TWO ROADS TO "UNION."

Otago Witness, Issue 3270, 15 November 1916, Page 55

TWO ROADS TO "UNION."

By Jessie Mackat

(Continued.)

We have briefly indicated the growth and internal unification of Scotland after the Union of 1707, leading up to the realisation of that Union in the reconciling nineteenth century. That oneness of England and Scotland has meant more to the world, probably, than any other international mingling in history. For it marked the birth of the Britannic ideal of_ progress and government, with all its mighty message for the world. It is like falling back into night and chaos to take up the tale of Ireland from Anne's reign. The Irish House of Lords petitioned for Parliamentary Union like that of Scotland. Failing attention to its plea in London, it busied itself passing some heavier penalties on Catholics, which Anne's Tory Ministers supplemented by further restrictions on the Ulster Presbyterians. As Justin M'Carthv points out, these flagellations of Ireland did not add weight to the remonstrances Anne was making to the Emperor of Austria on his treatment of his Protestant subjects. It is difficult for Englishmen to understand how their quite sincere moral policing of other nations has been consistently discounted by the spectacle of the blighted, disaffected country crving for autonomy at their own door. ' England has for centuries played the Ancient Mariner, with Ireland for her albatross, and even yet her repentance is not deep enough to warrant her being divested of the dead weight round her neck.

Scarcely a flicker of change marked the opening of the Georgian era in Ireland. The sullen gloom of a helot country was uncheered by the rising sun of Constitutionalism in England. Her faith savagely penalised, her education stilled, first by neglect, then by the nefarious system that made apostacy the price of learning, her trade and industries wrecked, her law courts corrupted beyond belief, her liberties destroyed, her bravest in exile, and her people starving under alien landlords—this was the autonomy her own "Parliament" and that of England secured to her for the first 70 years of Guelph rule. And yet the unconquerable Celtic heart of her would not despair. How she cherished the memory of Molyneux, the first writer to advocate the repeal of Poynings' Law! How she thrilled to the "Drapier Letters" of Swift, evoked by the robbery of the people regarding debased coinage, and a minter's monopoly ! And how her gratitude overflowed towards the fir t Lord Lieutenant since Tyrconnell, who strove to mend her hurt. " By that strange historic rule of contraries, while the "Forty-five" was rending Scotland and horrifying England, Ireland was enjoying her first intermission of persecution under the clement and chivalrous rule of Lord Chesterfield. Not long did it last; it was soon the end of an official career once a "Castle" man, Viceroy or other, was convicted of sympathy with the Irish people. Yet the idea of constitutional reform took root in Ireland, and actually flowered in brief triumph—when the Irish " Parliament " had nun its course of shame for nearly : 9o years after the broken Treaty of Limerick.

Two mighty movements crossed the fated orbit of the oppressed country. Every schoolboy knows that the American War of Independence forced England to allow young Irishmen to drill as volunteers to defend the island against invasion, and that there volunteers were able to demand what the eloquent patriots, Flood and Grattan, had long advocated—a Parliament free of Poynings' Law, and elected by Catholics as- well as Protestants. A farcically narrow franchise it was; but at that time neither England nor Scotland had a better, and " Grattan's Parliament" began its brief career in 1782, lifting the balk of penalisation off the Catholics, and inaugurating what seemed a reign of promise. There stood between Ireland and that fair hope but one obstacle—her muddle headed bigot of a King, who fought every effort of Pitt and the newer stale-men to emancipate the Catholics. The bond of a new nationhood was forging fast. The young Protestants and young Catholics were clasping hands in the Society of United Irishmen, pledged for the weal of their native land, and had Geoirge 111 died at 40 there would not have been a Sinn Feiner, a Carsonite, or a K-edmondite in Ireland to-day. But George lived, and the French Revolution broke over Europe. To England and Scotland the dread of it brought panic and a shoal of galling political restrictions. To Ireland it brought long-lasting misery—the second death which our schoolbooks have glorified as "the Union." In those fateful 'Nineties that rang with the fall of the Bastille, the hearts of these young, ardent reformers, who for the first time had gloried in a common bond, effacing class and creed, felt their heairts beat high and impatiently. Why was their Parliament denied its fruition, and the reforms they so needed delayed by the whim of a mad King and the panic of his duller Ministers? A man after their own hearts, Earl Fitzwilliam, was sent to bo Lord Lieutenant in 1795. Alas ! he was a man of integrity who meant to do Ireland good ; the thing could not be forgiven. In three months he was recalled, and then thepatriots abandoned hope of constitutional reform, and looked to France and the rising star of General Bonaparte, not yet the Dictator Napoleon. And let it be remembered that it was misgovernment and not religious difference that drove the United Irishmen to revolt in the paralysis that overtook Grattan's Parliament. _ Most of the leaders were learned and brilliant young Protectants, to whom, Irish-born aa they'were, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality was a sacred reality. It was a Geraldine,

young Silken Thomas who first unfurled the banner of Irish independence in Tudor days; again it was an heir of the Geraldines who gave his name, his fame, and his life for Ireland's redemption 200 years later. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, once holding an English commission till his loyalty cooled fighting the admired American nationalists, with Theobold Wolfe lone, was the hero of Irish song and story for many a sorrowful year after 'ninety-eight. Let it bo remembered, too, that these leaders were chivalrous gentlemen. Not theirs the fault that their rank and file were the dispossessed helots whom England had crushed out, so far as her earnest endeftvour had prevailed, from every right of humanity, and needed but a spark to fan 500 years of hatred to beast-like ferocity. Of that time no historian willingly speaks. Yet it was not the wronged Irishry for whose deeds of horror modern writers must apologise, but fptf the fearful excesses which matched them on the other side —outrages for which settler Scots and English soldiers alike must bear the blame, as well as the German mercenaries their Hanoverian king let loose upon the rebels —mercenaries who were the true fathers of those who held the devil's carnival two years ago in Belgium.

Of the French aid that failed, of the spy system that plucked the core out of Irish organisation, of the death of Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe lone, and the rest, it is not needful to speak longer. Ireland's foes in high places were happy. They had seen her destroy herself, and had the handle they desired to win back most they had lost by Grattan's reforms. The Irish Parliament, though it had honestly kept aloof from rebellion, was marked for death. "Union" had been asked for a hundred years ago; now she should have it —a "union" that meant all for one and nothing for the other. We all know that this was not Pitt's policy: he tried to effect a real union by coupling the Bill with Catholic emancipation and educational reform. But George 111, that scourge of British constitutionalism, having lost America wholly to England, was still able to lose what chance remained of binding Ireland to her by belated justice. Promises, indeed, accompanied the wholesale campaign of bribery that alone could move towards the extinction of Irish autonomy. The Irish Parliament, though blamed, had committed no treason : they could not hang it and they could not expel it. Therefore it had to be bought to consent to its own destruction. Gold and titles fell like rain, and still 100 members of that unrepresentative Protestant Assembly were yet too honourable to vote away the broken hope of Catholic Ireland, as well as the better part of Ulster's unfolding future—a fact which in itself points to the unity that might have been and would have buried the long animosities of Limerick and the Boyne. Let no one who cries out on Irish disunity now forget who bred that disunity, and for what end, in the years that saw the "Castle" sitting up in disdainful aloofness, pulling the wires that kept Orange and Green in renewed and neverending strife. The first morning of the nineteenth century saw the fusion of the two Parliaments, a "union" unblessed by love or juctice, of which the first fruits were the proclamation of martial law, the suspension of the lately won Habeas Corpus Act, and an Act of Indemnity covering the Irish Protestants and English •soldiery who had committed these hideous and Hunnish crimes against the rebels and unarmed peasantry. For the "Croppy Boys" there had been no indemnity. The rising of Robert Emmet, as usual in the history of Ireland, was made the handle of fresh repression instead of a reason for looking into unredressed grievances. True, Charles James Fox, a better friend to Ireland than Pitt ever was, and other Englishmen among the better politician sort, lifted up their voices for the first measure of amelioration—Catholic emancipation. And it is good to remember, as Justin M'Carthy says, that of the few speeches Byron ever made in the House of Lords one was for justice to the Irish Catholics. The condition of the peasant was scarcely touched by union. The father of our own Edward Gibbon Wakefield, travelling in Ireland about 1812, reported that the Irish peasant was to all intents a serf, groaning under exactions on every side—the exactions of landlords, middlemen, the Episcopalian Church, and the step-mother Parliament. What a spirit had this people! Not much later than this Walter Scott was writing his humorous ballad of "The "Happy Man"—shirtless, starving Paddy, who still laughed and sang while John Bull ruffled his brows o- er the cares of riches. Alas! that gaiety, so picturesque in English romances, covered a sore heart enough, as the country saw her sons pushed overseas by a bare cupboard and the landlord-bishop's whip at home. America was then the new El Dorado of all fortune-seekers, the new haven of refuge to all persecuted for conscience sake. As many of Ireland's children as could leave went west, taking with them a traditional hatred very soil where that hatred would be best watered. The son of the "Croppy," who had seen his father hanged, his mother evicted (not then, but in the "-peace" left by the English Act of self-indemnity), his brothers and sisters starving on the roadside at a landlord's nod, did some heart-to-heart talking with his new hosts. For they had seen an English cantain eating his supper by the light of the blazing "Yankee palace" at Washington in 1812, from which fair, intrepid Dolly Madison had just retired with George Washington's portrait in her arms. Let •us leave Ireland now_, with her dawning hope of a new outlet, in the bounteous west, and her strong desire for Catholic emancipation at home. (To be continued.)