts reveal;
Longing with them his fervent prayer to pour,
He sought St. Honorat’s pine-girdled shore――

There treading where St. Patrick trod of old,
When gathered his young heart the words of gold
That should for heaven’s King a new realm win――
A faithful fold no wolf should enter in.

Here rose the chapel where the young saint prayed,
Here thoughtful paced he Lerins’ learnèd shade.
Ruined the abbey ’mid its olives rests,
Wide open all its doors to pilgrim guests――

Though still the chapel keeps its purpose old,
And Lerins’ vines and olives still enfold
A cloister shade where constant prayer ascends,
And Benedictine lore with labor blends.

Here, with all holy memories possessed,
With loving thoughts of that sea-severed West,
The pilgrim knelt――in that peace-shadowed place
Mingling his prayers with Ireland’s tearful race.

Kneeling afar at shrine his hand had raised,
While hearts, his lips had taught, St. Patrick praised,
In love, ’neath western clouds and Provence’ sun,
The Latin priest and Celtic flock were one.

O great St. Patrick! each day grows more wide
The realm thou winnest that thy Lord may bide,
A King revered on royal altar throne,
In patient love abiding with his own.

Pray thou that this beloved land of ours,
Strong in her youth and undeveloped powers,
One day with that true beauty may be crowned,
That girds thy island’s mournful brows around――

The beauty of true faith in Christ, her Lord,
Who in her lavish hands such wealth has poured:
Win thou for her great heart’s best heritage
The steadfast bearing of faith’s strongest age.

Oh! win her stars for beacon-light to guide
The restless wanderers from the Cross’s side,
Gracious in pure, unfaltering light arrayed――
The earthly shadow of the Heavenly Maid.

Pray that her hands be ever raised to bless
Meek hearts whose prayer wins her such comeliness;
Pray that her soul for evermore be free,
Signed with the chrism of true liberty.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.