ENGLAND'S TREATMENT OF IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XV, Issue 28, 4 November 1887, Page 27

ENGLAND'S TREATMENT OF IRELAND.

fA paper read before the Irish National League at Wanganui by Mr. W. Bunting.) ( Continved.) A hundred years of such a code in active operation ought, according to all human calculations, to have succeeded in accomplishing its malefic purpose. But again God, as it by a miracle, preserved the faith, the virtue, the vitality abd power of the Irish race. Mr. A.M. Sullivan, writing f-ome 20 years ago, on what legislative independence accomplis-hcd for Ireland, says :— " If mankind needed at bo late a period of ihe world's age as the close of the 18ih century, any experiment to prove the substantial benefits '>f national freedom, the piogress of Ireland during this brief but bright and glorious era of indepi ndence would suffice to establish the fact for ever. Statistics invulnerable attest it as the day of Ireland's true, real, and visible prubpeiity. Manufacture, tiade, and commerce developed to a greater extent in ten years of national rule than they have developed in the aWty-seven years of subsequent 'union ' legislation. Ireland's freedom and prosperity did not mean Edgland's injury, nor England's pauf-e in the like onwaid march, The history of that period disposes of the fallacies used by advocates of Irish national exunction. It proves Ireland's right does not involve England's wrong. Never before were the two countries more free from jealousy, rivalry or hostility ; never before was discontent banished from Ireland, as never since bas disaffection been absent. Lns> of dominion, sheer covetousness of mastery, has in all ages been the source tind oiigin of the most wanton invasions and most wicked sui jutfUii'ns. Not even amongst Englishmen themselves does any wr ter hesitate now to cbarac ense as nefarious, tiea'iherous and abominable the scheme by *hich England invaded aud overthrew in 1800 the happily established legislative independence of Ireland." k From 1789 to 1795 was thu revelation of England's treason the final adj lbtment of Irish national rights, and the exasperaBting demeanour, language, and action if the Government in its avowed determination to conquer right by might. To drive the Irish into the ield, to goad them iuto action in the hour of England's choice, not their own, was the prub.'em. I s accomplishment whs arrived at by proceedings over which the historical writer or student th udder a in horror. Early in 1796 an Insurrection Act was passed, making the administration of an oath identical with, or similar to that of the United Irishmen punishable with death. An army of 50 000 men subsequently increased to 80,000 was let loose upon the c untry. On the atrocious system of '• free quarter"," irtesponsible poivenwas confeired on the military nfficers and lo;;al magistracy. The yeomanry ,*mainly composed of Orangemen, were quartered on the most Ca.th.olic districts, while the Irish Mi'uia regiments suspec ed of any sympathy with the p >pulation were shipped off to England in exchange for for< ign ttoops. We read in McGeu'a History of Ireland lhat the "military tribunals did not wait for the l He formalities of the civil durtF, s ildiers and civilians, yeomjn and townsmen, against whom thd informer poiuted his finger, were taken cut and summanly executed. Gnast.y form* hung u[i.n thickset gibbets, not only in the maiket places? of the c >imtr\ towns, and before the pub ie pris> n^, but on all the bridges of the metropolis. The horrid torture of pick' tii'g, and Hie • loo'i--,tained lash, were cnrmtqn'lv resorted to, to extoit nrcuebtions or confesßionp." Lord Holland in his " Memons of t/,e. Whig Paiiy," gives us a like picture of '• uuinuig cottages," " toi lured hacks," and "frequent execution*." "The fact is incontrovertible," be fays " hat the people of Ireland were driven t-> resistance, (which \ robably they meditated before) I y Va.? free -quarters and exce sea ot the boldi.-ry, whLb were *uch as are not peimittel in civilised warfare evci in an enemy's country. D . Dicks in, Lord Bishop of Down, assured me that he had seen families returning

peaceably from Mass, assailed without provocation by drunken troopi and yeomanry, and their wires aod daughters exposed to every specie* of indignity, brutality, and outrage, from which neither his (tha Bishop'd) remonstrances, nor those of other Protestant gentlemen, could rescue them." No wonder the gallant and humane Sir John Moore, appalled at the infamies of that lustful and brutal soldiery, and unable to repress his sympathies with the hapless Irish peasantry, should have exclaimed :: — •' If I mere an Irishman T would be a rebel." It is a notable fact tbat the insurrection of '98, was the first rebellion on the part of the Irish people for hundreds of years. The revolt of the Puritan colonists iv 1641, and that of their descendants, the Protestant rebels of 1690, were not Irish movements in any sense of the phrase. It was only after 1605, that the English Government could ty any code of moral obligations whatever be held entitled to the obedience of the Irish people, whose struggles previous to tbat date were, lawful efforts in defence of their native and legitimate rulers against the English invaders. And never subsequently to 1608 up to 1798 did the Irish people revolt against the new sovereignty. On the contrary in 1641 they fought for the king and lost heavily by theirloyalty. 1nJ1690 once more they fought for the king and again paid a terrible penalty for their fidelity to the sovereign. In plain truth, the Irish are, of all peoples, the most disposed to respect constituted authority where it is entitled to respect, and the mottrsady to repay even the sharte^t measure of justice on the part of the sovereign by generous, faithful, enduring, and self- sacrificing loyalty. They are a law-abidiag people, or, rather, a justice-loving people >, for their contempt for law becomes extreme when it is made the antithesis of justice. Nothing but terrible provocation could have driven such a people into rebellion. Refuting Fronde's falsification of the history of the 1641 rebellion — the period of the so-called " massacre of Protestants " — Mr. John Vlitchel, himself an Irish Protestant, reviewing the conduct of the Irish engaged in that war, writes in very forcible language as follows :—": — " I am bound to maintain," he says, " after all th<i examination I have been able to give to the ' ghastly story,' that the Irish insurrection of 1641 was notable amongst insurrections for its mildness and humanity, and that if the Irish were not the most gentle, patient, and good-naiured people in the whole world their island would long since have been a smoking wilderness of cinders soaked in blood." The heroic men of Wexford, and the United Irishmen were driven into the field to defend their homes and altars against brutal military violence. They were men who honestly desired and endeavoured, while it was permitted to them to do so, by lawful and constitutional means to sare and serve their country, but who, by an infamous conspiracy of the Government, were deliberately forced upon resistance as a patriot's duty, and who at the last sealed with their blood their devotion to Ireland. In 1846 and '47— the famine years — was witnessed a monstrous proceeding, while the people lay perishing, the land lay wasted, wherever seed was put in the ground, the hunger-maddened victims rooted it out and ate it raw. No crops were raised, and, of course, no rents were paid In any other land the first duty of the State would be to remit, or compound with the landowners for any claims advanced for the rents of these famine years. But, alas I in cruelties of oppression endured, Ireland is like no other country in the world. With the permission of the Government, the landowners, in 1849, commenced to demand what they called " arrears of rent " for the past three years, and failing payment " notices to quit " by the thousand carried the sentence of expulsion through the homesteads of the doomed people. The ring of the crowbar, the crash of ihe falling rooftree, the shriek of the evicted flung on the roadside to die,resounded all over tha island. Thousands of families,panic-stricken,did not wait for receipt of the dreaded mandate at their door, with breaking hearts they quenched the health and bade eternal farewell to the scenes of home, fiying in crowds to the land of liberty in tin west The streams of fugitives swelled to dimensions that staitled Christendom, but the Eng ish Pre-i8 burst into stioutu of joy aad triumph, that now at last this turbulent, disaffected, untameuble, race would be cleared out. "In a short time," said the London Times, ■' a Catholic Celt will be asiaiein lieland as z ted Indian on the shores of Manhattan." Their own counti> men, their kiLdred, their pastors and prelates could not witoe^s unmoved this spectacle unexample i in hibtory, the flight en masse of a populatio i from their own beautiful land, not as adventurous emigrants, but as heart- crushed victim* of expulsion. Some voices were accordingly raised to deplore this calamity, to appeal to England, to warn her that evil would come of it, but England laugbed scjrnfully at the warning The English press went further ; thejp called the sorrowing cavalcade wending their way to the emigrant hh\p,a race of assassins, creatures of superstition, lazy, ignorant and brutified. Far in the progress of tbiß exodus tb© London Saturday Review answered in the following language to a very natural expies-ion uc sympathy and grief wrung from an Irish prelate witnessing the destiucuou of his people :—": — " The Lion of St. Jtilath'B surveys with an. envious eyt|the Irish exodus, and sighs over the departing "demons of assassination and murder. So complete is that rusfi of departing maurauders rvhose lives were profitably occupied in shooting Protestants from behind a hedge, that silence reigns over the vast solitude of Ireland." P.ued rmgat bu fille i wich extracts of a like nature ]r m ih: PrebS of Kugland ; many still more co.irse and biuinl. Tii- i„• may, probably, be some Englishmen who now wish such laiiiruijre had not been used ; tbat such blistering libels h>d not U-en rained on a depaiting people to nouiish in their beans the terrible vow <.f vengeKDco with which they landed <>v Ameiican shor >. But then, in i lint Lour, when it seemed sufe to be brutal and mer^iiet-s, the gni.f-stnc>en. thrust-out people, '■ f uud i v; a generous friend, a i it\ iug foe." Andso they went into banishment iv thousands and tt'Ub ot tnousauds, with hand^ uplifted to the just G-jd who saw all thi-, and they cried aloud " iiovv long, oh Lord ? how long ? "

Dm int.' tho ceniunes of carnage, persecutions and plunder to wh'i'li I hare but Lriefly referred, tbt^e w<re sonte bright (lavs for Ireland, and especiilly the day of Ulackwater, when tho glouou> Hugh O'N.;i 11 (called in English patents Karl of T>rone), defeated the splendid army of Queen Elizabeth's picked troope. •• It

is one of the ehiwii g points in our nis'ory, gleaming through the general darkiws, on wLo^e brigh'ues^ Irish eyes love to dwell." '• Fortunately," say* an Iri-b authur, ' for the fame of Hugh O'Neill, and for ihn Irish nat.on in whose history he played so memorable a part, the life of that illustrious mau has been written in our generation by a biograp. er woitny of the iheme. Amongst the ma3ses of Irishmen, comparatively little would be known of that wondrous careei had its history not been popularised by John Mitchel's " Life of Hugh O'Neill." The .lust of centuries had been allowed to cover the noble picture drawn from life by the master-hand of Don Phillip O'Sullivan Beare, a writer but for whom we should now be without any contemporaneous record of the most eventful period of AngloIrish history, save the unjust and distorted versions of bitterly partisan English officials. Don Phillip's history, however, was practically inaccessible to the masses of Irishmen, and to Mr. Mitchel i almost entirely owing the place O'Neill now holds— his rightful prominence — in popular estimation."

"At last," says Mitchell, " the time had come, and Dun»annon with stern joy beheld unfurled the royal standard of O'Neill, displaying, as it floated proudly on the breeze, that terrible Red, Right Hand upon its snow-white folds, waving defiance to the Saxon Queen, dawning like a new aurora upon the awakened children of Heremon." "With a strong body of horse and foot O'Neill suddenly appeared upon the Blackwater, stormed Portmore, and drove away thegarrUou { as carefully,' says an historian, ' as he would have driven poison from his heart,' then demolished the fortress, buraed down the Dridge, and advanced into O'Reilly's country, everywhere driving the English and their adherents before him to the south (but without waaton bloodshed, slaying no man, save in battle ; for cruelty is nowhere charged to O'NeiJl), and finally with Macguireand Macmahon he lad close seige to Monaghan, which was still held for tne Queen of England."

Over several of the subsequent brilliant engagements in 1596-7 I must pass, unnoticed, to reach the most imp >rUnt event in the career of O'Neill— the great battle ot Beal-an atha-buie, or the '• Yellow Ford." To Mr. Mitchel, wh.)Be vivi.i naintive I have so far been quoting, we are indebted for the following stirring; description of O'JSeill's greatest battle, ever memorable Beal-an atluu-buie.

(To be concluded in our next?)