IRISH
152
IRISH
whom from GOOO to SOOO were Irish, mostly resident in
London. An Irish ReUef Bill did not follow until 1 793.
During the eighteenth century there was a consid-
erable trade between Whitehaven and Ulster. The
Catholic mission of St. Begh, Whitehaven, dates from
1706. Hawkers and labourers at this time were fre-
quently passing through London for the Kent hop-
pickings. At Croydon Assize, 1767, an Irish priest,
Moloney, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment
for exercising his functions. At St. Mary's Old
Chapel, Lumber St., Liverpool, an Irish priest, An-
thony Carroll, served from 1759 to 1766. Another
Irish priest, Father P. O'Brien, was there from 1760
to 1770. "The mission of St. George's Cathedral,
Southwark, dates from 1766, when an Irish priest.
Father T. Walsh, hired a room in which to say Mass.
In condemning the Gordon riots (17S0) Burke ".sup-
posed " there were not less than -1000 Catholics in
London. Manning gave the Catholic population of
England in 17S8 at 69,000 The famous Irishman,
Father Arthur O'Leary, founded St. Patrick's, Soho,
in 1792. Froude, writing of 179S, said, "Half the
sailors and petty officers in the service were Cath-
olics ", and inferred that they were mostly Irish.
Consequent upon the removal of the seat of gov- ernment at the L^nion, there was less inducement for men of political instincts, social ambition, or intel- lectual activities, to remain in Ireland. Until the ballot of 1872 there was no true parliamentary life in Ireland. Before the County and District Councils of 1898 there was neither local nor national self-govern- ment to attract the first; the absenteeism of richer men bafHed the second; dearth of general liigher edu- cation and learned distinction was felt by the third. Ireland lost the creative power of a native aristoc- racy, intellectual, financial, or social. Hence her gen- try were induced, more and more, to ally themselves to England. But this exile was not of the nobility only. In 1803 a report of a secret Commission of the House of Commons described London and other large English towns as honeycombed with secret societies in communication with the disaffected elements in Ireland. This closing of avenues of distinction; the restriction of inclustry and trade arising from the Penal Laws, the famines of 1817 and 1822, impelled an increasing emigration, which the famine of 1846—18, the "Black '47 ", made a permanent factor in national life. Emigration from May, 1851, to 31 December, 1908, drained away 4,126,310 souls, or half the na- tional population. In 1846, with only 65 miles of rail- ways, Ireland had a population of 300 to the square mile. " Nearly half as many again as the purely agri- cultural districts of England support at the present time (1908) and twice as many as Denmark, the model farming country of Europe." In 1901 there were 141 per square mile. The bulk of the Irish emigrants were, naturally, poor. Those who came to the nearest lands, England and Scotland, were the poorest of the poor, being those who had not the means to reach far Australia, or nearer America, or Canada. For years, therefore, they could not make any impression, social or political, on their adopted countries. Their in- fluence was simply that of example in fidelity to tlieir religion. Untouched by the .spirit of irreligion or in- difference rife on the Continent, this example was par- ticularly vivid. Mayhew in his London Labour" f>raises the virtue of the London-Irish coster girls and ads. Illicit connexions were, he says, the exception rather than the rule among them. Partly from these immigrants, partly for them, a large body of Irish priesthood accumulated in both countries, who, with signal self-sacrifice, <levote(l themselves to the hum- blest and most trying duties of their ministry. Edu- cated men, in many cases highly gifted, lived out- wardly inglorious lives amid surroundings of the squalor, ignorance, and vice that seem inevitable in cities of our civilization. The examples of strenuous
faith, of fearless Catholicism, of active piety, which
this large body of men must have impressed upon their
English and Scots coreligionists, unquestionably deep-
ened and widened the hold anil growth of Catholicism
in these islands. They were, it has been well said, the
most successful missionaries of the Catholic Church in
the nineteenth century. Railway development, the
rise of manufacturing towns and of commercial cities,
were powerful attractions to the Irish poor. Curiously
enough, scarcely any of these emigrants from an ag-
ricultural country settle in agricultural districts.
Politically, the Irish in England scarcely emerged from non-recognition under O'Connell's appeal to moral force in his agitation for Repeal. Their polit- ical awakening was not even complete under the call of Yoiuig Ireland to a more active force. Signs of life were visible upon a return to the methods of the United Irishmen of 1798, attempted l>y the Irish Rev- olutionary Brotherhood (Fenianism) of 1859 — open phy.sical force cemented by an oath of secrecy. A large number of the labouring Irish were pronouncedly in favour of this. They and their middle-class fellow- countrymen grew to political importance when they reverted to the idea of moral force only, advanced by Isaac Butt in his Home Rule scheme in 1870— an idea broadly, but less pacifically, followed by Parnell. It is significant of this increase of political power of the Irish in England that it was the Liverpool convention of the Home Rule Confederation that superseded Butt with Parnell. Concurrent with it was the Irish National Land League originated by Michael Davitt, who, as a former worker in the cotton mills of Lanca- shire, was very popular with the Irish workers in Eng- land. In the United Irish League of Great Britain the two facets of the Irish party have a most powerful organization, with ramifications everywhere.
From its situation Liverpool would have a large poor Irish population. In 1788-89 there were 260 Catholic baptisms out of 2332, i.e. llj per cent. Ap- proximately, the Catholic population of Liverpool in 1788 was 6916; in 1811, 21,359; in 1829, 50,000. (In 1804 there were only 12,000 to 15,000 Catholics in Lon- don.) In 1841 the Irish-born in Great Britain num- bered 419,250; in 1851 there were 519,959, of whom 213,907 were in Scotland. It has been claimed that "the outward sign of the great impetus given to Catholi- cism in Great Britain by the immigration from Ireland was the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Eng- land". It was therefore appropriate that the first head of the restored hierarchy should be a son of Irish parents. The present Archljishop of Westminster is of Irish descent, as are also his bishop auxiliary and vicar-general and one of his canons. In 1853 Irish Vincentians took charge of the parish of St. Vincent, Sheffield. Later they had a training college at Ham- mersmith. At present the Irish province has two houses in England. In this year there were 41,400 Catholics, mostly Irish, in the British Army, and a quarter of the Navy was estimated as Irish Cath- olics. In 1862 the Irish Sisters of Charity were work- ing in Hereford. In 1881 the census for the Parlia- mentary Borough of Manchester gives 8| per cent of its population as Irish (32,750 out of 393,580). In 1908 the Catholic population of Great Britain was 2,130,- 100, of which 400,000 was in Scotland. In 1909 the Catholic population of England had increased to 1,671, - 000, with one of its bisliops Irish-born and two others of Irish descent. Irish Sisters of Charity are in the Diocese (jf Westminster and of Shrewsbury, and Irish Christian Brothers are at Bristol. ( onfessions are of- ficially announced as heard in Irisli in the Dioceses of Westminster (2 churches), Clifton, and Salford (4 churches). Of the 1717 churches, ehapi-ls, tni.l sta- tions in England 48 (2? per cent) are declicated to Irish saints, of which 42 are under SI. Patrick.
Though the impress of the early Ciitliolie Irish set- tlers on th(' social, political, and artistic life of Eng-
