Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848
CONTINENTAL REVOLUTIONS – IRISH REBELLION – ENGLISH DISTRESS
Seven months have barely elapsed since the throne of Louis Philippe was overturned, by a sudden and well-concerted urban tumult; and six have not expired since the fervour of revolution invaded the Germanic empire, and Italy, torn by the innovating passions, commenced a strife with the Austrian power. How marvellous have been the changes, how vehement the action, how powerful the reaction, since those events commenced! Involved in the whirlwind of anarchy, the greater as well as the lesser states of Germany seemed to be on the verge of destruction. Austria, tormented by diversity of lineage, race, and interest, seemed to be irrevocably broken up; and amidst the rebellion in Lombardy, the severance of Venice, the insurrection in Bohemia, and the fierce demand of the Hungarians for independence, it seemed scarcely possible to hope that the house of Hapsburg could maintain its existence, or the important element of Austria in the balance of European power be preserved. Torn by contending passions, a prey to the ambition of the republicans, the dreams of the socialists, and the indignation of the loyalists, France resembled a fiery volcano in the moment of irruption, of which the throes were watched by surrounding nations with trembling anxiety for their own existence. Italy, with Sicily severed from the throne of Naples; Rome in scarcely disguised insurrection against the Papal authority; Lombardy, Tuscany, and Venice in open revolt; and Piedmont, under revolutionary guidance, commencing the usual system of external democratic aggression, scarcely presented a spot on which the eye of hope could rest. Prussia, the first to be reached by the destructive flame, seemed so strongly excited, that it was hard to say whether its national unity or monarchical institutions would first fall to pieces. England, assailed by Chartism in the one island, and the approaching insurrection of the Irish in the other; oppressed with a debt to which its finances, under present management, seemed unequal – having borrowed £8,000,000 in a single year of general peace – seemed shaken to its foundation. The distress so generally diffused by the combined effect of free trade and a fettered currency, appeared at once to have dried up its material resources and overturned the wonted stability of the national mind: every thing seemed to be returning to chaos; and even the most sanguine advocates of human perfectibility, the most devout believers in democratic regeneration, looked on with trembling anxiety, and could hardly anticipate any other result from the disturbed passions of society, but a general and sanguinary war, terminating in the irresistible ascendency of one victorious power, or possibly a fresh inundation, over the exhausted field of European strife, of northern barbarians.
But truth is great, and will prevail. There are limits imposed by the wisdom of nature to the madness of the people, not less than the strife of the elements. Extraordinary convulsions seldom fail to restore government, after a time, to a bearable form: the letting loose of the passions of nations ere long rouses the feelings and alarms the interests, which produce reaction, and restore the subverted equilibrium of society. Men will not be permanently ruled by brutal force. Triumph reveals the latent tyranny of the multitude; power brings to light the selfishness and rapacity of their leaders. How strikingly have those truths – so often enunciated, so little attended to – been demonstrated by the events of the last summer! Six months only have elapsed, and what years, what centuries of experience have been passed during that brief period! How many delusions has it seen dispelled, and fallacies exposed; how many pretensions levelled, and expectations blasted; how many reputations withered, and iniquities detected! How much has the peril of inflammatory language been demonstrated, and the hollowness of revolutionary regeneration established! how quickly have words been blown into the air by deeds, and the men of eloquence supplanted by those of the sword! "Words," says Lamartine,11 "set nations on fire; bayonets alone restore them to reason." Who has furnished such a commentary on these words as Lamartine himself?
Is it the doctrines of the French Revolution which were deemed seductive, its principles insinuating, its example dangerous? The Red Republicans, the insurrection of June, the slaughter of a greater number of men in a single revolt than has taken place in many a decisive battle, the withering agony of Parisian destitution, the ten thousand captives in its dungeons; the nightly transportation, for weeks together, of hundreds of deluded fanatics; the state of siege, – the prostration of freedom, a military dictatorship, rise up in grim and hideous array to dispel the illusion. Is it the Io Pæans of Italian regeneration which have caused the heart of the patriot to throb all over the world, and led the enthusiastic to anticipate a second era of Italian independence in the old age of its civilisation? The defeats on the Adige, the fall of Milan, the dispersion of the Lombard and Tuscan levies, tell us how miserable was the delusion on which such expectations rested, and how vain is the hope that a selfish and worn-out nation, destitute alike of civil firmness or military courage, can successfully establish its independence. Is it from Rome that this regeneration of society is expected to arise, and the reforming pope who is to be the Peter the Hermit of the new crusade in favour of the liberties of mankind? Behold him now trembling in his palace, bereft of authority, deprived of consideration; hated, despised, discrowned; waiting to see which of the Tramontane powers is to send a regiment of horse to receive the keys of the Eternal City, and give a lasting ruler to the former mistress of the world.
Is it Prussia that is to take the lead in the regeneration of the world, and from the north that a new Arminius is to issue, to assert the liberties of the great Teutonic family of mankind? Turn to Berlin, and see to what a pitiable degree of weakness revolutionary triumphs have reduced the monarchy of the Great Frederick. Behold its monarch and its army defeated by a band of students and shop-boys; its arsenal pillaged by an insurgent mob; and the power which withstood the banded strength of Europe, a century ago, and fronted Napoleon in the plenitude of his power, waging a doubtful and aggressive war with Denmark, a fifth-rate power, and paralysed by processions of apprentices, and the menaces of trades-unions, in the capital. Is it Ireland that is regarded as the sheet-anchor of the cause of revolution, and from the Emerald Isle that the bands of heroes are to issue who are to crush the tyranny of England, restore the freedom of the seas, and avenge the long quarrel of the Celt with the Saxon? It is in Boulagh Common that we must look for the exploits of the new Spartan heroes, and among the widow's cabbages we must search for the grave of a modern Leonidas! Is it in the energy, courage, and perseverance of the army of Tipperary, that we must find the realisation of the long-cherished hopes of Irish independence, and the demonstration of the solid foundation on which the much vaunted prospects of Hibernian success against British oppression is to be founded! It must augment the admiration which all the world must feel at the gallant conduct of the Irish, in this memorable struggle, to reflect that they owed their success to themselves alone; that none of their arms had been purchased, nor preparations made, with the wealth of the stranger; that they had spurned the charity of England as proudly as they had repelled its arms; and that, whatever could be cast up against them, this, at least, could not be said, that they had evinced ingratitude for recent benefits, or eaten the bread of their benefactor while they were preparing to pierce him to the heart!
Memorable, indeed, has been the year which has given these examples, and taught these lessons, to mankind. History will be sought in vain for a period in which, during so short a time, so many important political truths were unfolded, so many moral precepts taught, by suffering; or in which, after being for a season obscured by clouds, the polar star of religion and duty has shone forth with so bright a lustre. It is a proud thing for England to reflect on the exalted post she has occupied during this marvellous and trying time. While other nations, possessed of far greater military forces, were reeling under the shock, or prostrated by the treachery and treason of their defenders, she alone has repelled the danger by the constable's baton. She has neither augmented her army, nor increased her navy; she has not added a gun to her ships, nor a bayonet to her battalions. She has neither yielded to the violence of the Revolutionists, nor been guilty of deeds of cruelty to repress them. If her government is to blame for their conduct during the crisis, it is for having been too lenient – for having dallied too long with agitation, and winked at sedition till it grew into treason. A fault it undoubtedly has been, for it has brought matters to a crisis, and caused the ultimate outbreak to be repressed with far greater and more unavoidable severity than would have been required if the first merciful coercion had taken place. Had the Habeas Corpus Act been suspended in November, and the farce of Irish patriotism been hindered from turning into a burlesque tragedy, for one person whom it would have been necessary to imprison or transport, fifty must now undergo that punishment. Yet is this leniency or temporisation, misplaced as it was, and calamitous as it has turned out, a proud passage in England's story. It is some consolation to reflect that she conquered the revolutionary spirit, by which so many of the military monarchies of Europe had been prostrated, by moral strength alone; that scarce a shot was fired in anger by her troops, and not a drop of blood was shed on the scaffold; and that undue forbearance and lenity is the only fault which, during the crisis, can be imputed to the government which braved the storm under which the world was reeling.
Nor is the moral lesson less striking, or less important, which France, during the same period, has read to mankind. She has not, on this occasion, been assailed by the Continental powers. No Pitt or Cobourg has stood forth to mar, by ensanguined hostility, the bright aurora of her third Revolution. No Louis Philippe has stepped in, to change its character or intercept its consequences, and reap for royalty the fruits of insurrection. No bands of Cossacks or plumed Highlanders have again approached the capital of civilisation, to wrest from Freedom the rights she has acquired, or tear from her brows the glory she has won. Whatever she has gained, or suffered, or lost, has been owing to herself, and herself alone. Europe has looked on in anxious, it may be affrighted, neutrality. Though undermined every where by the spirit of propagandism, though openly assailed in some quarters by scarcely disguised attacks, the adjoining powers have abstained from any act of hostility. Albeit attacked by a revolutionary expedition, fitted out and armed by the French government at Paris, Belgium has attempted no act of retaliation. Victorious Austria, though grievously provoked, has accepted the mediation of France and England: when Turin was at his mercy, the triumphant Radetsky sheathed his victorious sword at Milan, and sought not to revenge on Piedmont the unprovoked aggression which its revolutionary government had committed on the Imperial dominions in Italy. Russia has armed, but not moved; the Czar has left to the patriotism and valour of Denmark the burden of a contest with the might of revolutionised Germany. Revolution has every where had fair play; a clear stage and no favour has been accorded to it by all the surviving monarchies in Europe. The enthusiasm of Lamartine, the intrigues of Caussidière, the dreams of Louis Blanc, the ambition of Ledru Rollin, have been allowed their full development. Nothing has intercepted the realisation of their projects. If France has suffered beyond all precedent from her convulsion; if her finances are in a state of hopeless embarrassment; if forty-five per cent has been added to her direct taxes, and the addition cannot be levied from the public distress; if three hundred thousand men have been added to her regular army; if poverty and destitution stalk through her streets; if her jails teem with ten thousand captives, and thousands of families mourn a father or a brother slain on the barricades, or transported for civil war, – the cause is to be found in the Revolution, and the Revolution alone.
The terrible and tragic result of the strife in the streets of Paris in June, has done scarcely a less service to mankind, by opening the eyes of the world to the real nature of crimes which recent events had rendered popular, and restoring their old and just appellation to acts of the deepest atrocity, which the general delusion had caused to pass for virtues. Since the successful result of the Revolt of the Barricades in 1830, the ideas of men have been so entirely subverted, that no government was practicable in France but that of corruption or the sword; and treason and sedition appeared to have been blotted out of the list of crimes in the statute-book of England. So licentious had the age become, and so much was government paralysed by terror at the unprecedented turn which the public mind had taken, that, in Ireland especially, it can scarcely be said, for the last ten years, that, in regard to state offences, there has been any government at all. The Repeal agitation – the wholesale liberation of prisoners by Lord Normanby – the unchecked monster meetings, – the quashing of O'Connell's conviction by the casting vote of one Whig peer, in opposition to the opinion of the twelve judges of England – the unparalleled and long-continued violence of the treasonable press in Dublin – the open drilling and arming of the people in the south and west of Ireland – the undisguised announcement of an approaching insurrection, of which the time was openly fixed for the completion of harvest – were so many indications that Government had become paralysed, and ceased to discharge its functions, in the neighbouring island.
If matters were not as yet so menacing in England, it was not that the executive was more powerful or efficient in this country, but that the English mind was slower to take fire than on the other side of the Channel, and that more weighty interests required to be subverted among the Saxons than the Celts, before the institutions of society were overturned, and anarchy, plunder, and spoliation, became the order of the day. Yet even here there were many indications of Government having become paralysed, and lamentable proof that the public tranquillity was preserved, more by the moderation of its assailants than the strength of its defenders. The violence and general impunity of the trades-unions, in both England and Scotland; the open and undisguised preparations of the Chartists in both countries; the toleration in the metropolis, on two different occasions, of a Chartist Convention, which aspired at usurping the government of the country; the uniform and atrocious violence of the revolutionary press; the entire impunity with which, on every occasion, the most dangerous sedition was spouted on the platform, or retailed in the columns of the journals; the open preparation, at last, of treasonable measures; and the organisation of the disaffected in clubs, where arms were distributed, and projects of rebellion, massacre, and conflagration hatched – were so many indications, and that, too, of the most alarming kind, that matters were approaching a crisis in these islands; and that the paralysis and imbecility of a Government which had ceased to discharge its functions, might prove, as it did in France in the feeble hands of Louis XVI., the precursor of a dreadful and disastrous convulsion.
Thanks to the French revolution and Irish rebellion, this state of matters has met, for the time at least, with a decisive check. The eyes of men have been opened; things are called by their right name. We again hear of treason and sedition – words, of late years, so much gone into disuse that the rising generation scarcely knew what they meant. In France the heroes of the barricades have ceased to be lauded as the greatest of men. Insurrection is no longer preached as the first of social duties. That which was the chief of civic virtues on the 24th February has become the greatest of civic crimes on the 24th June. The soldiers of treason no longer meet with an honoured sepulchre, nor, if surviving, are they fêted and caressed by royal hands. If killed, they are thrust into undistinguished graves; if taken alive, they are immured in dungeons or transported. Universal suffrage has done that which royalty was too indulgent or too timorous to do – it has ceased the dallying with treason. It has fought the Red Republic with its own weapon, and conquered in the strife. It has erected a military despotism in the great revolutionised capital. Industry, almost destroyed by, the first triumph of anarchy in France, is slowly reviving under the protection of absolute power. With suppression of the trade of the "journaliste," the "émeutier," and the "homme des barricades," other branches of employment are at length beginning to revive.12
Nor is the change less remarkable in Great Britain, where government have not only followed Mr Pitt's example of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, but have passed a special statute, assimilating for two years the punishment of aggravated cases of sedition to what it was by the old common law of Scotland. Great was the abuse which the Whig writers for half a century bestowed on the Scotch Judges in 1793, for applying the punishment of the Scotch law to the sedition of 1793, and transporting Muir and Fische Palmer, for trying to force on a revolution by means of a national convention. The "Martyrs' Monument" in Edinburgh stands as a durable monument of their sympathy. Lord Campbell, in his Lives of the Chancellors, has in bitter terms exhaled their collected indignation. But scarcely was the ink of his lordship's lucubrations dry, when he saw fit, as a member of Lord John Russell's cabinet, to bring in a bill to assimilate the punishment of sedition in Ireland to the old law of Scotland; and under it Mitchell has been transported fourteen, and Martin ten years – the very punishments inflicted for similar offences on Muir and Fische Palmer. The difference is, that for one person transported or imprisoned under Mr Pitt's system of timely coercion and prevention, in 1793, in Great Britain and Ireland, a hundred will be transported or imprisoned under the Whig system of long temporisation and final repression, in 1848. So true it is, that undue weakness in the prevention of crime is the inevitable parent of undue sternness in its punishment, and that in troubled times government incur the reality of severity to avoid its imputation.
Not less important, to the final interests of mankind, is the exposure of the real designs and objects of the revolutionary party, over the world, which has now taken place. The days of delusion are gone past; words have ceased to mislead men as to the nature of things. For half a century, men have been continually misled by the generous and elevated language under which the democratic party veiled their real designs. The strength of revolution consists in the power it possesses of rousing effort by the language of virtue, to render it subservient to the purposes of vice. But its designs have now reached their accomplishment: men see what was intended under all this veil of philanthropic intentions. The revolutionists have been victorious in Paris; and immediately their projects of spoliation, anarchy, and plunder, were set on foot, and approached so near their accomplishment, that a desperate and last effort of all the holders of property became indispensable, to prevent the total ruin of society; and carnage to an unheard of extent for three days stained the streets of Paris, to avert the triumph of the Red Republic, and the return of the Reign of Terror. The cry for repeal turned into rebellion in Ireland; and a vast concentration of the forces of England was requisite to prevent the Emerald Isle becoming the theatre of general massacre, devastation, and ruin. For two hours the Chartists got possession of Glasgow, and instantly a general system of plunder and sacking of houses commenced. The Chartist Convention was long tolerated in England, and, in return, they tried to overturn the Government on the 10th April; and organised a general plan of plunder and conflagration, which was to have broken out in the end of August, and was only mercifully prevented by the designs of the conspirators having become known, and the timely vigour of Government having prevented their accomplishment. The ultimate objects of the enemies of society, therefore, have become apparent: deeds have told us what meaning to attach to words. Revolution in France means spoliation, and the division of property, at a convenient opportunity. Repeal in Ireland means the massacre of the Protestants, and the division of their estates at a convenient opportunity. Chartism in England means general plunder, murder, and conflagration, the moment there is the least chance of perpetrating these crimes with impunity.
Ireland has been, in an especial manner, the subject of these general delusions; and there is perhaps no subject on which foreigners, the English, and the Irish themselves, have for so long a period been entirely misled, as in regard to the real cause of the protracted, and apparently irremediable evils of that distracted country. The proneness of the English to believe, that all mankind will be blessed by the institutions under which they themselves have flourished and waxed great, and the virulence with which party ambition has fastened upon Ireland, as the battle-field on which to dispossess political opponents, and gain possession of power, are the main causes of this long-continued and wide-spread misconception. We have to thank the Irish for having, by their reception of the magnificent gift of England in 1847, and subsequent rebellion in 1848, done so much to dispel the general delusion. To aid in disseminating juster views on the subject, we shall proceed to disinter from the earlier volumes of this Magazine, an extract from the first of a series of papers on Ireland, published in 1833, immediately before Lord Grey's Coercion Act, and which might pass for an essay on present events. It affords a striking example, both of the justice of the views there enunciated, and of the pernicious and continual recurrence of those real causes of Irish suffering, which party spirit in both islands has so long concealed from the people of Great Britain.
"It is in vain to attempt to shake ourselves loose of Ireland, or consider its misery as a foreign and extraneous consideration with which the people of this country have little concern. The starvation and anarchy of that kingdom is a leprosy, which will soon spread over the whole empire. The redundance of our own population, the misery of our own poor, the weight of our own poor-rates, are all chiefly owing to the multitudes who are perpetually pressing upon them from the Irish shores. During the periods of the greatest depression of industry in this country since the peace, if the Irish labourers could have been removed, the native poor would have found ample employment; and more than one committee of the House of Commons have reported, after the most patient investigation and minute examination of evidence from all parts of the country, that there is no tendency to undue increase among the people of Great Britain, and that the whole existing distress was owing to the immigration from the sister kingdom.
"Nature has forbidden us to sever the connexion which subsists between the two countries. We must swim or sink together. It is utterly impossible to effect that disjunction of British from Irish interests, for which the demagogues of that country so strenuously contend, and which many persons in this island, from the well-founded jealousy of Catholic ascendency in the House of Commons, and the apparent hopelessness of all attempts to improve its condition, are gradually becoming inclined to support. The legislature may be separated by act of Parliament; the Government may be severed by Catholic revolts; but Ireland will not the less hang like a dead weight round the neck of England; its starving multitudes will not the less overwhelm our labourers; its passions and its jealousies will not the less paralyse the exertions of our Government. Let a Catholic Republic be established in Ireland; let O'Connell be its President; let the English landholders be rooted out, and Ireland, with its priests and its poverty, be left to shift for itself; and the weight, the insupportable weight of its misery, will be more severely felt in this country than ever. Deprived of the wealth and the capital of the English landholders, or of the proprietors of English descent; a prey to its own furious and ungovernable passions; ruled by an ignorant and ambitious priesthood; seduced by frantic and unprincipled demagogues, it would speedily fall into an abyss of misery far greater than that which already overwhelms it. For every thousand of the Irish poor who now approach the shores of Britain, ten thousand would then arrive, from the experienced impossibility of finding subsistence at home; universal distress would produce such anarchy as would necessarily lead the better classes to throw themselves into the arms of any government who would interfere for their protection. France would find the golden opportunity, so long wished for, at length arrived, of striking at the power of England through the neighbouring island; the tricolor flag would speedily wave from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear; and even if England submitted to the usurpation, and relinquished its rebellious subjects to the great parent democracy, the cost of men and ships required to guard the western shore of Britain, and avert the pestilence from our own homes, would be greater than are now employed in maintaining a precarious and doubtful authority in that distracted island.
"Whence is all this misery, and these furious passions, in a country so richly endowed by nature, and subjected to a Government whose sway has, in other states, established so large a portion of general felicity? The Irish democrats answer, that it is the oppression of the English Government which has done all these things; the editors of the Whig journals and reviews repeat the same cry; and every Whig, following, on this as on every other subject, their leaders, like a flock of sheep, re-echo the same sentiment, until it has obtained general belief, even among those whose education and good sense might have led them to see through the fallacy. Yet, in truth, there is no opinion more erroneous; and there is none the dissemination of which has done so much to perpetuate the very evils which are the subject of such general and well-founded lamentation. Ireland, in reality, is not miserable because she has, but because she has not been conquered; she is suffering under a redundant population, not because the tyranny of England, but the tyranny of her own demagogues, prevents their getting bread; and she is torn with discordant passions, not because British oppression has called them into existence, but because Irish licentiousness has kept them alive for centuries after, under a more rigorous Government, they would have been buried for ever.
"It is the more extraordinary that the popular party in both islands should so heedlessly and blindly have adopted this doctrine, when it is so directly contrary to what they at the same time maintain in regard to the causes of the simultaneous rise and prosperity of Scotland. That poor and barren land, they see, has made unexampled strides in wealth and greatness during the last eighty years: its income during that period has been quadrupled, its numbers nearly doubled, its prosperity augmented tenfold; they behold its cities crowded with palaces, its fields smiling with plenty, its mountains covered with herds, its harbours crowded with masts, the Atlantic studded with its sails; and yet all this has grown up under an aristocratic rule, and with a representative system from which the lower classes were in a great measure excluded. In despair at beholding a nation whose condition was so utterly at variance with all their dogmas of the necessity of democratic representation to temper the frame of government, they have recourse to the salutary influence of English ascendency, and ascribe all this improvement to the beneficial influence of English freedom. Scotland, they tell us, has prospered, not because she has, but because she has not, been governed by her own institutions: and she is now rich and opulent, because the narrow and jealous spirit of her own Government has been tempered by the beneficial influence of English freedom. Whether this is really the case, we shall examine in a succeeding Number; and many curious and unknown facts as to the native institutions of Scotland we promise to unfold; but, in the mean time, let it be conceded that this observation is well founded, and that all the prosperity of Scotland has been owing to English influence. How has it happened that the same influence at the same time has been the cause of all the misery of Ireland? The common answer that Scotland was always an independent country, and that Ireland was won and ruled by the sword, is utterly unsatisfactory, and betrays an inattention to the most notorious historical facts. For how has it happened that Ireland was conquered with so much facility, while Scotland so long and strenuously resisted the spoiler? How did it happen that Henry II., with eleven hundred men, achieved with ease the conquest of the one country, while Edward II., at the head of eighty thousand men, was unable to effect the subjugation of the other? How was it that Scotland, not once, but twenty times, expelled vast English armies from her territory, while Ireland has never thrown them off since the Norman standard first approached her shores? And without going back to remote periods, how has it happened that the same influence of English legislation, which, according to them, has been utterly ruinous to Ireland, has been the sole cause of the unexampled prosperity of Scotland? that the same gale which has been the zephyr of spring to the one state, has been the blast of desolation to the other? It is evident that there is a fundamental difference between the two states; and that, if we would discover the cause of the different modes in which the same legislation of the dominant state has operated in the two countries, we must look to the different condition of the people to whom it was applied.
"One fact is very remarkable, and throws a great light on this difficult subject – and that is, that at different periods opposite systems have been tried in Ireland, and that invariably the system of concession and indulgence has been immediately followed by an ebullition of more than usual atrocity and violence.
"The first of these instances is the great indulgence showed to them by James I. That monarch justly boasted that Ireland was the scene of his beneficent legislation; and that he had done more to its inhabitants than all the monarchs who had sat on the English throne since the time of Henry II. He established the boroughs; gave them a right of sending representatives to Parliament; and first spread over its savage and unknown provinces the institutions and the liberties of England. What was the consequence? Did the people testify gratitude to their benefactors? Did they prove themselves worthy of British freedom, and capable of withstanding the passions arising from a representative government? We shall give the answer in the words of Mr Hume.
"'The Irish, everywhere intermingled with the English, needed but a hint from their leaders and priests to begin hostilities against a people whom they hated on account of their religion, and envied for their riches and prosperity. The houses, cattle, goods, of the unwary English were first seized. Those who heard of the commotions in their neighbourhood, instead of deserting their habitations, and assembling for mutual protection, remained at home, in hopes of defending their property, and fell thus separately into the hands of their enemies. After rapacity had fully exerted itself, cruelty, and the most barbarous that ever, in any nation, was known or heard of, began its operations. A universal massacre commenced of the English, now defenceless, and passively resigned to their inhuman foes. No age, no sex, no condition, was spared. The wife weeping for her butchered husband, and embracing her helpless children, was pierced with them and perished by the same stroke. The old, the young, the vigorous, the infirm, underwent a like fate, and were confounded in one common ruin. In vain did flight save from the first assault: destruction was every where let loose, and met the hunted victims at every turn. In vain was recourse had to relations, to companions, to friends; connexions were dissolved, and death was dealt by that hand from which protection was implored and expected. Without provocation, without opposition, the astonished English, living in profound peace and full security, were massacred by their nearest neighbours, with whom they had long upheld a continual intercourse of kindness and good offices.
"'But death was the slightest punishment inflicted by those rebels: all the tortures which wanton cruelty could devise, all the lingering pains of body, the anguish of mind, the agonies of despair, could not satiate revenge excited without injury, and cruelty derived from no cause. To enter into particulars would shock the least delicate humanity. Such enormities, though attested by undoubted evidence, appear almost incredible. Depraved nature, even perverted religion, encouraged by the utmost license, reach not to such a pitch of ferocity, unless the pity inherent in human breasts be destroyed by that contagion of example, which transports men beyond all the usual motives of conduct and behaviour.
"'The weaker sex themselves, naturally tender to their own sufferings, and compassionate to those of others, here emulated their more robust companions in the practice of every cruelty. Even children, taught by the example, and encouraged by the exhortation of their parents, essayed their feeble blows on the dead carcasses or defenceless children of the English. The very avarice of the Irish was not a sufficient restraint of their cruelty. Such was their frenzy, that the cattle which they had seized, and by rapine made their own, were yet, because they bore the name of English, wantonly slaughtered, or, when covered with wounds, turned loose into the woods and deserts.
"'The stately buildings or commodious habitations of the planters, as if upbraiding the sloth and ignorance of the natives, were consumed with fire, or laid level with the ground. And where the miserable owners, shut up in their houses and preparing for defence, perished in the flames, together with their wives and children, a double triumph was afforded to their insulting foes.
"'If any where a number assembled together, and, assuming courage from despair, were resolved to sweeten death by revenge on their assassins, they were disarmed by capitulations and promises of safety, confirmed by the most solemn oaths. But no sooner had they surrendered, than the rebels, with perfidy equal to their cruelty, made them share the fate of their unhappy countrymen.
"'Others, more ingenious still in their barbarity, tempted their prisoners by the fond love of life, to imbrue their hands in the blood of friends, brothers, parents; and having thus rendered them accomplices in guilt, gave them that death which they sought to shun by deserving it.
"'Amidst all these enormities, the sacred name of RELIGION resounded on every side; not to stop the hands of these murderers, but to enforce their blows, and to steel their hearts against every movement of human or social sympathy. The English, as heretics, abhorred of God, and detestable to all holy men, were marked out by the priests for slaughter; and, of all actions, to rid the world of these declared enemies to Catholic faith and piety, was represented as the most meritorious. Nature, which, in that rude people, was sufficiently inclined to atrocious deeds, was farther stimulated by precept; and national prejudices impoisoned by those aversions, more deadly and incurable, which arose from an enraged superstition. While death finished the sufferings of each victim, the bigoted assassins, with joy and exultation, still echoed in his expiring ears that these agonies were but the commencement of torments infinite and eternal.'"
"This dreadful rebellion left consequences long felt in Irish government. Cromwell, the iron leader of English vengeance, treated them with terrible severity: at the storming of a single city, 12,000 men were put to the sword; and such was the terror inspired by his merciless sword, that all the revolted cities opened their gates, and the people submitted, trembling, to the law of the conqueror. The recollection of the horrors of the Tyrone rebellion was long engraven in the English legislature; and it produced, along with the terrors of religious dissension, the severe code of laws which were imposed on the savage population of the country before the close of the seventeenth century. A hundred years of peace and tranquillity followed the promulgation of these oppressive laws. That they were severe and cruel is obvious from their tenor; that they were in many respects not worse than was called for by the horrors which preceded their enactment, and followed their repeal, is now unhappily proved by the result.
"The next great period of concession commenced about the year 1772, soon after the accession of George III. The severe code under which Ireland had so long lain chained, but quiet, was relaxed; the Catholics were admitted to a full share of the representation; the more selfish and unnecessary parts of the restrictions were removed; and, before 1796, hardly any part of the old fetters remained, excepting the exclusion of Catholics from the Houses of Lords and Commons, and the higher situations in the army. Did tranquillity, satisfaction, and peace, follow these immense concessions, continued through a period of thirty years? On the contrary, they were immediately followed by the same result as had attended the concessions of James I. A new rebellion broke out; the horrors of 1798 rivalled those of 1641; and the dreadful recollection of the Tyrone massacre was drowned in the more recent suffering of the same unhappy country.
"The perilous state in which Ireland then stood, imperfectly known at the time even to the Government, is now fully developed. From the Memoirs of Wolfe Tone, recently published, it appears that 250,000 men were sworn in, organised, drilled, and regimented; that colonels and officers for this immense force were all appointed; and the whole, under the direction of the central committee at Dublin, only awaited the arrival of Hoche and the French fleet to hoist the tricolor flag, and proclaim the Hibernian Republic in close alliance with the Republic of France. With truth it may be said, that the fate of England then hung upon a thread. Napoleon, and the unconquered army of Italy, were still in Europe; a successful descent of the advanced guard, 15,000 strong, under Hoche, would immediately have been followed up by the invasion of the main body under that great leader; and the facility with which the French fleet reached Bantry Bay in February 1797, where they were only prevented from landing by tempestuous gales, proves that the command of the seas cannot always be relied on as a security against foreign invasion. Had 40,000 French soldiers landed at that time in Ireland, to organise 200,000 hot-headed Catholic democrats, and lend the hand of fraternity to their numerous coadjutors on the other side of St George's Channel, it is difficult to say what would have been the present fate of England.
"The rebellion of 1798 threw back for ten years the progress of the indulgent measures so long practised towards Ireland. But at length the spirit of clemency again resumed its sway; the system of concession was again adopted, and the last remnants of the Irish fetters removed by the liberal Tory administration of England. First, the Catholics were declared eligible to any situations in the army and navy; and at length, by the famous Relief Bill, the remaining distinctions between Catholic and Protestant were done away, and an equal share of political influence was extended to them as that of their Protestant brethren. What has been the consequence? Has Ireland increased in tranquillity since this memorable change? Have the prophecies of its advocates been verified, as to the stilling of the waves of dissension and rebellion? Has it proved true, as Earl Grey prophesied it would, in his place in the House of Lords,
Defluit saxis agitatus humor;
Concedunt venti, fugiuntque nubes;
Et minax (quod sic voluere) ponto
Unda recumbit?
"The reverse of all this has notoriously been the case. Since this last and great concession, Ireland has become worse than ever. Midnight conflagration, dastardly assassination, have spread with fearful rapidity; the sources of justice have been dried up, and the most atrocious criminals repeatedly suffered to escape, from the impossibility of bringing them to justice. A universal insurrection against the payment of tithes has defied all the authority of Government, in open violation of the solemn promises of the Catholics that no invasion on the rights of the Protestant church was intended; and the starving clergy of Ireland have been thrown as a burden upon the consolidated fund of England. At this moment the authority of England is merely nominal over the neighbouring island; the Lord Lieutenant is less generally obeyed than the great Agitator, and the dictates of the Catholic leaders are looked up to in preference to the acts of the British Parliament. In despair at so desperate a state of things, so entirely the reverse of all they had hoped from the long train of conciliatory measures, the English are giving up the cause in despair; while the great and gallant body of Irish Protestants are firmly looking the danger in the face, and silently preparing for the struggle which they well know has now become inevitable.
"The result of experience, therefore, is complete in all its parts. Thrice, during the last two hundred years, have conciliatory measures been tried on the largest scale, and with the most beneficent intention; and thrice have the concessions to the Catholics been followed by a violent and intolerable outbreak of savage ferocity. The two first rebellions were followed by a firm and severe system of coercive government; as long as they continued in force, Ireland was comparatively tranquil, and their relaxation was the signal for the commencement of a state of insubordination which rapidly led to anarchy and revolt. The present revolutionary spirit has been met by a different system. Every thing has been conceded to the demagogues; their demands have been granted, their assemblies allowed, their advice followed, their leaders promoted; and the country in consequence has arrived at a state of anarchy unparalleled in any Christian state.
"What makes the present state of Ireland, and the democratic spirit of its inhabitants, altogether unpardonable is, the extreme indulgence and liberality with which, for the last fifty years, they have been treated by this country. During the whole war, Ireland paid neither income-tax nor assessed taxes; and the sum thus made a present of by England to her people, amounted at the very lowest calculation to £50,000,000 sterling. She shared in the full benefit of the war in consequence of the immense extent of the demand for agricultural produce which its expenditure occasioned, without feeling any of the burdens which neutralised its extension in this country. No poor's rates are levied on her landholders – in other words, they are levied on England and Scotland instead – and this island is in consequence overwhelmed by a mass of indigence created in the neighbouring kingdom, but which British indulgence has relieved them from the necessity of maintaining. The amount of the sums annually paid by the Parliament of Great Britain to objects of charity and utility in Ireland almost exceeds belief, and is at least five times greater than all directed to the same objects in both the other parts of the empire taken together. Yet with all their good deeds, past, present, and to come, Ireland is the most discontented part of the United Kingdom. She is incessantly crying out against her benefactor, and recurring to old oppression rendered necessary by her passions, instead of present benefactions, of which her democratic population have proved themselves unworthy by their ingratitude.
"Notwithstanding all the efforts of her demagogues to distract the country, and counteract all the liberality and beneficence of the English Government, Ireland has advanced with greater rapidity in industry, wealth, and all the real sources of happiness, during the last thirty years, than any other part of the empire. Since the Union, she has made a start both in agricultural and manufacturing industry, quite unparalleled, and much greater than Scotland had made during the first hundred years after her incorporation with the English dominions. It is quite evident that, if the demagogues would let Ireland alone – if the wounds in her political system were not continually kept open, and the passions of the people incessantly inflamed, by her popular leaders, she would become as rich and prosperous as she is populous – that, instead of a source of weakness, she would become a pillar of strength to the united empire – and instead of being overspread with the most wretched and squalid population in Europe, she might eventually boast of the most contented and happy."
So far what we wrote in December 1832. We make no apology for the length of this quotation. So precisely is it applicable to the present time, that were we to write anew on the subject, we should certainly reproduce the same ideas, and probably, in a great degree, make use of the same words. It affords a remarkable proof of the manner in which Ireland has been influenced, in all periods of its history, by the same causes; and of the way in which all its natural advantages have been thrown away, by the indolence and want of energy in its inhabitants, joined to the unhappy extension to it, through British connexion, of the privileges, excitement, and passions, consequent on a free constitution, for which it was unfitted by its character, temperament, and state of social advancement.