Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 5/Ireland and her Queen
IRELAND AND HER QUEEN.
“Punch” has seldom given us a prettier picture of the times than when he showed us the greeting of the Queen to Ireland,—that engaging damsel, comely and neat, and possessed of a noble pig. While everybody liked that sketch, it went right to the heart of old people who could not forget, if they were to live to the age of Methusaleh, the wringing pain caused by the idea of Ireland at the beginning of the century. I am not going over the story from that time to this. Its leading events are not likely to be forgotten by any who have ever cared about the subject at all. All that I desire is that we should just catch a glimpse of the aspect of that strange country at three or four periods since the Union, in order to see the course of the transformation, and learn the natural lesson from it.
In deriving lessons from events, people, it is true, commonly learn, or fancy they learn, just what they knew before; in the same way that people usually see what they are looking for, and always fail to perceive what they had no conception of: but there is one hint so very broadly conveyed in the recent history of Ireland that it must stand second in everybody’s view, whatever favourite notion may come first. When, in an election among a crowd of candidates, one candidate has everybody’s second vote, while the first votes are scattered, that candidate heads the poll; and in the same way, the second lesson that we all learn from Ireland being the same, however we may differ about the first,—that is the lesson. It is noble enough to hold the very highest place in any scheme of political study. It is—a warning against political despair.
There has never been a time since any organised polity existed when such a lesson was not needed. There is always some country or other where matters are in such a bad state that it is difficult to see how they can ever be set right; and at present it is difficult for political students who have any benevolence in them to keep up their spirits about half-a-dozen countries 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 houses, rendered idle and poor by every sort of obstruction, and wretched by popular dislike: and there were Catholic priests who knew, in virtue of their office, how political disappointment was made use of to sink their flocks deeper into crime. There were hedge-schools, where tattered boys were eagerly learning arithmetic and land surveying, that they might enter into the competition for land and land offices, which was their only notion of getting a living. There were hollow places under the turf of the moors, betrayed only by a thread of blue smoke, where illicit stills were at work, and dogs were in training to carry bladders full of whisky through the beat of the exciseman in the night. There were hovels without number, where parents were compelled to give their children the potatoes which they had promised as rent. The little ones could not starve to-day, whether or not they were to have a roof over their heads to-morrow. There were wastes on the mountain, and wild sands by the sea where men stealthily collected in the dusk or at daybreak for drill, with pike or fork or scythe, when firearms could not be got; and frantic was the joy, or desperate the rage, according to the report of scouts or prophets, as to the approach of the French, or the putting off of the invasion. There was emigration in those times, though we are too apt to forget it. Not only did Irish mowers, reapers, and hop-pickers invade our agricultural counties in the season in numbers (the like of which will never be seen again), but several thousands of the peasantry yearly found their way to the United States or the British Colonies. In America they were very welcome, in the early days of railways and canals. The new comers, it is true, died off fast, of drink, miasma, and needless discomfort; but the lowest of them valued education for their children; and, as education is universal in the free States, the next generation were well worth having; but the characteristic of the Irish in America was found to be, as it is now, their intolerance, and preference of despotic to free government. John Mitchel is a true representative of his countrymen in America in his aspiration after “a goodly plantation, stocked with fat negroes.” As the emigrants dispersed over the world, they spread everywhere the notion that their people were made slaves of by England, and that all their woes were owing to political causes. At this moment a sound is ringing in my ears, one of the most painful I ever heard,—the passionate, peevish cry of the widow of Theobald Wolfe Tone,—an aged lady living at Philadelphia, who poured out her Irish politics to me, exclaiming, on behalf of her country, “Let her alone! Don’t touch her at all! Only let her alone!” It was not a case for reasoning. The Catholics were then emancipated; and the Whig government was entering on its course of beneficent rule; but the widow of the rebel of 1798 had no patience to hear of good news for Ireland if it came through English hands.
I shall ever believe that to Thomas Drummond, more than to any other human agency, is the regeneration of Ireland due. An undemonstrative Scotchman, he seemed animated as by a new soul when he had warmed in his Irish office; and it might well be so; for he had set before him the object of saving Ireland, whatever became of himself. Ireland was saved, and he perished under the burden of the work. To those who knew him before he crossed the Channel, it is very moving to see his statue at Dublin,—with the face full of the well-remembered intellectual sensibility, but so thin and worn! In dying, he declared that he died for Ireland; and it is true. Those who know him by nothing else remember him by his saying—so simple to him that he could not conceive how it became so celebrated,—that “Property has its duties as well as its rights:” and it will be fully recognised hereafter that he inaugurated the rule of indulgence which alone could have saved Ireland,—so deeply sunk as she was. The rule of the Whig government, worked by Mr. Drummond, and exemplified by the high officials who did the demonstrative part, was the turning point of the fate of Ireland.
There was a new phase, but not a much more promising one to superficial observers, when O’Connell, having obtained Catholic emancipation, found himself unable (supposing him willing) to withdraw from his function of Agitator. I have never been able to think well of O’Connell, more or less. Men of all politics desired to like and admire him, if possible: but I, for one, never could see that he answered to any sort of test of sound character, political or moral. He had his retribution for his sins in the tribulation of his later years, every one of which plunged him deeper in the embarrassments of false promises, timid collusion, and public pledges which he could never redeem. Nobody now supposes that latterly he believed Repeal possible, or in any way desirable; yet he had not courage to avow the truth: and his humiliation extended even to sanctioning each man’s dream as to the results of Repeal. He obtained the support of the Irish peasantry by permitting them to believe that “Repale” meant the possession of land by each man in fee simple. A glimpse of Ireland at that time, twenty years ago, shows us an altered scene, but one as full of peril as ever, except that plans of regeneration were maturing at the Castle at Dublin.
There had been abundant proof within a few years that the loyalty of the Irish was to persons more than to institutions. It had astonished us all in 1820 that George IV., who would not grant Catholic emancipation, and had been no benefactor to Ireland, was received there with an enthusiasm which seemed perfectly senseless. We might have learned more than we did from the fact that the mere presence of the king could so work upon the people. Nearly twenty years later, the people were hero-worshipping again; and their heroes were changing the aspect of Ireland for the time. Father Mathew had obtained a hold on the popular imagination in one way, as O’Connell had in another. In Ireland we then saw the distilleries shut up, and the spirit-merchants turning to other occupations. We saw the temperance medals on tens of thousands of necks and breasts; and where they were worn, the children were getting clothed, and the cabins furnished, and the parents rising out of debt and difficulty. But it was really worship, and therefore dangerous. Father Mathew, like O’Connell, let the popular imagination run wild, for the sake of influence, and the aims to which influence was directed. The people believed, and they were not contradicted, that Father Mathew healed the sick, and had raised at least one from the dead. He afforded thus the material of a Temperance host, which O’Connell drilled as an army. Those were the critical days when an indulgent policy was happily adopted, instead of a coercive one; and when the right choice was made between giving Ireland opportunity to be a convert, and calling her to account as a rebel. She was allowed to hold her monster meetings, where an army of sober peasantry marched before O’Connell, really believing him to be the destined king of Ireland, while their mothers and wives wept rapturous tears, in full faith that there was now to be no more poverty for anybody; no more evictions from field or cabin; no lack of potatoes ever again; but plenty, and glory, and liberty for every man to do as he liked, under King Dan—his own chosen prince. That mob-prince, meantime, carried a heavy heart within him. He was as a man half-way up a precipice, where he finds no path nor footing. His uncertainty and fear became very obvious, and they carried him to his grave. His influence was much lessened before he died, and so was Father Mathew’s. There was nothing to sustain the hero-worship in either case; and the chief practical result was the evidence that the way to govern the Irish was through the loyalty of the popular heart, and not by making them arbiters of their own political rights. Even O’Connell, to whom they were loyal so long, failed because he could not give them the bribes which he annexed to political claims; and no agitator since his time has succeeded at all. When Smith O’Brien was in the height of his hopeful delusions, Irishmen who knew their countrymen said he and his comrades must fail: no political Protestant could ever lead discontented Catholics on to a successful rebellion. The reason was, that the people wanted a hero to worship first, whatever notion of rights might come afterwards; and no political Protestant can be an idol in a priest-ridden Catholic country.
How far it might have been different if O’Connell had lived, there is no saying; but Irish history took a new turn when his vigour and influence declined, and began a new chapter after his death. There was the national system of education—a blessing which Ireland (and the whole empire, as interested in Ireland) owes primarily to Lord Derby. Half a million of the children of successive generations have been civilised and enlightened by that institution; and the Irish passion for education has happily counteracted the influence of the priesthood so far as to secure the signal success of the scheme. The Bishop of Oxford saw with delight, the other day, what those schools really are, in regard to the intelligence, and free, happy, and orderly bearing of the children, and the good understanding which exists among households of teachers of differing religious faiths. But, to estimate the full benefit, one should see what these schools do in the remoter parts of the country, where the priest is kept in order, and the rebel is laughed at, and the incendiary is restrained, and all wildness turned into reason, by the mere enlightenment of the children as they grow up. Bigots on both sides have made great difficulty; but the system survives and flourishes, and the period of Irish delusion from ignorance is evidently closed.
Of the famine, I will say only that it left the country covered with refuges for the helplessly poor. The workhouses were not mere roofs for the shelter of the destitute, nor abodes of shame, as they are elsewhere. There was no disgrace in the destitution caused by such a calamity as the famine and its consequent pestilence; and the workhouses operated in somewhat the same way as the schools. They were an interesting feature to the traveller who went to see what Ireland was like when the hungry were fed again, and the dead were buried. There the people learned to wear whole clothes; there habits of cleanliness and neatness were formed; there boys were trained in agricultural and girls in domestic arts; and the multitude of orphans left by the fever found a not unkindly parent in the State. The system could not have worked, however, without another great change. While the land lay waste under the burden of debt, and its owners could not live on it, and Irish capital was deposited in the imperial funds at low interest, while the country was perishing for want of it, there could be no actual poor-rate which could support the lowest class. The famine had proved the absence of a middle class at all in proportion to those above and below, as it had exhibited the mischievous lack of roads to connect one community with another. Everything wanted consolidation with other things—one class of society with another—one locality with another—trade with agriculture—labour with capital; and while the disintegration existed, even the feeding and clothing the destitute from the public purse could not go on. The remedy was applied when the land was released. There never was a more conspicuous instance of success in social administration than that of the Encumbered Estates Act. When it had come into full operation, it was really worth while to go to Ireland. It is true the country was studded all over with gable-ends where cabin-roofs had fallen in, and nettles and briars grew over the cold hearth-stones. It is true the churchyards were very full, and the villages very empty, in the dreariest districts. One’s heart was rent with the cry of parting, when groups of emigrants mounted the public cars. The priests hung about the shores or the lanes, as idle as the Protestant parson had ever been, and far more miserable. Their flocks were dispersed; their living was gone; and their neighbours had betaken themselves to a land where they were pretty sure to turn heretics. These incidents were mournful enough; and there were complaints that more and more cattle were grazing where cabins and potato-grounds contained inhabitants before. But there was an abundant set-off against all melancholy incidents. The beggars had diminished yet more than in proportion to the decrease of population. The men in the fields were earning double wages, and working better accordingly. The labourer who, at sixpence a-day, had lain down on his back as soon as the agent was out of sight, now, at a shilling a-day, took no such rest till his work was done. Boys took the stranger to see a curiosity with much pride; and, when in presence of the marvel, told him that the plant was called a turnip. The women and girls, who had supported the men after the dislocation of industry from the famine, were still sewing away, morning, noon, and night, on their door-sills, at the embroidery sent them from Scotland, as well as from Belfast; and 400,000 of them were earning between 80,000l. and 90,000l. per week. The rural families all over the country showed the effects in their faces of better diet than they had known in the days of the dear old potato; and in their spirits they testified to a new experience of hope and comfort having fairly set in.
There were still occasional agrarian murders; and strangers formed their opinion of the priests accordingly, as cognisant of the whole mind of the Catholic peasantry; but by that time the explanation was ready that the power of the priests was no longer what it had been: in fact, the men did not, as a general rule, go to confession, if the women did; and if the women were not told secrets, the priests did not know them. On dark hillsides, and in wide wastes, everything was brightening. Prostrate fences were set up again; mansions were rebuilt; weedy fallows were manured and tilled, and stock was turned in upon the neglected pastures. There was certainly a plague of ragwort and loosestrife over the land; and the stench of steeping flax showed that wasteful old methods were still in use; but a Scotch farmer here and there was waging war against unthrift of every kind; and flax-dressing by machinery was making its way.
The best thing was that the Scotch and Englishmen were so few, though the released estates were daily taken in hand by new owners. The Irish capital in the imperial funds was flowing back, and spreading fertility like a stream in India which has gone astray, and is led back to irrigate a desert, and make it blossom as the rose.
It was at that time that the Queen made her first visit to Ireland. Smith O’Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel, were undergoing their exile, and were supposed to have many sympathisers at home. The royal authority had been insulted and defied by the existing generation; and there had been reckless people, at home and abroad, to assure the credulous Irish that the famine and the pestilence had been somehow the work of England. Every gift from England had been haughtily despised as a mere instalment of a right. Every scheme of relief had been clamoured against; and all that insolence could say and do through an ignorant Catholic hierarchy had been tried by the priests, and imitated by the people within their influence. No wonder the Queen was nervous on landing. She who, like her brave race, is absolutely dauntless on all emergencies, and when she comprehends the elements of the case, was fluttered by the uncertainty as to her footing in Ireland; and her first steps on Irish soil were somewhat unsteady; her glance was anxious, and her countenance full of solicitude. But it was all right. The people had once more an idol. Reverence and love greeted her whichever way she turned. None of us will ever forget her departure. She was worshipped as she went to the pier, and as she stepped on board her yacht; and cheers broke forth again and again as she stood on deck while the vessel moved off. When the distance increased, the sudden sense crossed her of the contrast between her feelings in arriving and departing, and she ran along the deck, and up the paddle-box where her husband was standing, and threw out her handkerchief to the wind. Never was there such a roar of delight, among her many greetings from her subjects, as went up when the act was seen from the far distance. The Irish and their Queen felt that they must and should meet again.
They have now met again. In the eight years that have intervened the progress of the country in all ways has been very great. Some complain of the diminution of numbers since the census of 1851; but there has been a due increase of people, though they are living far away. They are prosperous in the colonies; and, as for those in the United States, they are coming back now that their new, and not their old, country is the scene of civil war and social hardship. We hear of sixty embarking by one ship, and of hundreds converging towards the ports, to get back to their families at home, instead of following the fashion of bringing them out. There is plenty of work and wage for them in the old country; and they will find affairs wearing a new face. The workhouses half empty or more, and a demand for labourers from the remnant there; the towns showing new markets and shops, and improved public buildings; the ports full of shipping; the tillage expanded by a million of acres in ten years, and the live stock by five millions of money; the wretched cabins gone by thousands and replaced by decent dwellings; the people ashamed of rags, and accustomed to a varied diet; the constabulary lessened in number, the military barracks standing empty, the prisons not half full, and the judges of assize putting on white gloves instead of the black cap; these are the features which will surprise the returned emigrants, and make them ask whether this is indeed Old Ireland.
The Queen landed this time with gravity and amidst silence; but it was because her subjects sympathised with her personal griefs, betokened by the deep mourning which she wore. When they discovered how pleased she was to meet them they gave her the heartiest of greetings; and the enthusiasm knew no bounds while she remained in sight. It is said that she contemplates having a residence among the beautiful scenery of the west—and we shall all desire that she may. If she had twenty palaces elsewhere, it would still be wise to have another in Ireland. Her mere presence and sympathy are a sufficient ruling power in the stage which Ireland has reached. She smiles upon the comely Ireland in her state of buxom health and comfort; and comely Ireland modestly clasps the royal hand, and looks into the Queen’s kindly face. Such a meeting every year or nearly would cheer the hearts of both.
What the historical commentators and political critics of France and Austria, and Russia and America, think of this meeting, I do not know; and none of us will care. They have lost a topic for declamation; but Europe and America seem likely to yield others. If they want a type of the rebel and the beggar, they must henceforth look elsewhere than to Ireland.