JAMES REDPATH ON IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 375, 25 June 1880, Page 17

JAMES REDPATH ON IRELAND.

(From the Boston Pilot.)

Last week, when in New York, we received an unexpected call at an hotel from our friend James Redpath, who had just returned from Ireland. We spent most of the day together, reviving memories of old friends and old times here, and of the old country which he had so recently seen. Mr. Redpath said that the JVew York , Tribune had the most important of his letters to publish yet, as they had been delaggp by the press of other news, and that the letters to be publiall?> will be chiefly the record of his personal observations in the West' of Ireland. We wished to engage him to write for the Pilot, a series of articles on Ireland, but he said he did not feel at liberty to do so without Mr. Whitelaw Beid's consent, and as the editor of the Tribune had already consented to let him write a short series of articles in the Independent, he did not care to ask another favour -of the same sort so soon again. " I think," he said, " the Tribune has behaved quite handsomely. Mr. Keid, when I was ready to start for Ireland, gave me very brief instructions : ' First find the facts and report them !' and I did that ; and I have been told, since I came home, that my facts and the theories I expressed conflicted with the position that the Ti'ibune had previously taken. Most editors would have thrown their correspondent's letters into the waste basket in such circumstances. But I tell you Boyle, no honest American, with any warm blood in his veins, could take any other position than I have taken after he was once brought face to face with the facts in Ireland. The Tribune has published in the old times, I think, hundreds of columns from rae denouncing the slaveholders, and the landlords of Ireland are just as bad a lot as ever the worst of our southern slaveholders were. There are two words that mean entirely different things in Ireland and America — landlord and Protestant. I have expressed my opinions about Irish landlords in the Tribune, and I shall express my opinion of Irish Protestants in the Independent. All I met reminded me of what Clarendon said more than two hundred years since in his history of the Civil Wars in England : ' The religion of the Scotch consists of hating the Pope or " the Papists," ' I have forgotten which. It's the same thing in Scotch, though ! " Well, do you know, I was a little fellow then, about 12, and my father was a Scotch Presbyterian, and somehow that sentence stuck in my memory until it worked all the Scotch Presbyterianism out of me— for I lived to see that it was true yet. " Nearly all the Irish Protestants I met — I was not in Ulster and may have met bad samples of the Orangemen — but all I met, educated or ignorant, always spoke of the Catholics as the slaveholders and their friends used to speak of the negro. I thought all my old enthusiasm had cooled off ; but I was in a chronic state of combat from the time I landed until I left Ireland. I was in a state of moral Donny brook Fair all the time I 11 1 remember one day I was dining in the Shelborne Hotel and met Mr. Hepworth. I was telling him of the scenes I had seen in County Mayo. A man opposite us asked me if I had been in Ulster. I said no. Well, be said, you will find things different there, sir ! ' We are a different people.' " ' Oh yes, 1 said Mr. Hepworth : ' You are a different race and a different religion. " ' Yes,' I added, I was brought up to believe in Scotland and England when I was a boy, at the time of the famine of '48, that the Irish were poor because they were lazy and Catholics. But I got rid of that notion in America.

"How is it," I asked the Orangeman, "that you fellows, with your different race and different religion, don't get along any better, man for man, in America than the Irish Catholics as soon as both of you have a fair field arid no favours ? I have seen the Irish in almost every State in the Union, and I have noticed that with us it isn't the Irish Protestant or the Irish Catholic that succeeds ; it is the man with the best education and most industry — it isn't a question of belief at all. When I saw that I had to believe that the old theory I had been taught was faulty somehow." The man asked me what I attributed the difference to ? I told him land tenure : "In Ulster they had tenant-right and in the Cathode provinces of the West the tenants had had no rights that the landlords felt bound to respect." That's the whole of it, O'Eeilly.

Now, I went over to Ireland prejudiced against Mr. Parnell and his followers — not much, but just a little. If I had found the facts against him, I would have reported them without fear or favour. You need not thank me for writing letters that have pleased the Irish in America. I never thought of pleasing anybody, but just to tell honestly what I saw. I was utterly confounded at the proof I met at every step, and on every hand of the utter heartlessness of the great landed proprietors. " Look here : let me read you a note from my diary. I meant to put it into an article, but I have so much material that you cfen copy it if you like " :— The Irish in America can never be thoroughly understood until you have seen them at home. And they improve on acquaintance. They are truly a warm-hearted and generous people, at least every American will find them so ; although, possibly, their hereditary hatred of tie rule of England may conceal their good qualities from British travellers. Wherever I have gono. among priests or peasants agitators or tradespeople, I have found tlua the one word that opened every Irish heart and home was the name of America. I have received more invitations to visit Irish homes than I could accept in a year. The two traits that are not pleasant in the eyes of Americans in the character of the Irish in America are their clannishness and their entire willingness to make a rew. But one sees here that but for these traits the Irish race would have been crushed generations ago. It is not. political tyranny only that they have been obliged to endure, and the insulting domination of an alien creed, but the despotism of the lords of the soil — the most merciless, the most arbitrary, the most degrading system of irresponsible rule that existß in any country professing to be free. Every landlord

is a local Plantagenet, without the fear of the nobility before his eyes that softened the rigor of royal rule in pre-Cromwellian times ; for the landlord is the noble, and the Crown supports his exactions. If the Irish Catholics had not been quarrelsome and clannish — if they had not always been ready with a knock down blow and had not hung together, they would have been all knocked down or hanged separately.

This inherited trait gives to the leader of the Irish popular party, whoever for the time he may be, an influence over his followers to which we have no parallel in our American politics. His word is law. As long as he is recognised as the leader, no man in the same party presumes to oppose his policy. Mr. Parnel], for example was ag eagerly expected, and as anxiously expected as if he had been the commander of an army whose orders were to lead it to victory or death. Mr. Biggar spoke of him, in a public speech, as the " dictator of the Irish people." And so he is. There are men in his party quite as able as Mr. Parnell ; but as long as he leads the column they obey him, They could not do otherwise. For in many a lowly cabin, with its floor slippery, its walls black, half of it a kitchen, and the other half a stable, I have heard barefooted women and haggard men speak of Mr. Parnell as the saver of the Irish people. Whenever his name is mentioned in a public speech — and I have heard it mentioned in a dozen speeches before different audiences — the people cheer with a heartiness that shows that Mr. Parnell is their idol today.