The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 1898. THE '98 CENTENARY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 51, Issue 51, 22 April 1898, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 1898. THE '98 CENTENARY.

f MONTH hence the Irish nation will reach another mile-post on her road — the centenary of the insurrection of 1798. That brief but titanic- peasant- war is not a landmark merely in the history of the Irish race. It is a turningpoint. For a brief period — in 1795 — Viceroy Lord Fitzwilliam had set the current of Irish political l.fe running in a more hopeful channel than it had known since the days of Strongbow. Then Pitt decreed a rebellion. It was with him a means towards effecting the pet policy of his later years — the abolition of the Irish Parliament. The insurrection was produced to order. Free quarters, martial law, and military severities soon transformed peaceable peasants into desperate rebels. The guiding mind was Pitt's. But Irishmen must ever remember with grief and shame that his chief instruments in goading the people to insurrection were men of their own land — Irish troops (mainly the Orange yeomanry), and a recreant Irish Parliament that had fallen from the glories of the Volunteer days into a senile decrepitude. It survived the insurrection it had been instrumental in creating only to pass through venality and corruption into a dishonoured extinction.

The insurrection thus forced on altered the whole subsequent course of Irish politics. According to Lecky, it set a mark upon Irish life and character that endures to the present hour. The generation that witnessed the struggle has passed away. We of to-day can survey it calmly, in the mellowed light of its faint after-glow, over the long'perspective of a hundred years. It knit together Irishmen of difff rent creeds almost as in the golden days of the Volunteers. Its centenary celebration brings them together now again in Ireland, America, and Australia. It did so last week in Dunedin. The celebration knows no creed-line. It appeals to the heart of the " sea-divided Gael "in every land. In the North, the insurrectionary movement was carried on chiefly by Presbyterians. Jacksox and Arthur O'Coxxor were both clergymen of the Established Church, and Lecky tells us that at least rive-sixths of the United Irish leaders were Protestants. In their Mnwiir, Emuktt, O'Connor, and McNevin testify that the Northern Catholics held aloof from the organisation till drawn into it for protection against the long-drawn fury of the Orange lodires in 171)5175)7. When the Catholic populations of Wicklow and AVexford were forced into insurrection by the red stress of free quarters and martial law, their chosen leaders were Protestants like Felix Holt and Bkaucilami' Bacjkxal Harvhy.

The true idea of the celebration is not as that of Bkl'tts over the slain body of (\ksau — a purposeful exhibition of open-mouthed wounds. It is not a mere exhuming of dead men's bones ; not a scolding-bout ; not a recriminationmatch ; not a mere revival of the memory of the wild play of unregulated passions in a period of paroxysm. Its true purpose and meaning are belter and lie deeper. We do not set in the forefront I>unljivin, or Carnew, or the Croppies' Grave any more than we do Wevford Bridge or Scullabogne. These are the Wailing-places of ' (J( JS — to weep over as Scot and Briton might weep over the gra\es of Cullodcn. We take '98 as a whole ; but we seek out and set into the foreground its brighter things. With feelings mellowed by time we can fiv our mental gaze, not upon the evil which was of the time and circumstance and therefore accidental, but upon the good which was in the national character, which shone forth amidst the uncongenial surroundings of a

rising, and which endured in spite of all things. For there is shine as Avell as shadow in '98. Even Pitt had his compensations. Irish Catholics and Protestants will place the good behaviour of the English regiments as a set-off against the brutality of the Irish yeomanry, the Hessians, and the Ancient Britons. The humanity of General Sir Ralph Abercromby and of Sir John Moore — the hero of Coiunua — and the manly protests of Grattan, will be remembered when the names of Clare and Carhampton and John Claudius Beresford are forgotten. Men such as these are the malignant growths of a diseased period — its tumours and cancers. They enter not at r,ll — or, at worst, but accidentally and beside our intention — into the centenary celebrations. They are no integral or necessary part of them. We do not erect monuments to the worms that feed upon the bodies of our beloved dead. We prefer to think of such things as little as we may.

Nor is the centenary a glorification of rebellion as such. The question of the wisdom or unwisdom of the insurrection in the North may be a debateable point. That there was deep and grinding provocation, no one denies. Whether it passed the border-line of endurance which justified or compelled revolt, others can say. As regards what we conceive to be the true scope and purpose of the celebration, the question does not strictly apply. As for the South : the maddened people were driven out to the hills by burnings and slow torture, with, at first, no fixed idea beyond that of selling their lives as dearly as they could. General Sir John Moore, who had witnessed the treatment of the peasantry, exclaimed : "If I were an Irishman, I would be a rebel." The works of Protestant writers such as BAiuiiNCrTON, Lecky, Walpole, Goldwin Smith, etc., furnish an abundant reason why. But this much we may well celebrate : that during the insurrection period the Irish peasant displayed a patient endurance, a courage, a magnanimity and forbearance in the hour of triumph and of power, such as we read of with quickened pulse and deepened moral sense in the story of the Tyrolese peasants who fought under Andreas . Hofer, or of the Bretons who strove for crown and altar under La Rocieejaquelein in La Vendee. Add to this that dire defeat never crushed their hopes and aspirations — it but served to burn them in — to hall-mark them. These are the facts that deserve to be placed in the very forefront of the coining commemoration. They are written in letters of light across the history of the insurrection of 1798.

Martial law and free quarters — chiefly by yeomanry forces " demoralised by a long course of license " — were, according to Lecky, the immediate cause of the rebellion. The Irish peasantry endured the military horrors of the agonising period that preceded the outbreak with a patience whose breaking-strain was reached only with the last limits of human endurance. The capture of Enniscorthy and Arklow, the fierce right at the Three Bullet Gate and in the streets of New Koss, the dogged struggle on Vinegar Hill — and many other such in North and West — proved the magnificent bravery of the ill-led, ill-fed, ill- armed men who " rose in dark and evil days to right their nativcland." Considering the circumstances of the hour, they comported themsel\es with rare forbearance in their short-lived day of triumph. The Protestant Bishop of Kihala (Dr. Stock) — who lived on the spot — testifies that " not a drop of blood was shed by the Connaught rebels except in the field of battle.' 1 The fierce reprisals of Wexford Bridge and Scullabogue were — as Lecky and others point out — unauthorised acts of retaliation by a few, committed under a sense of savage wrong, against the express orders of their leaders. To the eternal credit of the insurgents, there is one crime — fearfully common among the soldiery — that even their iiercest enemy, MrsfiitAVK, has never laid to their charge — outrages upon women. The spectacle of Wexford insurgents escorting the supposed inventors of the pitch-cap to a place of safety, and their courtly treatment of Protestant ladies in that moment of wild elation — the capture of Wexford town — show how untutored peasants could give their enemies an example of high chivalry even amidst the fierce passions that stirred men's hearts in 1798. These are things we love to remember. They count among the nation's treasured heirlooms. And through and over all there is the national spirit and faitli and character which dire defeat

could not kill ; which still endure ; and which stamp the Irish Celt with an individuality as marked as that of his brother-Celt, the Scot, or of that other descendant of an undying race, the Hebrew. All this we commemorate. And there is in it something which appeals to wider sympathies than those of either creed or race or colour.