The Story of Ireland

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 50, 28 December 1922, Page 7

The Story of Ireland

(By A. M. Sullivan.)

LXXXVII. —How Some Irishmen Took to “The Politics of Despair.” How England’s Revolutionary Teachings “Came Home to Roost.” How General John O’Neill Gave Colonel, Booker a Touch of Fontenoy at Ridgeway.

All may deplore, but none can wonder, that under circumstances such as those, a considerable section of the Irish people should have lent a ready ear to “the politics of despair.”

In vain the hero’s heart had bled, The sage’s voice had warned in. vain.

In the face of all the lessons of history they would conspire anew, and dream once more of grappling England on the battlefield!

They were in the mood to hearken to any proposal, no matter how wild; to dare any risk, no matter how great ; to follow' any man, no matter whom he might be, promising to lead them to vengeance. Such a proposal presented itself in the shape of a conspiracy, an oath-bound secret society, designated the “Fenian Brotherhood,” which made its appearance about this time. The project was strenuously reprehended by every one of the “Forty-eight” leaders with scarcely an exception, and by the Catholic clergy universally ; in other Avoids, by every 'patriotic influence in Ireland not reft of reason by despair. The first leaders of the conspiracy were not men well recommended to Irish confidence, and in the venomous manner in which they assailed all who endeavored to dissuade the people from their plot, they showed that they had not only copied the forms, but imbibed the spirit of the continental secret societies. But the maddened people w r ere ready to follow and worship any leader whose project gave a voice to the terrible passions surging in their breasts. They were ready to believe in him in the face of all warning, and at his bidding to distrust and denounce friends and. guides whom, ordinarily, they would have followed to the death.

In simple truth the fatuous conduct of England had so prepared the soil and sown the seed, that the conspirator had but to step in and reap the crop. In 1843 she had answered to the people that their case would not be listened to. To the peaceful and amicable desire of Ireland to reason the questions at issue, England answered in the well-remembered words of the Times : “Repeal must not be argued with”—“lf the Union were gall it must be maintained. In other words, England, unable to rely on the weight of any other argument, flung the sword into the scale, and cried out: “Vae Yictisl” In the same year she showed the Irish people that loyalty to the throne, respect for the laws, and reliance exclusively on moral force, did not avail to save them from violence. When O’Connell was dragged to gaol as a conspirator a man notoriously the most loyal, peaceable, and law-respecting in the land — people unhappily seemed to conclude that they might as well be real conspirators, for any distinction England would draw between Irishmen pleading the just cause of their countrv.

But there was yet a further reach of infatuation, and apparently England was resolved to leave no incitement unused in driving the Irish upon the policy of violenceAt the very time when the agents of the secret society of hate and hostility implacable.

were preaching to the Irish people the doctrines of revolution, the English press resounded with like teachings. The sovereign and her Ministers proclaimed them; parliament re-echoed them England with unanimous voice shouted them aloud. The right, nay, the duty of a people considering themselves, or fancying themselves, oppressed, to conspire and revolt against their —even native and legitimate rulers day by day thundered forth by the English journals. Yet more than this. The most blistering taunts AAere flung against peoples who, fancying themselves oppressed, hoped to be righted by any means save by conspiracy, revolt, war, bloodshed, eternal resistance and hostility. “Let all such peoples know,” wrote the Times, “that liberty is a thing to be fought out with knives and swords and hatchets.”

To be sure these general propositions were formulated for the express use of the Italians at the time. So utterly had England’s anxiety to overthrow the Papacy blinded her, that she never once recollected that those incitements were being hearkened to by a hot-blooded and -passionate people like the Irish. At the worst, however, she judged the Irish to be too completely cowed to dream of applying them to their own case. At the very moment when William Smith O’Brien was freely sacrificing or perilling his popularity in the endeavor to keep his countrymen from the revolutionary secret society, the Times— blind, stoneblind, to the state of the factsblinded by intense national prejudiceassailed him truculently, as an antiquated traitor who could not get one man — even one man in all Ireland to share his “crazy dream” of national autonomy.

Alas! So much for England’s ability to understand the Irish people! So much for her ignorance of a country which she insists on ruling!

Up to 1864 the Fenian enterprisethe absurd idea of challenging England (or rather accepting her challenge) to a strenuously resisted by the Catholic clergy and other patriotic influences, made comparatively little headway in Ireland. In America, almost from the outset it secured large support. For England had filled the western continent with an Irish population burning for vengeance upon the power that had hunted them from their own land. On the termination of the great civil war of 1861-1864, a vast army of Irish soldiers, trained, disciplined ,an dexperienced — valor proven o nmany a wellfought field, and each man willing to cross the globe a hundred times for “a blow at England”—were disengaged from service.

Suddenly the Irish revolutionary enterprise assumed in America a magnitude that startled and overwhelmed its originators. It was no longer the desperate following of an autocratic chief-conspirator, blindly bowing to his nod. It grew into the dimensions of a great national confederation with an army and a treasury at its disposal. The expansion in America was not without a corresponding effect in Ireland; but it was after all nothing proportionate. There was up to the last a fatuous amount of delusion maintained by the “Head Centre” on this side of the Atlantic, James Stephens, a man of marvellous subtlety and wondrous powers of plausible imposition; crafty, cunning, and quite unscrupulous as to the employment of means to an end. However, the army ready to hand in America, if not utilised at once, would soon be melted away and gone, like the snows of past winters. So in the middle of 1865 it was resolved to take the field in the approaching autumn.

It is hard to contemplate this decision or declaration, without deeming it either insincere or wicked on the part of the leader or leaders, who at the moment knew the real condition of ■ affairs in Ireland. That the enrolled members, howsoever few, would respond when called upon, was certain at any time; for ! the Irish are not cowards; the men who joined this desperate • enterprise were sure to prove themselves courageous, if not either prudent or' wise.But the pretence of the revolutionary chief, that there was a force able to afford the merest chance of success, was too utterly false not to be plainly criminal.

(To be continued.)