Seven Periods of Irish History

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Seven Periods of Irish History

Table of contents :
Front Cover
......Page 1
Short Title
......Page 2
Title Page
......Page 4
Printer's Imprint
......Page 5
Dedication
......Page 6
Acknowledgment
......Page 7
Contents
......Page 8
I. Seven Centuries and Seven Days
......Page 10
II. Devastations of Ireland in Medieval Times
......Page 25
III. "The Curse of Cromwell"
......Page 34
IV. The Faith of King William - The Ruin of Irish Trade and Industry - The Dark 18th Century
......Page 38
V. The Penal Laws
......Page 43
VI. A Nation Born, 1798 - A Nation Crushed, 1800
......Page 46
Plate: Eviction of an Irish Tenant
......Page 50
Plate: English Police Disperse a Gathering of Irish Patriots, 1871
......Page 51
VII. The Union of Shark and Prey
......Page 70
VIII. The Enslavement of the Irish Peasantry - Famine - Evictions
......Page 76
Plate: Black and Tan Destruction in the City of Cork
......Page 92
Plate: Sinn Fein Prisoners Being Led Away after the Easter Rebellion of 1916
......Page 93
IX. The Irish Nation Fights On
......Page 97
O'Donovan Rossa
......Page 100
Tom Clarke
......Page 101
Pearse's Oration
......Page 126
Bibliography
......Page 131
Publisher's Notice
......Page 134
Rear Cover
......Page 136

Citation preview

SEVEN PERIODS OF IRISH HISTORY

SEVEN PERIODS OF IRISH HISTORY EDITED BY

SHAEMAS O'SHEEL "The Irish Nation has been built upon corpse. and broken hearts."-

ARTHUR GRIFFITH.

FLANDERS HALL

:

Publishers

SCOTCH PLAINS, NEW JERSEY

COPYRIGHT,

1940

BY

SHAEMAS O'SHEEL

PRINTED IN U.S.'\'.

DEDICATED To the Memory of the Scot, George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron; the Englishmen, Percy Rysshe Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Gilbert Keith, Chesterton and Countless Thousands of other Britons Who Have Spoken and Labored for the Liberation of Ireland.

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENT GrateEul acknowledgment is made to the Eollowing publishers and authors Eor permission to reprint passages of the books designated: To E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. for passages Erom Seventy Years YOllng by the Countess of Fingell and Pamela Hinkson. To International Publishers Eor passages from Easter Weell by Brian O'Neill. To Sheed & Ward, Inc., for passages from Henry Graltlln by Roger McHugh. To The Vanguard Press for passages from Dell' Robert Emmet by R. W. Postgate, To Whittlesey House Eor passages from Dear Dllrll He" by Helen Landreth. To Seumas MacManus for passages from The Story of the lrisb Race, published by the Devin-Adair Company.

Contents I.

Seven Centuries and Seven Days

1

Devastations of Ireland in Medieval Times

16

III.

"The Curse of Cromwell"

25

IV.

The Faith of King William-The Ruin of Irish Trade and Industry-The Dark 18th Century

29

II.

v. The Penal Laws VI.

VII. VIII.

IX.

34

A Nation Born, 1798-A Nation Crushed, 1800

37

The Union of Shark and Prey

59

The Enslavement of the Irish PeasantryFamine-Evictions

65

The Irish Nation Fights On

84

Bibliography

118

VII

I. Seven Centuries and Seven Days ON EASTER Monday morning of 1916, in the city of Dublin, slender columns of young men in the gray green uniforms of the Irish Volunteers or the dark green slouch hats of the Citizens' Army marched through the streets with a purposeful air and came to attention at the foot of Nelson's Pillar. Three men stepped from among the soldiers and faced the citizens who began to gather. One was Padraic Pearse, young and intrepid, a poet, a dreamer and a doer. Beside him stood a man of the stout frame of a worker, with a resolute face: James Connolly, organizer and leader of the Irish proletariat. The third man, advanced in years, his face and body still thin with the marks of fifteen years of starvation and suffering in an English prison, was Tom Clarke, head of the secret organization, The Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, the principal mover of the rnornentous events of this day, which were the consummation of a lifetime of indomitable hope and grim determination. The poet Pearse stepped forward-stepped one might say at that moment into Immortality in the memories of men. He began reading to his soldierly companions and fellow citizens the Irish Declaration of Independence and Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. "Irishmen and Irishwomen. In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom. 1

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"Having organized and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organizations, the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory. "We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations. "The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the

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children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past. "Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people. "We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called." Less than a week later the force of about one thousand soldiers of the Irish Republic who held Dublin against the British Army estimated to number fifty thousand at the maximum, surrendered to save the city from further bombardment. Less than two weeks after that Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, and a dozen of the other patriot leaders had fallen before British firing squads and the quicklime was eating the flesh off their bones in a grave at Arbour Hill. The Irish Republic was crushed under the might of an invading army. Some four and a half years later after the struggle had been renewed and carried on by a dauntless people against a horde of veritable savages recruited

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from the jails and the slums of England, a treaty was signed by which the limited autonomy of a portion of Ireland was grudgingly acknowledged: but one fifth of that small nation, perhaps the richest corner of the land, was held tight in the chains of dependency upon a foreign government. Nineteen years have passed since then and Ireland is still partitioned, one fifth still forcibly included in an alien kingdom. And indeed the whole country, even that portion nominally independent, sees the shadow of threatened aggression rise once more across the Irish Sea. The curious thing about this chapter of modern history is that the power against which the Irish people were goaded into revolt, against which they had to carry on such a grim struggle-the power which even when the public opinion of the world forced it to make concessions to Ireland, nevertheless at that moment perpetrated the unprecedented crime of tearing this small country into two parts: a power which even today is threatening new aggression, by trying to draw Ireland into the sanguinary orbit of the second world war-this power is none other than the British government which from 1914 through 1918 was supposedly fighting for Democracy and the Rights of Small Nations, and today once more, according to its own protestations is fighting for Democracy, Small Nations, and "Civilization as we have known it." In view of the fact that the British government has already enlisted the support of the American government and the most powerful financial and industrial groups in America-"by all means short of war"-and is daily bidding for the last full measure of American assistance, it may be useful briefly to review the story of the British conquests and British rule in Ireland. The study may

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throw some useful light upon the nature of British devotion to democracy and the rights of small nations. On a certain day in 1927, the present writer was interviewing William T. Cosgrave, at that time President of the Council of the Irish Free State. His aide-de-camp, Colonel O'Reilly, approached and said: "Mr. President, Desmond Fitzgerald (then Minister of Defense) has to make a speech tonight and wants to know if you have any suggestions to make as to what he shall say." With scarcely a twinkle in his eye Mr. Cosgrave replied: "Tell Desmond to talk of any thing he pleases so long as he doesn't go back to the Dawn of History." We shall go back to the dawn of history for only a moment, but for a purpose. Long before the beginning of the Christian Era, Ireland was a country inhabited by a distinctive people with a political organization independent of any other country. Up to the latter part of the twelfth century, A. D., Ireland, having absorbed various Celtic and Norse invaders, retained its distinctive and independent character. At that time, however, it happened that an Englishman for the first and only time in history was Pope in Rome. Some historians still dispute the story of the Papal Bull which Pope Adrian is supposed to have given King Henry II authorizing him to add Ireland to his royal domain: but the circwnstances are suspicious. Adrian and Henry were friends: and there is the even more significant fact that Adrian's Bull, anticipating a long line of English arguments in justification of her Empire-building procedures, recited a tale of supposed disorder and anarchy in Ireland, which of course, the English considered it their moral duty to correct.

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Clearly it was the duty of the English to go over there and introduce Civilization. This typically English imperial idea ignored the fact that Ireland for some centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire had been the center of civilization and learning, and had practically saved Christianity from extinction, sending missionaries and teachers equipped not only with theology but with Latin and Greek learning, to all the countries of the Continent from Italy to Scandinavia. Whatever may be the truth about the Papal Bull it is certain that when one of the Irish sub-kings, having been run out of Ireland for stealing his neighbor's wife, appealed to Henry of England for assistance, the latter was very prompt to give certain of his troublesome barons permission and encouragement to go to Ireland and take that country over, if they could, in his royal name. Although Irish Civilization was eminent not only in the arts, but as well in justice and jurisprudence, the central authority of the High King had never become consolidated as it had by this time in France and England. Consequently the Earl of Pembroke, better known as Strongbow, and the motley horde of Norman, French and Welsh gangsters who landed in Ireland with the English King's permission to loot and conquer, were able to appropriate to themselves considerable choice territories. The history of Ireland for the next six hundred years is chiefly the history of successive invasions by successive crowds of land-grabbers and freebooters. The earlier Norman-French invaders quickly adopted the higher culture, the more gracious ways of living, the habits, the dress and the language of the Irish; and coming to

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consider themselves thoroughly Irish, they in turn fought bitterly against the new hordes of land-grabbers who descended like locusts on the land in the days of Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and Cromwell. The need of the English Crown to reward its servants and favorites was the real occasion for these later expropriations of land. The religious differences that arose from English acceptance of the Reformation while Ireland remained Catholic, provided the excuse. James Connolly has made the point that the struggles of those days were essentially struggles between earlier land-grabbers who wanted to hold what they had and later adventurers intent on securing what the English Crown so generously apportioned to them. This view perhaps does some injustice to the patriotism of the Geraldines and other older Anglo-Irish families, as well as to the great land-owning chieftains. But however one looks at it the people of Ireland were the victims. Time and again the soldiers of Elizabeth and James harried the provinces of Ireland with fire and sword until the land was almost bereft of living creatures and so denuded of grain and fruits that it was said a crow trying to fly across it would die of hunger. Cromwell's visitation was almost as terrible. His soldiers delighted to toss babies and catch them on their spears with the pleasant comment, "Nits will be lice." Three hundred women huddled around the High Cross at Wexford were slaughtered; garrisons that surrendered on Cromwell's promise of clemencywere put to the sword. The mistaken attempt of the Irish landed classes to restore James II to his royal prerogatives brought on the final conquest of Ireland by William of Orange.

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By this time, 1691, there was in many of the Irish cines a considerable artisan class with a very definite stake in free commerce with Europe and America. In the treaty of Limerick, King William pledged that England would not interfere with Irish manufactures and commerce. As the Irish say, the ink was hardly dry on the treaty before this King who has acquired a considerable reputation for rectitude, complacently yielded to the demands of the British commercial interests and sanctioned laws forbidding the manufacture of woolen cloth in Ireland, restricting and prohibiting commerce in Irish ships, and otherwise exemplifying a typical English concern for justice, fair play, and the rights of a smaller nation. Throughout the 18th century the masses of the Irish people were degraded by the conquerors and exploiters to an almost sub-human state. Religion was made the excuse. Under the infamous Penal Laws the Irish Catholic people were legally almost non-existent. Not only was the practice of their religion forbidden, but they were excluded from any franchise or voice in public affairs, disqualified from holding any political office, and strictly limited in the amount of property they could hold: moreover means were provided by which Protestants could easily seize the property of Catholics, and sons were even invited to rob their own fathers, by the simple process of joining the Protestant Church, whereupon they were entitled to strip their own parents of their property rights. However the masses of the people had little enough to worry about in respect to property rights. They were sweated and rack-rented tenants on the land they formerly owned. The Protestant and Presbyterian farmers

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who had been settled or "planted" in Ulster were little better off. They had been used by the English Crown and the English speculators to clear the "mere Irish" off the land, but once settled in their stolen acres they were expected also to toil endlessly for the benefit of the landlords. They did have a certain right of tenure, whereas the Catholic farmers were merely tenants-at-will. The poverty, the actual starvation which stalked the land is reflected in the bitter writings of Jonathan Swift, including the famous suggestion that the great surplus of children who had no chance to grow up to any decent living, should be used for food: it will be remembered that he gave detailed suggestions for various ways of cooking them. Before the century was far advanced, mass resistance began to take form among the tenant farmers, who organized various secret militant groups under such names as "The White Boys," "The Hearts of Oak," and "The Hearts of Steel." The members of these organizations carried on operations against landlords, particularly those who were already beginning to clear their land of farmers to make room for cattle. Beating, tarring and feathering, and even killing landlords and their agents, driving off cattle, burning barns and manor houses, were among the measures used by these men compelled to strike desperately against the appropriators of their land and the exploiters of their toil. Meanwhile in the cities of the north and along the eastern seaboard, the artisans and mechanics, mostly Protestant and Presbyterian, under the pressure of English commercial discrimination, were learning that they too were Irishmen. The American Revolution precipitated the fast-

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growing spirit of independence among all classes of the Irish population. There was an Irish Parliament consisting of landlords and opportunists, all Protestants of course, and elected only by Protestant voters. Even among these place-holders the demand arose for legislative and economic freedom for Ireland. In 1779, a body known as Irish Volunteers was formed which quickly grew to number nearly 100,000 armed and disciplined men, mostly Protestant and Presbyterian. Meeting at Dungannon, in 1782, the Volunteers called for the liberation of their Catholic fellow countrymen, demanded freedom of trade and commerce, and resolved that "the claim of any other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to make laws to bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional, illegal and a grievance." In May, 1782, the British Parliament formally and solemnly passed and the King signed, a measure renouncing the claim of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland. Thus the legal status of Ireland as an independent kingdom was admitted and recognized by the English government. During the last eighteen years Irish manufactures, trade and general bourgeoise prosperity made progress probably unequaled in the history of the world in those early years of the Industrial Revolution, but the manufacturers and mercantile interests of Britain had no intention of playing fair. The right of appointing Ministers had been left to the King, who in turn was under the thumb of the English ruling classes. The appointed Ministers steadily intrigued against the independence of Ireland; and by the most barefaced bribery and stuffing the Irish House of Lords with ready-made "noblemen," in the year 1800 they

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secured from the Irish Parliament consent to union with Great Britain. Meanwhile the miseries of the people combined with the ferment of Revolutionary ideas spreading from America and France, resulted in the birth of the Irish republican movement and the beginning of modern Irish Nationalism. Under the leadership of modern minded and courageous men, mostly Presbyterians, guided by the organizing genius of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the organization of United Irishmen spread throughout the country. The British government with the most brutal cynicism goaded the United Irishmen and the people into premature rebellion in 1798. British soldiers were quartered in the homes of the Irish people, resulting of course in insults, violence, and rapine which stung the Irish to retaliate. The soldiers and the Irish Yeomenry, consisting of more privileged classes of farmers and servants of the landlords, were let loose upon the people, and there ensued a reign of terror, including the burning of homesteads, rape and brutal beatings, framed-up trials and simple murder. Lord Abercromby, in charge of the British troops in Ireland, gave up his command in abhorrence of the methods he was directed to use to drive the people to desperation. One invention of British "civilizers" at this time was the notorious pitchcap, a canvas cap which was filled with hot tar and then placed upon the head of any mere Irishman, which of course after the tar hardened could only be removed with the hair and the scalp coming with it. Another quaint civilizing device was the "walking gallows"-a soldier of such great stature that he could hang a man of ordinary height by pulling the rope, at the end of which the victim dangled, over his shoulder.

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The rebellion of 1798 was a genuine national uprising: the desperate struggle of an oppressed people to change their intolerable lot, and the deliberate effort of the most enlightened and liberal sections of the population to carry their nation forward out of Medievalism into the newly dawning era of bourgeois democracy. Irish patriots in every generation since then have based their cause upon the national demand for political independence and a republican form of government given in 1798. Though vast numbers of Irish had been emigrating to America since the middle of the 17th century, nevertheless during decades free from actual warfare excepting the struggle of 1798, the Irish population continued to increase, being in the early decades of the 19th century almost on a par with the population of England. A great popular leader arose in Daniel O'Connell, whose achievement of Catholic emancipation benefited, however, mostly the opportunist classes of the Catholic majority. Before O'Connell's death the economic illness of Ireland came to a head in the most ghastly tragedy of modern times. Ireland is in many parts a fertile and abundant land. The toil of the people produced bountiful crops of grain and fruits. These, however, did not belong to those who grew them. They belonged to the landlords and were grown only to be sold and to pay to the landlords the exorbitant rents which kept the actual tillers of the soil impoverished. The farmers and their families lived on potatoes. Several years in successon in the 1840's-particularly 1846, 1847, 1848 and 1849, the potatoes were blighted. The Irish farmers and their families were suddenly faced with the question of starving to death or reaching out their hands to take enough of the produce

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their hands had grown, to keep life in their bodies. Probably in similar circumstances the Russian landlords in Poland or the Turk overlords of Armenia would have given enough to save them from death: but not the British government of Queen Victoria nor the British absentee landlords. British bayonets guarded rich stores of grain while it was shipped out of the famine stricken land. The bayonets were hardly needed, since the Irish Bishops and Priests and the Irish political leaders, being landlords and their henchmen, told the people that it was better to starve than to commit the sin of "stealing" the landlords' fruits and grains. In the last four years of the 1840's nearly 2,000,000 men, women and children did starve to death in their fertile native land. And in those years and the early 1850's more than 2,000,000 Bed from the famine to America, to Australia, and to England. The London Times, organ of the chivalrous ideas of the British ruling class, exulted: "The Celt is going and going with a vengeance; soon a native Irishman will be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as a Red Indian on the shores of the Hudson." At this time the new Irish republican movement revived in the form of the Young Ireland Movement; its effort to revolt in '48 was abortive, but it served to keep the people from utter despair. In 1865 and 1867, the Fenian movement enlisted hundreds of thousands of Irishmen. It failed in its attempt at revolt by mismanagement and misfortune; but during the next two decades "The intensity of Fenianisrn," as Gladstone confessed, forced the British government to a slow series of reluctant reforms in the land laws. The Land League, a sort of specifically Agrarian form of Fenianism, began to make the exploita-

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tion of Irish farmers unprofitable to the absentee landlord. Gradually at a high price the toiling farmer was permitted to buy back the land once stolen from his ancestors. Meanwhile however, following the Famine, an almost deadly blow had been struck against the Irish farmer, by the transformation of great areas of the land into grazing ranches where cattle were fattened for the English market. The laborious business of taking the land back from the bullock and getting it into the hands of tillage farmers, has been the principal task of the semi-autonomous Irish government since 1921. The Famine had cut the population of Ireland in half, something that never happened even in lands under the bloody rule of the Sultan or the knout of the Czar. The Famine was in fact the most terrific visitation endured by any people since the conquests of Genghis Khan. And this was not in remote times-it was less than a century ago. People are still living who were born during those times. There are in America nearly 20,000,000 children and grandchildren of Irish men and women who Bed their native land in those dark days. We have surveyed Irish history at this length in order to make clear the one dominant fact, that the cause of Irish sufferings has been at all times the English connection. We need not blame the British government for the marauding and land-grabbing exploits of medieval knights in armor. But since the days of Elizabeth the organized power of the English (after 1707 say the British) government has been the scourge, the enslaver, and the exploiter of the Irish people. It is true that other conquerors and other imperialist powers have enslaved and exploited other peoples; but it

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is probably true that in no other case has the conquest been so ruthless and the exploitation been so heartless and destructive. And it is certainly true that none of the other conquerors, and none of the other imperialist powers, have gone about their deadly work to the accompaniment of such high and holy moral protestations as the English have always proclaimed to the world. The British goverrunent alone has had the sublime effrontery to fight one World War and to begin another World War ostensibly to protect small nations, to defend civilization and liberty, and to promote the cause of Democracy, while still holding one fifth of Ireland in the grip of its seven-centuried tyranny, while still threatening to undo the partial liberation of Ireland, and while still holding by force and exploiting to its own sole benefit the rich empire of India, the fertile valleys of Egypt and scores of other conquered territories large and small around the globe.

II. Devastations of Ireland in Medieval Times "As it very constantly happens, whenever any Englishman, by perfidy or craft, kills an Irishman, however noble, or however innocent, be he clergyman or layman ... nay. even if an Irish prelate were to be slain, there is no penalty or correction enforced against the person who may be guilty of such wicked murder, but rather the more eminent the person killed, and the higher the rank which he holds among his own people, so much the more is the murderer honoured and rewarded by the English, and not merely by the people at large, but also by the religious and bishops, of the English race, and above all, by those on whom devolves officially the duty of inflicting on such malefactors a just reward and equitable correction for their evil deeds."-From the Complaint of Donal O'Neill, King of Ulster and High King of Ireland, to Pope John XXII, in A. D.HIB. "As they went, they drove the whole country before them into the Ventrie, and by that means they preyed and took all the cattle in the country, to the number of 8000 kine, besides horses, garrons, sheep, and goats; and all such people as they met they did without mercy put to the sword; by these means the whole country having no cattle or kine left, they were driven to such extremities that for want of victuals they were either to die and perish for famine or die under the sword . . . By means of the continual persecuting of the rebels, who could have no breath nor rest to releave themselves, but were alwaies by one garrison or other hurt and pursued; and by reason 16

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the harvest was taken from them, their cattells in great number preied upon, and the whole countrie spoiled and preied; the poore people, who lived onlie upon their labors, and fed by their milch cowes, and were so distressed, that they would follow after the goods which were taken from them, and offer themselves, their wives, and children, rather to be slaine by the armie, than to suffer the famine wherewith they were now pinched."Hollinshed: Chronicles of Ireland. VI. 33 and 427. "Of all the wars waged by a civilized race on a barbarous (sic!) and despised race, these wars waged by the English on the Irish seem to have been the most hideous. No quarter was given by the invader to man, woman, or child. The butchering of women and children is repeatedly and brutally avowed. Nothing can be more horrible than the cool satisfaction with which English commanders report their massacres. Famine was deliberately added to the other horrors. What was called law was more cruel than war: it was death without the opportunity for defense with the hypocrisy of the forms of justice added."Goldwin Smith. "The war was literally a war of extermination. The slaughter of Irishmen was looked upon literally as the slaughter of wild beasts. Not only the men but even the women and children who fell into the hands of the English, were deliberately and systematically butchered. Bands of soldiers traversed great tracts of country, slaying every living thing they met. The sword was not found sufficiently expeditious, but another method proved more efficacious. Year after year, over a great part of Ireland, all means of human subsistence were destroyed, no quarter was given to prisoners who surrendered, and the whole

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population was skillfully and steadily starved to death ... Long before the war had terminated, Elizabeth was assured that she had little left to reign over but ashes and carcasses."-W. E. H. Lecky: A History of Eng/and in the Eighteenth Century. "Immediately on the accession of Elizabeth the fierce and bloody work began in Munster on invented rwnors of Geraldine plots, with the result that when her Deputy, Sir Henry Sydney, made a tour of inspection in 1567, he was able to report to her that 'such horrible and lamentable spectacles are there to behold as the burning of villages, the ruining of churches, the wasting of such as have been good towns and castles; yea, the view of the bones and the skulls of dead subjects who, partly by murder, partly by famine, have died in the fields, as in truth hardly any Christian with dry eyes could behold." The policy of extermination had been put in force there by burning of corn in fields and haggards, the slaughter or removal of people's cattle, the destruction of their homes, the slaying of themselves ... "In 1574 the Earl of Essex wrote home thus: 'In the end it may be put to her (the Queen's) choice whether she will suffer this people to inhabit here for their rent, or extirpate them and plant other people in it. The force which shall bring about the one shall do the other; and it may be done without any show that such a thing is meant.' Elizabeth did not long leave any doubt as to what her choice was. In 1577 Captain Cosby, an Englishman planted on confiscated land on the borders of Kildare, purported to prepare a banquet on a large scale on the Rath of Mullaghmast, to which he invited all the Irish nobility and gentry of a wide area round about, privately

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spreading a rumor that refusal to accept the invitation would be regarded as want of amity. Of more than 400 guests only one man escaped with his life. All the rest were massacred in cold blood. Many families were wholly wiped out ... "In 1579, after the suppression of the Geraldine League, Raleigh and Wingfield at the head of English soldiery captured 800 prisoners of war who had surrendered and laid down their arms, and had them all thrown off the rocks into Smerwick Harbor-a further exhibition of English chivalry and the policy of extirpation . . ."Laurence Ginnell: The Irish Republic. Why? "No spectacle was more frequent in the ditches of the towns, and especially in wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people, the Irish, dead, with their mouths all covered green by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend above ground."-Lord Mountjoy, quoted by FynesMoryson: Itinerary. "Henry VIII, like Henry II, was not concerned to give 'civilisation' to Ireland. He was concerned to take the land ... Claims were again revived to 'our rightful inheritance'; quibbles of law once more served for the King's 'title to the land'; there was another great day of deception in Dublin. Henry asked the title of King of Ireland instead of Lord, and offered to the chiefs in return full security for their lands. For months of subtle preparation his promises were explicit. All cause of offence was carefully taken away. Finally a parliament was summoned (1541) of lords carefully bribed and commons carefully packed-the very pattern, in fact, of that which was later called to vote the Union. And while they were by order voting the title, the king and council were making arrange-

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ments together to render void both sides of the bargain. First the wording of the title was so altered as to take away any value in the 'common consent' of parliament, since the king asserted his title to Ireland by inheritance and conquest, before and beyond all mandate of the popular will. And secondly it was arranged that Henry was under no obligation by negotiations or promises as to the land. For since, by the council's assurance to the king on the day the title was passed, there was no land occupied by any 'disobedient' people which was not really the king's property by ancient inheritance or by confiscation, Henry might do as he would with his own . . . "Every trace of Irish law and land tenure must finally be abolished so that the soil should lie at the king's will alone, but this was to be done at first by secret and politic measures, here a little and there a little, so that, as he said, the Irish lords should as yet conceive no suspicion that they were to be 'constrained to live under our law or put from all the lands by them now detained.' 'Politic practices,' said Henry, would serve till such time as the strength of the Irish should be diminished, their leaders taken from them, and division put among themselves so that they join not together. If there had been any truth or consideration for Ireland in the royal compact some hope of compromise and conciliation might have opened. But the whole scheme was rooted and grounded in falsehood, and Ireland had yet to learn how far sufferings by the quibbles and devices of law might exceed the disasters of open war. Chiefs could be ensnared one by one in misleading contracts, practically void. A false claimant could be put on a territory and supported by English soldiers in a civil war, till the actual chief was exiled or

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yielded the land to the king's ownership. No chief, true or false, had power to give away the people's land, and the king was face to face with an indignant people, who refused to admit an illegal bargain. Then came a march of soldiers over the district, hanging, burning, shooting the 'rebels,' casting the peasants out on the hillsides. There was also the way of 'conquest.' The whole of the inhabitants were to be exiled, and the countries laid vacant and waste for English peopling: the sovereign's rule would be immediate and peremptory over those whom he had thus planted by his sole will, and Ireland would be kept subject in a way unknown in England; then 'the king might say Ireland was clearly won, and after that he would be put to little cost and receive great profits, and men and money at pleasure' ... Henceforth it became a fixed policy to 'exterminate and exile the country people of the Irishry' ... "These laws and confiscations gave to the new sovereigns of the Irish the particular advantage that if their subjects should resist the taking of the land, they were legally 'rebels' and thus outside the laws of war. It was this new fiction of law that gave the Tudor wars their unsurpassed horror. Thus began what Bacon called 'the wild chase on the wild Irishmen.' The forfeiture of land of the tribe for the crime of a chief was inconceivable in Irish law; the claim of the commonalty to unalterable possession of their soil was deeply engraven in the hearts of the people, who stood together to hold their land, believing justice and law to be on their side, and the right of nearly two thousand years of ordered possession. At a prodigious price, at inconceivable cost of human woe, the purging of the soil from the Irish race was begun. Such

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mitigations as the horrors of war allow were forbidden to these 'rebels' by legal fiction. Torturers and hangmen went out with the soldiers. There was no protection for any soul; the old, the sick, infants, women, scholars; any one of them might be a landholder, or a carrier on of the tradition of the tribal owners, and was in any case a rebel appointed to death. No quarter was allowed, no faith kept, and no truce given. Chiefs were made to 'draw and carry,' to abase them before the tribes. Poets and historians were slaughtered and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man 'might know of his own grandfather,' and all Irishmen be confounded in the same ignorance and abasement, all glories gone, and all rights lost. The great object of the government was to destroy the whole tradition, wipe out the Gaelic memories, and begin a new English life ... "Henry VIII had found Ireland a land of Irish civilization and Law, with a people living by tribal tenure, and two races drawing together to form a new self-governing nation. A hundred years later, when Elizabeth and James I had completed his work, all the great leaders, Anglo-Irish and Irish, had disappeared, the people had been half exterminated, alien and hostile planters set in their place, tribal tenure obliterated, every trace of Irish law swept clean from the Irish statute-book, and an English form of state government effectively established."-Alice Stopford Green: Irish Nationality. "Drastic steps were taken to prevent the amalgamation of the races, to blight the bloom of Gaelic-Anglo-Norman civilization. The notorious Statute of Kilkenny (1367) was but one of a long series of legislative acts designed for this purpose. It begins thus: 'Many of the English of

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Ireland discarding the English tongue, manners, style of riding, laws and usages, lived and governed themselves according to the mode, fashion and language of the Irish enemies, and also made divers marriages between themselves and the Irish, whereby the said lands and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due to their lord the King of England, and the English laws, were put in subjection and decayed, and the Irish enemies exalted and raised up, contrary to reason.' So it declared any such alliance high treason. It declared war on fostering the Irish language, on Irish culture, on Irish music and its professors, on Irish law and its judges, on Irish games and pastimes, on the Irish clergy, on Irish manners and customs, on Irish trade and commerce . . . Every avenue of tyranny and of terror was explored to find means of arresting the irresistible tide of Gaelicism. If a wayfarer was seen either riding in the Irish fashion, or dressed in Gaelic costume, or not wearing 'a civil English cap,' it was 'advisable and lawful' to murder the offender. Even the sporting of a moustache after the Irish fashion (the fashion on the Continent then also) and not having a shaven upper lip like the English, was denounced by Act of Parliament (25 Henry VI, 1447) as deserving of death, and the delinquent's estate was to be forfeited to the Crown."-Seumas MacManus: The Story of the Irish Race. "In Ireland Protestantism was not given a chance to appeal to the people by any ethical, religious or political ideals. The licentious unpaid English soldiery who had to maintain themselves by plunder and rapine, were accompanied by incendiaries who left not a homestead, not a blade of corn, standing; these apostles were fol-

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lowed by ministers of the Gospel, with hangmen and escheators in their train. So, amidst an orgy of slaughters and executions, in which neither age nor sex, neither the infirm nor the strong were spared, and of burnings, the true teachings of the Prince of Peace were supposed to be inculcated ... The destruction of monasteries, churches and schools, became a passion. Even the possession of a manuscript on any subject whatever incurred the death penalty. Poets and historians were put to the sword, and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man 'might know his own grandfather' , .. "Henry's well-defined policies were religiously pursued by his successors, Edward and Mary. , , "Mary's political policy did not differ from that of her father . , . Catholic England, Protestant England-both were, to Ireland, as one in savage tyranny."-Seumas MacManus: The Story of the Irish 'R4&e.

III. "The Curse of Cromwell" "For the exploiter's rage, for the waster's madness, more land was constantly needed. Three provinces had been largely planted before 1620-one still remained. By a prodigious fraud James I, and after him Charles I in violation of his solemn promise, purposed to extirpate the Irish from Connaught. The maddened people were driven to arms in 1641. The London parliament, which had just opened the quarrel with the king which was to end in his beheading, seized their opportunity in Ireland. Instantly London City, and a House of Commons consisting mainly of Puritan adventurers, joined in speculations to buy up 'traitors' lands; openly sold in London at a hundred pounds for a thousand acres in Ulster or for six hundred in Munster, and so on in every province. It was a cheap bargain, the value of forfeited lands being calculated by Parliament later at two thousand five hundred pounds for a thousand acres. The more rebels the more forfeitures, and every device of law and fraud was used to fling the whole people into the war, either in fact or in name, and so destroy the claim of the whole of them to their lands . . . Parliament did its utmost to make the contest a war of extermination: it ended, in fact, in the death of little less than half the population. "The Commons' auction of Irishmen's lands in 1641, their conduct of a war of distinguished ferocity, these were the acts by which the Irish first knew government by an English Parliament. The memory of the black curse 25

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of Cromwell lives among the people. He remains in Ireland as the great exemplar of inhuman cruelties, standing amid these scenes of woe with praises to God for such manifest evidence of His inspiration. The speculators got their lands, outcast women and children lay on the wayside devoured by wolves and birds of prey. By order of parliament (1653) over 20,000 destitute men, women and children from twelve years were sold into the service of English planters in Virginia and the Carolinas. Slavedealers were let loose over the country, and the British merchants did good business."-Alice Stopford Green: Irish Nationality. "Of all cases of murderous cruelty that marked the career of the government force in Ireland, the most atrocious occurred at the surrender of Drogheda. Cromwell had besieged this town for some time, and was finally admitted on promise of quarter. The garrison consisted of the flower of the Irish army, and might have beaten him back, had they not been seduced by his solemn promise of mercy, which was observed till the whole had laid down their arms. Then the merciless wretch commanded his soldiers to begin the slaughter of the entire garrison, which slaughter continued for five days with every circumstance of brutal and sanguinary violence that the most cruel savages could conceive or perpetrate . . . "Three thousand men, women and children, of all ranks and ages, took refuge in the Cathedral of Cashel, hoping the Temple of the Living God would afford them a sanctuary from the butcheries that were laying the

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whole country desolate. The barbarian Ireton forced the gates of the church, and let loose his bloodhounds among them, who soon convinced them how vain was their reliance on the Temple or the altar of God. They were slaughtered without discrimination. Neither rank, dignity or character saved the nobleman, the bishop or the priest; nor decrepitude nor his hoary head, the venerable sage bending down into the grave; nor her charms, the virgin - nor its helplessness, the smiling infant. Butchery was the order of the day."-Matthew Carey: Vindiciae

Hibernicae. "His soldiers were a band of hungry murderers let loose on the country, robbing for their living in lieu of pay, murdering men, especially priests and monks, outraging women and girls whose food they had eaten, then murdering the women and children; tossing babies in the air and catching them on the points of their swords in the presence of their mothers, in pursuance of a hint given by Cromwell himself that 'nits will be lice.' They were answerable to no authority whatever."-Laurence Ginnell: The Irish Republic. Why? "Each of the assailants would take up a child and use it as a buckler of defence to keep him from being shot or brained. After they had killed all in the church they went into the vaults underneath, where all the choicest of women had hid themselves. One of these, a most handsome virgin, arrayed in costly and gorgeous apparel, knelt down to Wood, with tears and prayers begging for her life; and being stricken with a profound pity, he did take

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her under his arm for protection, and went with her out of the church with intention to put her over the works, to shift for herself, but a soldier, perceiving his intention, ran the sword through her, whereupon Mr. Wood, seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels, etc., and flung her down over the works.v-s-Arthur Wood, Historian of Oxford, relating the sack of Drogheda as recounted to him by his brother. "It has pleased God to bless our endeavors ... I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs:' -Oliver Cromwell, reporting on his devastation of Ireland and massacres of the Irish, to the British Parliament.

IV. The Faith of King William-The Ruin of Irish Trade and Industry -The Dark 18th Century "Up to the time of the English invasion the Irish fleets and commerce were more widely known and powerful than England's ... "At this period ships were built at more than seven Irish ports, now fallen into decay, and 'fleets of masts,' sung by the Bards, were owned by the O'Sullivans, Lynches, O'Driscolls, O'MaIleys, O'Briens, O'Flahertys, Maguires, and other Gaelic nobles and princes. As late as the 16th century, 20,000 foreign fishermen paid customs duties to the O'Sullivan Beara, prince of this ancient southern house, for fishing in the territorial waters of the O'Sullivans; and of Spanish boats alone over 300 paid similar dues to the O'Driscolls of Baltimore . . . "Irish ships in those days sailed the Mediterranean and all the known seas. Their traders penetrated even to Spanish America. For centuries an Aonach or Fair of Irish goods had been held annually at all the principal continental cities near the coast. Irish representatives were attached to the Merchant's Guilds in these cities. Irish silk (srol), fine leather and linen and serges (sayes) were included in the wardrobes of European sovereigns and courtiers. Irish weavers of fine richly-colored cloths were successful competitors of the Catalonian and Florentine." -Katherine Hughes: Ire/and. 29

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"When the war was over William confiscated a million and a half acres, and distributed them among the aristocratic plunderers who followed him as follows: "He gave Lord Bentinck 135,300 acres; Lord Albemarle 103,603; Lord Conningsby 59,677; Lord Romney 49,517; Lord Galway 36,142; Lord Athlone 26,840; Lord Rochford 49,512; Dr. Leslie 16,000; Mr. F. Keighley 12,000; Lord Mountjoy 12,000; Sir T. Prendergast 7,083; Colonel Hamilton 5,886 acres. "These are a few of the men whose descendants some presumably sane Irishmen imagine will be converted into 'nationalists' by preaching a 'union of classes.' "It must not be forgotten, also, if only as a proof of his religious sincerity, that King William bestowed 95,000 acres, plundered from the Irish people, upon his paramour, Elizabeth Villiers, Countess of Orkney. But the virtuous Irish Parliament interfered, took back the land, and distributed it amongst their immediate friends, the Irish Loyalist adventurers."-James Connolly: Labor in lrisb History. " 'Isle of the Woods,' the Milesians had called Ireland when they first landed from Spain. Now, with titles so dubious, the planters hurried to draw all the wealth possible from the land before they could be dislodged. The woods vanished almost overnight. 'In twenty years there will be hardly an oak left in Ireland,' one observer wrote in 1697. A thousand years before, the sound of the axe on his beloved oaks of Derry had been fearful to Columcille. When Ulster was settled with strangers, fifty thousand oaks and twice as many ash were cut down for the making of Londonderry, which was the name the new English gave to the town they built there. Whole

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hillsides were ravished of their woods, which were sold for as little as sixpence a tree. The forests went to make English ships, to build towns for the English, to fire ironworks. Hillsides which had been mantled in green were beautiful no longer, but ravaged and scarred."Helen Landreth: Dear Dark Head. "And yet, in spite of this success, the Anglo-Irish had made a bad bargain. Cut off from their fellow-countrymen, having renounced the right to have a country, the Protestant land-hunters were no more respected in England than in Ireland. The English parliament did with them what it chose. Their subjection tempted the commercial classes. To safeguard their own profits of commerce and industry English traders made statutes to annihilate Irish competition . . . They forbade carrying of cattle or dairy stuff to England, they forbade trade in soap or candles; in cloth, in glass, in linen save of the coarsest kind; the increase of corn was checked; it was proposed to stop Irish fisheries. The wool which they might not use at home must be exported to England alone. They might not build ships. From old time Ireland had traded across the Gaulish sea: her ports had seen the first discoverers of America. But now all her great harbors to the west with their rising American trade were closed: no merchant ship crossing the Atlantic was allowed to load at an Irish port or to unload. The abundance of harbors, once so full of commerce, were now, said Swift, 'of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon' . . . The planters' parliament looked on in barren helplessness. They had no nation behind them. They could lead no popular resistance. They had no call to public duty. And the English knew it well. Ministers heaped up hurnil-

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iations; they quartered on Irish revenues all the pensioners that could not safely be proposed to a free parliament in England-the mistresses of successive kings and their children, German relations of the Hanoverians, useful politicians covered by other names, a queen of Denmark banished for misconduct, a Sardinian ambassador under a false title, a trailing host of Englishmen-pensions steadily increasing from thirty thousand pounds to over eightynine thousand pounds. Some six hundred thousand pounds was at last yearly sent over to England for absentees, pensions, government annuities, and the like."-Alice Stopford Green: Irish Nationality. "In 1699 the manufacture of wool into cloth was wholly destroyed in Ireland by law. Acts of the British and Irish parliaments (the latter being wholly subject to the former) prohibited the export of woolen cloth from Ireland to any country whatsoever except to England and Wales. The exception was delusive, because duties amounting to a prohibition prevented the Irish cloth from entering England or Wales. Before that time Ireland had a good trade in woolen draperies with foreign countries, and undersold the English. Therefore the British Parliament addressed King William, urging him to suppress the traffic. The House of Lords used this language: 'Wherefore we most humbly beseech your most sacred Majesty, that your Majesty would be pleased, in the most public and effectual way that may be, to declare to all your subjects of Ireland, that the growth and increase of the woolen manufactures there hath long been, and will be ever, looked upon with great jealousy by all your subjects of this kingdom, and if not timely remedied, may

occasion very strict laws totaliy to prohibit it and suppress

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the same.' King William the Deliverer replied that he would do his utmost to ruin his Irish subjects-'He would do all that in him lay to discourage the woolen manufactures of Ireland: And he was as good as his word. Acts of Parliament were very shortly after passed, whose effect was that Irish wool had to be sent to England raw to be manufactured in Yorkshire: And there it goes in fleece, and thence a very little of it returns in broadcloth to this day. Add to this the Navigation Laws; and the absolute prohibition of all direct Irish trade with the Colonies-no Colonial produce being admitted into Ireland until it had first entered an English port and been unloaded there; and you will be at no loss to find out how the English became so rich a nation and the Irish so poor. "Of these laws the Dean of St. Patrick's wrote: 'The conveniency of ports and havens which nature hath bestowed so liberally upon this kingdom is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon: "-John Mitchell: Jail Journal.

V. The Penal Laws "EVERYBODY has heard of the terrible Penal Laws; but not everybodyknows what they were. "They took charge of every Catholic from his cradle, and attended him to his grave-Catholic children could only be educated by Protestant teachers at home; and it was highly penal to send them abroad for education. "Catholics were excluded from every profession, except the medical; and from all official stations without exception. "Catholics were forbidden to exercise trade or commerce in any corporate town. "Catholics were legally disqualified to hold leases of land for a longer tenure than thirty-one years; and also disqualified to inherit the lands of Protestant relatives. "A Catholic could not legally possess a horse of any greater value than five pounds; and any true Protestant meeting a Catholic with a horse of fifty or sixty pounds in value might lay down the legal price of five pounds, unhorse the idolator, mount in his place and ride away. "A Catholic child, turning Protestant, could sue his parents for maintenance; to be determined by the Protestant Court of Chancery. "A Catholic's oldest son, turning Protestant, reduced his father to a tenant-for-life, the reversion to the convert. "A Catholic priest could not celebrate mass, under severe penalties; but any priest who recanted was secured a stipend by law.

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35

"Here was a code for the promotion of true religion; from whence it may appear, that Catholics have not been the only persecutors in the world. Some persons may even go so far as to say that no Catholic government ever yet conceived in its heart so fell a system of oppression. However, it may be a circumstance in favor of the Protestant code (or it may not) that whereas Catholics have really persecuted for religion, enlightened Protestants only made a pretext of religion,-taking no thought what became of Catholic souls, if only they could get possession of Catholic lands and goods. Alas, we may remark, that Catholic governments, in their persecutions, always really desired the conversion of misbelievers (albeit their method was rough) -but in Ireland if the people had universally turned Protestant, it would have defeated the whole scheme. "Edmund Burke calls this Penal Code 'a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man' ...John Mitchell: JailJournal. "Throughout those dark days the hunted schoolmaster, with a price upon his head, was hidden from house to house. And in the summer time he gathered his little class, hungering and thirsting for knowledge, behind a hedge in a remote mountain glen - where, while in turn each tattered lad kept watch from the hilltop for the British soldiers, he fed to his eager pupils the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge.

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"Latin and Greek were taught to ragged hunted ones under shelter of the hedges-whence these teachers were known as 'hedge schoolmasters.' A knowledge of Latin was a frequent enough accomplishment among poor Irish mountaineers in the seventeenth century-and was spoken by many of them on special occasions. And it is authoritatively boasted that cows were bought and sold in Greek, in mountain market-places of Kerry."- Seumas MacManus: The Storyof the Irish Race.

VI. A Nation Born. 1798- A Nation Crushed. 1800 "IN 1765 the issue was clearly set. The English House of Commons which had passed the Stamp Act for the American Colonies argued that it had the right to tax Ireland without her consent and English lawyers laid down the absolute power of parliament to bind Ireland by its laws. In Ireland Lord Charlemont and some other peers declared that Ireland was a distinct kingdom, with its own legislature and executive under the king. "The English government dealt its counterstroke. The viceroy was ordered to reside in Dublin, and by making himself the sowce of all favors, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political influence in the English Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first national debt of nearly two millions created in less than thirty years.... "Meanwhile misery deepened. In 1778 thirty thousand Irishmen were seeking their living on the continent, besides the vast numbers flying to America. 'The wretches that remained had scarcely the appearance of human creatures.' English exports to Ireland sank by half-a-million, and England instead of receiving money had to send fifty thousand pounds for the payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washington was made commander-in-chief of the forces for the American war in 1775, and in 1778 France recognized American independence. The shores of Ireland lay open to attack: the country 37

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was drained of troops. Bands of volunteers were formed for its protection, Protestant troops led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled (1779). Ireland was no longer unarmed. What was even more important, she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parliament that had obscured the true desires of the country was silenced before the voice of the people. In the sense of a common duty, landlord and tenant, Protestant and Catholic, were joined; the spirit of tolerance and nationality that had been spreading through the country was openly manifested. "... The collapse of the English system was rapid; the government saw the failure of their army plans with the refusal of the Irish to give any more military grants; the failure of their gains from the Irish treasury in the near bankruptcy of the Irish state, with the burden of its upkeep thrown on England; the failure of the prodigious corruption and buying of the souls of men before the new spirit that swept through the island, the spirit of a nation. 'England has sown her laws in dragon's teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men; cried Hussey Burgh, a worthy Irish successor of Malone in the House of Commons. 'It is no longer the parliament of Ireland that is to be managed or attended to; wrote the lord-lieutenant. 'It is the whole of this country: Above all, the war with the colonies brought home to them Gratten's prophecy-'what you trample on in Europe will sting you in America: "The demands for the justice of free men, for free trade, free religion, a free nation, were carried by the popular passion into the parliaments of Dublin and London. In three years the Dublin parliament had freed Protestant dissenters from the Test Act and had repealed the

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greater part of the penal code; the English commercial code had fallen to the ground; the Habeas Corpus Act was won.... ". . . At the first stirring of the national movement in 1778 'artful politicians' in England had revived a scheme favorably viewed there-the abolition of an Irish parliament and the union of Ireland with England. 'Do not make a union with us, sir,' said Dr. Johnson to an Irishman in 1779; 'we should unite with you only to rob you.' The threat of the disappearance of Ireland as a country quickened anxiety to restore its old parliament. . . . "In presence of these dangers the Volunteers called a convention of their body to meet in the church of Dungannon on February 15, 1782-to their mind no unfit place for their holy work. " 'We know,' they said, 'our duty to our sovereign and our loyalty; we know our duty to ourselves and are resolved to be free.' As Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protestants, they rejoiced in the relaxation of penal laws and upheld the sacred rights of all to freedom of religion. A week later Grattan moved in the House of Commons an address to the king-that the people of this country are a free people; that the crown of Ireland is an imperial crown; and the kingdom of Ireland a distinct kingdom with a parliament of her own, the sole legislature thereof. The battle opened by Molyneux a hundred years before was won. The Act of 1719, by which the English parliament had justified its usurpation of powers, was repealed (1782). 'To set aside all doubts' another Act (1783) declared that the right of Ireland to be governed solely by

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the king and the parliament of Ireland was now established and ascertained, and should never again be questioned or questionable. "That day of a nation's exultation and thanksgiving was brief. The restored parliament entered into a gloomy inheritance-an authority which had been polluted and destroyed-an almost ruined country. The heritage of a tyranny prolonged through centuries was not to be got rid of rapidly.... "Since the days of Henry VIII the Irish parliament had been shaped and compacted to give to England complete control. The system in this country, wrote the viceroy, did not bear the smallest resemblance to representation. All bills had to go through the privy council, whose secret and overwhelming influence was backed by the privy council in England, the English law officers, and finally the English cabinet. Irish proposals were rejected not in parliament but in these secret councils. The king had a veto in Ireland, not in England. The English cabinet, changing with English parties, had the last word on every Irish bill. There was no Irish cabinet responsible to the Irish houses; no ministry resigned, whatever the majority by which it was defeated. Nominally elected by about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the Commons did not represent even these. A landlord's assembly, there was no Catholic in it, and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords were subdued to English interests: some hundred Englishmen, whose main property was in England but who commanded a number of votes for lands in Ireland, did constantly override the Irish landlords and drag them on in a policy far from serviceable to them. . . . The number of placemen and pensioners equalled nearly one-half of the whole efficient

E VICTION OF AN IRISH TENANT

ENGLISH POLICE DISPERSE ~ G~THERING OF IRISH PATRIOTS, 1871

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body: 'the price of a seat of parliament', men said, 'is as well ascertained as that of the cattle of the field: "All these dangers might with time and patience be overcome. An Irish body, on Irish soil, no matter what its constitution, could not remain aloof from the needs, and blind to the facts, of Ireland, like strangers in another land. The good-will of the people abounded; even the poorer farmers showed in a better dress, in cleanliness, in self-respect, how they had been stirred by the dream of freedom, the hope of a country. The connection with England, the dependence on the king, was fully accepted, and Ireland prepared to tax herself out of all proportion to her wealth for imperial purposes. The gentry were losing the fears that had possessed them for their properties, and a fair hope was opening for an Ireland tolerant, united, educated, and industrious. Volunteers, disciplined, sober, and law-abiding, had shown the orderly forces of the country. Parliament had awakened to the care of Ireland as well as the benefit of England. In a few years it opened the 'gates of opulence and knowledge: It abolished the cruelties of the penal laws, and prepared the union of all religions in a common citizenship. It showed admirable knowledge in the method of restoring prosperity to the country, awakening its industrial life, increasing tillage, and opening inland navigation. Time was needed to close the springs of corruption and to bring reform to the parliament itself. "But the very success of parliament woke fears in England, and alarm in the autocratic government of Ireland. Jealous of power, ministers set themselves to restore by corruption an absolute authority, and recover by bribery the prerogative that had been lost. ...

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"A system of absolute power, maintained by coercion, woke the deep passion of the country. Despair of the constitution made men turn to republicanism and agitation in arms. The violent repression of freedom was used at a time when the progress of the human mind had been prodigious, when on all sides men were drinking in the lessons of popular liberties from the republics of America and France. The system of rule inaugurated by Fitzgibbon could have only one end-the revolt of a maddened people.... Violent statesmen in the Castle, and officers of their troops, did not fear to express their sense that a rebellion would enable them to make an end of the discontented once for all, and of the Irish Constitution. The rising was, in fact, at last forced by the horrors which were openly encouraged by the government in 1796-7. 'Every crime, every cruelty, that could be committed by Cossacks or Clamucks has been transacted here,' said General Abercromby, sent in 1797 as commander-in-chief. He refused the barbarities of martial rule when, as he said, the government's orders might be carried over the whole kingdom by an orderly dragoon, or a writ executed without any difficulty, a few places in the mountains excepted; and demanded the maintenance of law. 'The abuses of all kinds I found here can scarcely be believed or enumerated: 'He must have lost his senses,' wrote Clare of the great soldier, and 'this Scotch beast', as he called him, was forced out of the country as Lord Fitzwilliam had been. Abercromby was succeeded by General Lake, who had already shown the ferocity of his temper in his command in Ulster, and in a month the rebellion broke out.

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"The horror of death layover Ireland; cruelty and terror raised to a frenzy; government by martial law; a huge army occupying the country. In that dark time the plan for the Union with England, secretly prepared in London, was announced to the Irish Parliament. "Amid the universal detestation and execration of a Union the government dared not risk an election, and proceeded to pack the parliament privately. By official means the Commons were purged of sixty-three opponents, and safe men put in, some Englishmen, some staffofficers, men without a foot of land in Ireland. There were, contrary to one of the new laws, seventy-two placeholders and pensioners in the House. Fifty-four peerages were given to buy consciences. The borough-holders were offered 1 ~ millions to console them for loss in sale of seats. There was a host of minor pensions. Threats and disgrace were used to others. Large sums were sent from London to bribe the Press, and corrupt the wavering with ready money."-Alice Stopford Green: Irish Nationality. "In Dublin, John Claudius Beresford, the head of the peculators, converted his riding school in Marlborough Street into a Bogging arena, into which were dragged day after day men suspected of being Defenders of United Irish; they were whipped with cat-o-nine tails until their bones often showed through their flesh. Torture, for the same end of forcing the victims to 'discover their conspiracy,' was applied in the Royal Exchange at Dublin. Lord Castlereagh in the popular belief had the chief responsibility for this, and his name is described as having in history 'the faint sickening smell of hot blood: He denied that the Royal Exchange tortures were with the connivance of the government. 'But the Exchange; an-

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swers the historian Madden, 'immediately adjoins the Castle, and from it the cries of the sufferers might have been heard in Lord Castlereagh's office, where his personal interposition, where the mere expression of his will, might have prevented the continuance of the torture.' "Lieutenant Hepenstal, of the Wicklow militia, in June, 1797, led a party into the house at Gardenstown of an old man named Carroll, promising pardon if all concealed arms were surrendered. Carroll surrendered three guns, and Hepenstal then shot him and his two sons, and burned the house, crops, barns, and all the property. The wife of one of the sons with her child was in the burning house and begged to be allowed to escape. Hepenstal agreed to spare her life; 'but if the bitch makes the least noise,' he told the soldiers, she was to share her husband's fate. He then loaded the three corpses on to a cart, drove to Moyvore, where he arrested three men, Michael Murray, Henry Smith, and John Smith, who he said were United Irishmen, and threw them into the cart, tying them to the corpses whose blood poured over them. When he reached the village green of Ballymore he took them out and shot them. In the case of Hyland, tried at Athy, he himself recounted in a witnessbox how he attempted to extract evidence from a prisoner by repeated pricking with bayonets. On this failing, he threw a rope around the prisoner's neck, swung the rope over his own shoulder-he was a man of gigantic height -pulled it, and so hanged the man on himself. 'Here lie the bones of Hepenstal'Judge, jury, gallows, rope and all,' was the epitaph written for him but never inscribed on his grave.

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45

"Equally repulsive pictures are drawn in the memoirs and the documents of the period. The Ancient Britons and the Newtown-Mount-Kennedy Cavalry, amusing themselves by driving their spurs into the upturned face of young Richard Neill, a prisoner whom they tormented till he burst his bonds and fought two dozen of them with an iron weight; for which crime he was bayoneted and hanged. Hunter Gowan, a Protestant landlord, riding into Gorey at the head of his yeomanry, with the finger of a dead peasant spiked on the tip of his sword, and using it later in a public house to stir the punch for the officers' mess. The invention of an especial form of 'wire cat; weighted with scraps of tin and lead, to cause the Reverend Peter O'Neil, a suspected priest, to 'shake the triangle' with his writhings, because the assembled yeomanry expected that sign of agony. Innumerable 'halfhangings'-a trick by which the prisoner was hanged till he was nearly insensible, let down and cross-examined, hanged again, and so forth until he said whatever they wished. Judkin Fitzgerald, high sheriff of Tiperary, Bogging a teacher of French, for having a scrap of innocuous French writing on his person, until he was nearly dead, and leaving his wounds undressed in the hope that he would die. "The mind will not tolerate a repetition of all the abominations that were committed; there is, however, one device that must be described. 'Pitchcapping' is said to have been the invention of Lord Kingsborough and to have been practiced first in the southeast corner of Ireland. However that may be, its practice quickly spread all over the country. Many of the United Irishmen, for reasons unknown, cut their hair short. This device earned

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them the name of 'croppies,' and marked them out for the brutality of the soldiers. When a 'croppy' was caught and brought to the guardhouse, a cap of coarse linen or strong brown paper was produced covered with boiling pitch and forced on his head. There it was held until the pitch so far cooled that it was impossible to remove it without pulling out all the hair; and the victim was turned loose. Of several of the subordinate leaders in the insurrection of 1798 it was recorded that their heads were still one huge sore from pitchcapping. "Legal remedy against such actions could rarely if ever be secured. The case of Orr was the first as it was the most infamous of the instances that showed how directly the government would assume responsibility for the terror. Orr was a United Irishman of Ferranshane, tried for felony in October, 1797. The jury that convicted him was drunk. The chief witness against him made an affidavit afterwards that he had lied. Four of the jury swore either that they were drunk or that threats had been used to force their verdict. The presiding judge personally intervened to secure a pardon. Nevertheless, Lord Camden refused a pardon and Orr was executed."R. W. Postgate: Dear Robert Emmet, "Whether in conflict with the French expeditionary force of Humbert, with the Presbyterians and Catholics of the United Irish Army under General Munro in the North, or with the insurgent forcesof Wicklow, Wexford, Kildare, and Dublin, the British army can scarcely be said to have at any time justified its reputation, let alone covered itself with glory. All the glory was, indeed, on the other side, as was also most of the humanity, and all of the zeal for human freedom. The people were

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47

wretchedly armed, totally undrilled, and compelled to act without any systematic plan of campaign, because of the sudden arrest and imprisonment of their leaders. Yet they fought and defeated the British troops on a score of battlefields, despite the fact that the latter were thoroughly disciplined, splendidly armed, and directed like a huge machine from one common centre. To suppress the insurrection in the counties of Wexford and Wicklow alone required all the efforts of 30,000 soldiers; had the plans of the United Irishmen for a concerted uprising all over the island on a given date not failed, the task of coping with the Republican forces would have been too great for the Government to achieve . . . "While the forces of republicanism and of despotism were thus contending for supremacy upon the land, the victory was in reality being decided for the latter by its superiority upon the sea. The successes of the British fleet alone made it possible to keep the shores of England free of invading enemies, and to enable Pitt, the English Prime Minister, to subsidise and maintain the armies of the allied despots of Europe in their conflict with the forces of freedom and progress throughout the Continent. In face of this undoubted fact, it is somewhat humiliating to be compelled to record that the overwhelming majority of those serving upon that fleet were Irishmen. But unlike those serving in the British army, the sailors and marines of the navy were there against their own will. During the coercive proceedings of the Brtish government in Ireland, in their attempt to compel the revolutionary movement to explode prematurely, the authorities suspended the Habeas Corpus Act (the guarantee of ordinary legal procedure) and instituted Martial Law and Free

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Quarters for the Military. Under the latter system the soldiery were forced as boarders upon the civilian population, each family being compelled to provide food and lodging for a certain number. For all attempts at resisting, or all protests arising out of the licentious conduct of the brutal soldiery, or all incautious expressions overheard by them during their unwelcome residence in the houses of the people, the authorities had one great sovereign remedy- viz., transportation on board the British fleet. Thousands of young men were seized all over the island and marched in chains to the various harbors, from thence taken on board the English men-of-war ships, and there compelled to fight for the government that had broken up their homes, ruined their lives, and desolated their country. Whenever any district was suspected of treasonable sympathies it was first put under Martial Law, then every promising young man was seized and thrown into prison on suspicion and without trial, and then those who were not executed or flogged to the point of death were marched on board the fleet. All over Ireland, but especially in Ulstera and Leinster during the closing years of the 18th and the opening of the 19th century, the newspapers and private letters of the times are full of records of such proceedings, telling of the vast numbers everywhere sent on board the fleet as a result of the wholesale dragooning of the people."James Connolly: Labour in Irish History. "In the present era of reform when unjust governments are falling in every quarter of Europe, when religious prosecution is compelled to abjure her tyranny over conscience; when the Rights of Man are ascertained in Theory and that Theory substantiated by Practice: when antiquity

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49

can no longer defend absurd and oppressive forms against the common sense and common interests of mankind; when all government is acknowledged to originate from the people, and to be so far only obligatory as it protects their rights and promotes their welfare; we think it our duty as Irishmen to come forward and state what we feel to be our heavy grievance, and what we know to be its effectual remedy. "We have no National Government; we are ruled by Englishmen and the servants of Englishmen, whose object is the interest of another country; whose instrument is corruption; whose strength is the weakness ot Ireland; and these men have the whole of the power and patronage of the country as means to seduce and subdue the honesty and the spirit of her representatives in the legislature. Such an extrinsic power, acting with uniform force in a direction too frequently opposite to the true line of our obvious interests, can be resisted with effect solely by unanimity, decision, and spirit in the people, qualities which may be exerted most legally, constitutionally, and efficaciously by that great measure essential to the prosperity and freedom of all Ireland-an equal representation of all the people in Parliament .. :'-From the Declaration of the Society of United Irishmen, 1791.

"The Act by which most of us hold our estates was an act of violence, an Act subverting the first principles of the commonlaw in England and Ireland ... "The whole power and property of the country has been conferred by successive monarchs of England upon an English colony, composed of three sects of English adventurers, who poured into this country at the termination of three successive rebellions. Confiscation is their

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common title, and from their first settlement they have been hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation . . . What, then, was the security of the English settlers for their physical existence at the Revolution? And what is the security of their descendants at this day? The powerful and commanding protection of Great Britain. If by any fatality it fails, you are at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island:'-"Black Jack" Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, Lord Chancellor of Ireland; during debates in the Irish Parliament. "It was the union of a shark with its prey."-Lord Byron, commenting on the Union of Ireland with Great Britain. "The tranquil country was rapidly converted into a place of tyranny, torture, outrage, with homesteads on fire, provisions destroyed, families ruined, and all the atrocities which licentious ruffians living at 'free quarters' could inflict upon human victims. Death, by strangulation or the bullet, was common; but it was a merciful fate compared with the fearful floggings (often a thousand lashes) which tore off skin and muscles. To extort confessions, the son was compelled to kneel under his father and the father under his son, whilst the blood fell hot on them from the lash. Half-hangings was one mode of torture. Hot pitch was poured into canvas caps and pressed on the head, not to be removed from the inflamed and blistered surface without tearing off hair or skin."R. Barry O'Brien: Two Centuries of Irish History. "My lords, I have seen in Ireland the most absurd, as well as the most disgusting tyranny, that any nation ever groaned under. I have been myself a witness of it in many

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51

instances . . . If such a tyranny be persevered in, the consequence must inevitably be the deepest and most universal discontent, and even hatred to the English name . . . I have seen the most wanton insults practiced upon men of all ranks and conditions. I have seen the most grievous oppressions exercised, in consequence of a presumption that the person who was the unfortunate object of such oppression was in hostility to the government; and yet that has been done in a part of the country as quiet and as free from disturbance as the city of London. Who states these things, my lords, should, I know, be prepared with proofs. I am prepared with them. Many of the circumstances I know of my own knowledge; others I have received from such channels as will not permit me to hesitate one moment in giving credit to them. "His lordship then observed that, from education and early habits, the curfew was always considered by Britons as the badge of slavery and oppression. It then was practiced in Ireland with brutal vigor. He had known an instance where a master of a house had in vain pleaded to be allowed the use of a candle to enable the mother to administer relief to her daughter struggling in convulsive fits. In former times, it had been the custom for Englishmen to hold the infamous proceedings of the inquisition in detestation. One of the greatest horrors with which it was attended was that the person, ignorant of the crime laid to his charge, or of his accuser, was torn from his family, immured in a prison, and in the most cruel uncertainty as to the period of his confinement, or the fate which awaited him. To this injustice, abhorred by Protestants in the practice of the inquisition, were the people

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of Ireland exposed. All confidence, all security were taken away. In alluding to the inquisition he had omitted to mention one of its characteristic features. If the supposed culprit refused to acknowledge the crime with which he was charged, he was put to the rack, to extort confession of whatever crime was alleged against him by the pressure of torture. The same proceedings had been introduced in Ireland. When a man was taken up on suspicion, he was put to the torture; nay, if he were merely accused of concealing the guilt of another. The rack, indeed, was not at hand; but the punishment of picqueting was in practice, which has been for some years abolished, as too inhuman even in the dragoon service. He had known a man, in order to extort confession of a supposed crime, or of that of some of his neighbors, picqueted until he actually fainted-picqueted a second time until he fainted again, and as soon as he came to himself, picqueted a third time until he once more fainted; and all upon mere suspicion! Nor was this the only species of torture. Men had been taken and hung up till they were half dead, and then threatened with a repetition of the cruel treatment unless they made confession of the imputed guilt. These were not particular acts of cruelty, exercised by men abusing the power committed to them, but they formed a part of our system. They were notorious, and no person could say who would be the next victim of this oppression and cruelty, which he saw others endure. This, however, was not all; their lordships, no doubt, would recollect the famous proclamation issued by a military commander in Ireland, requiring the people to give up their arms. It never was denied that this proclamation was illegal, though defended on some supposed necessity; but it was

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not surprising that some reluctance had been shown to comply with it by men who conceived the Constitution gave them a right to keep arms in their houses for their own defence; and they could not but feel indignation in being called upon to give up their right. In the execution of the order the greatest cruelties had been committed. If anyone was suspected to have concealed weapons of defence,his house, his furniture, and all his property was burnt; but this was not all. If it were supposed that any district had not surrendered all the arms which it contained, a party was sent out to collect the number at which it was rated; and, in the execution of this order, thirty houses were sometimes burnt down in a single night. Officers took it upon themselves to decide discretionally the number of arms; and upon their opinions these fatal consequences followed. Many such cases might be enurnerated; but, from prudential motives, he wished to draw a veil over more exaggerated facts which he could have stated, and which he was willing to attest before the Privy Council, or at their lordships' bar. These facts were well known in Ireland, but they could not be made public through the channel of the newspapers, for fear of that summary mode of punishment which had been practiced against the Northern Star, when a party of troops in open day, and in a town where the General's headquarters were, went and destroyed all the offices and property belonging to that paper. It was thus authenticated accounts were suppressed," -Speech of the Earl of Moira, before the British House of Lords

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"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court-Martial: I mean not to give you the trouble of bringing judicial proof, to convict me, legally, of having acted in hostility to the Government of His Britannic Majesty in Ireland. I admit the fact. From my earliest youth, I have regarded the connection between Great Britain and Ireland as the curse of the Irish nation; and felt convinced that, whilst it lasted, this country could never be free nor happy . . . "... Under the Bag of the French Republic I originally engaged with a view to save and liberate my own country. For the purpose I have encountered the chances of war amongst strangers. For that purpose I have repeatedly braved the terrors of the ocean, covered, as I knew it to be, with the triumphant Beets of that power which it was my glory and my duty to oppose. I have sacrificed all my views in life; I have courted poverty; I have left a beloved wife unprotected, and children whom I adored fatherless ... ". . . In a cause like this, success is everything. Success, in the eyes of the vulgar, fixes its merits; Washington succeeded, and Kosciusko failed ... I am aware of the fate that awaits me, and scorn equally the tone of cornplaint and that of supplication."-From Wolfe Tone's speech before the jury that condemned him, 1798. "The first mention of a Union resulted in a government defeat, and the year 1799 had to be spent in discerning the available means of persuasion. In most cases this was not difficult ... "Under the triumvirate of Cornwallis, the Viceroy, Castlereagh, his secretary, and Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, this business proceeded all through 1799. Of Castlereagh enough has been said in other places. He was very effi-

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cient; he cut his country's throat, as Byron said, before he cut his own; and he was eminently successful in both operations. One is tempted to dwell upon the spectacle of Cornwallis in the role of fairy godmother to the Irish Parliament. 'I am kept here to manage matters of a most disgusting nature to my feelings; he complained, remembering that he had once been a soldier. 'How I long to kick those whom my public duties oblige me to court!' Still, a man must live, and Cornwallis went on waving his golden wand over refractory spirits ... changing briefless barristers into Union journalists, eminent lawyers such as Yelverton into 'Union judges; commoners into lords, and lords into heavens knows what. Lord Ely, who had attacked the Union as a 'mad scheme' to which all Irishmen were opposed, suddenly became its ardent supporter. Not less curious was the startling metamorphosis of George Beresford, bon vivant and rake, into the Bishop of Kilmore. At the same time Foster, the Irish Speaker; James Fitzgerald, Prime Serjeant, and Sir John Parnell, Chancellor of the Exchequer, men who were set against the Union, disappeared from their official places as if by magic. "These methods were, of course, regrettable; but to the English ministry they were a recognized means of obtaining a majority in an Irish Parliament, or for that matter in an English Parliament . . . The situation is perhaps amusing, until one remembers that a nation was sold; after which recollection of the popular ballad which begins:

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How did they pass the Union? By perjury and fraudi By slaves who sold their land for gold As Judas sold his God." seems to hit the mark less crudely.r-e-Roger McHugh: Henry Grattan. "My Lords: Why the sentence of the law should not be passed upon me I have nothing to say. Why the sentence which in the public mind is usually attached to that of the law ought to be reversed, I have much to say. I stand here a conspirator-as one engaged in a conspiracy for the overthrow of the British government in Ireland; for the fact of which I am to suffer by the law, for the motives of which I am to answer before God. I am ready to do both. Were it only the fact of treason, were it that naked fact alone with which I stood charged, were I to suffer no other punishment than the death of the body-I would not obtrude upon your attention, but having received the sentence I would bow my neck in silence to the stroke. But, my lords, I well know that when a man enters into conspiracy, he has not only to combat against the difficulties of fortune, but to contend with the still more insurmountable obstacle of prejudice; and that if in the end fortune abandons him and delivers him bound into the hands of the law, his character is previously loaded with calumny and misrepresentation ... "I am charged with being an emissary of France, for the purpose of inciting insurrection in the country and then delivering it over to a foreign country. It is false. I did not wish to join this country with France. I did join-I did not create-the rebellion; not for France, but for liberty ...

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"I do not fear approaching the omnipotent Judge to answer for the conduct of my past life, and am I to stand appalled before a mere remnant of mortality? But, my lord, were it possible to collect all the blood that you have shed into a common reservoir-for great indeed it must be-your lordship might swim therein. What I have spoken was not intended for your lordships, whose situation I rather commiserate than envy. My expressions were for my countrymen. If there be a true Irishman present, let my words cheer him in the hour of affliction! "My lord, shall a dying man be denied the legal privilege of exculpating himself in the eyes of the community from a reproach therein on him during his trial, by charging him with ambition, and attempting to cast away for a paltry consideration the liberties of his country? Why then insult me, or rather, why insult justice, in demanding of me why sentence of death should not be pronounced against me? I know, my lords, that the form prescribes that you should put the question. The form also confers a right of answering. This, no doubt, may be dispensed with, and so might the whole ceremony of the trial, since sentence was already pronounced at the Castle before jury was impaneled. Your lordships are but the priests of the oracle, and I submit: but I insist on the whole of the forms. "My lord, you are impatient for the sacrifice. The blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which usually surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled through its channels, and in a little time it will go to heaven. Be patient. I have but a few more words to say,-my ministry is now ended. I am going to my cold and silent grave. I have burnt out my lamp of

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life. 1 have parted with everything that was dear to me in this life for my country's cause; I have abandoned another idol that I adored in my heart. My race is run, the grave opens to receive me, and 1 sink into its bosom. 1 am ready to die. I have not been allowed to vindicate my character. 1 have but one request to make at my departure from this world-it is the charity of its silence. Let there be no inscription on my tomb. Let no man write my epitaph. No man can write my epitaph, for as no man who knows my motives and character dares now to vindicate them, let no prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace until other times and other men can do justice to them. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then shall my character be vindicated, then may my epitaph be written. "I have done." -Last Speech of Robert Emmet

VII. The Union of Shark and Prey "In 1896 the Financial Relations Commission, appointed by the British Government, reported that the annual over-taxation of Ireland totaled two and three quarter million of pounds sterling (nearly $15,000,000). "The following table shows how the taxation of Ireland has been further increased:

Total Taxation

Taxation per head of Population

1896 8,034,384 pds. 1 pd 15s Id 1912 (Home Rule Bill introduced) 10,688,289 pds. 2 pds 8s 9d 1914 (before Anglo11,134,500 pds. 2 pds lOs 10d German War) 1915 12,389,500 pds. 2 pds 16s 8d 1916 17,457,000pds. 4pds 4s 0 ("This estimate issued by the British Government does not appear to include Post Office, etc., receipts ('Non-tax' Revenue). They are included in the previous figures. The real amount of increased taxation on the same basis would appear to be much higher. ) DEBT AND DEBT CHARGE

(First Year of Union, 1801)

Pounds National Debt of Ireland.. 28,238,000 National Debt of England .450,505,000 59

Per Head 5 p 7s 6d 42 P 18s 0

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"On the destruction of the Napoleonic power and the banishment of Napoleon to St. Helena, England, in violation of her pledges, suppressed the separate Irish Exchequer, and made Ireland jointly responsible for the 'National' Debt. Result: PerHeaJ Debt charged to Ireland and England, 1914 707,654,000 pds. . . 15p 12s 6d Decrease of debt per head to Englishmen.. 27 5 6 Increase to Irishmen . 10 5 6 Annual debt charge per head in Ireland, 4 8 1801 . Annual debt charge per head in England, 1801 . 1 13 9 Annual debt charge per head in Ireland and England, 1914 . 10 5 Decrease to Englishmen per head . 1 3 4 Increase to Irishmen per head . 5 9 POPULATION

Ireland 1801

184.5

1896

1911

5,395,456

8,295,026

4,542,061

4,383,608

Great Britain 10,500,957

19,484,352

34,765,000

40,831,396

POPULATION TO THE SQUARE MILE

Ireland (1801) England (1801) Ireland (1911) England (1911)

166 152 135 618

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"On the basis of the increase in Irish population from 1801 to 1845, the present population of Ireland should be 17,000,000. "The actual Joss of Ireland in population between 1845 and 1915 is 3,912,000. "The real loss of Ireland in population between 1845 and 1911 is 8,705,000.

"This real loss in population represents a capital loss in money of 2,176,000,000 pounds (Le., 250 pounds per head lost). "Since the Union, Ireland paid as rent to absentee landlords a sum estimated at 1,000,000,000 pounds. "This money was a dead loss to Ireland, being spent almost entirely out of the country. "Ireland Exceeds in Population the independent kingdoms and republics of Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Ecuador, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Montenegro, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Salvador, Serbia, Switzerland, and Uraguay. "Ireland exceeds in Area the independent kingdoms and states of Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Serbia, Montenegro, and Switzerland. "Ireland exceeds in Revenue the independent kingdoms and republics of Bolivia, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Ecuador, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Roumania, Salvador, Serbia, Switzerland, and Uraguay. "SINCE THE WAR the taxation of Ireland has been increasedby 6,322,000 pounds. "SINCE THE UNION, Ireland has been plundered by England to the following extent:

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Overtaxation from 1801 to 1896.. 300,000,000 pounds Overtaxation from 1896 to 1916. . 60,000,000 pounds 1,000,000,000 pounds Absentee Rents 1,360,000,000 pounds

"Add to this Capital Loss in Money due to loss of population (2,176,000,000), and we have a Total LoS! to Ireland of three thousand five hundred and thirty-six millions." -Statement of Irish FinancialRelations Committee. "Why need we repeat the tale of present wretchedness? Seven millions and a half of us are Presbyterians and Catholics, and our whole ecclesiastical funds go to the gorgeous support of the clergy of the remaining 800,000, who are Episcopalians. Where else on earth does a similar injury and dishonor exist? Nowhere: 'Twas confessed it existed nowhere ... "We are most dishonestly taxed for your debts; the fact was not denied-an ominous silence declared that not a halfpenny of that mighty mortgage would be taken off our shoulders. "You raised five millions a year from us, and you spend it on English commissioners, English dockyards, English museums, English ambitions, and English pleasures. With an enormous taxation, our public offices have been removed to London, and you threaten to remove our Courts of Justice, and our Lord Lieutenancy, the poor trappings of old nationhood. We have no arsenals, no public employment here; our literary, scientific, and charitable institutions, so bountifully endowed by a Native Legislature, you have forced away, till, out of that enormous

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surplus revenue raised here, not 10,000 pounds a year comes back for such purposes, while you have heaped hundred upon hundred thousand into the lap of every English institution. For National Education you dribble out fifty thousand pounds a year-not enough for our smallest province ... "And my Lord Eliot says our exports and imports have increased. We wish your Lordship would have separate accounts kept that we might know how much. But they have increased-ay, they have; and they are provisions. And our population has increased; and when we had onehalf the number of people to feed we sent out a tenth of the provisions we send away now. This is ruin, not prosperity. We had weavers, iron-workers, glass-makers, and fifty other flourishing trades. They sold their goods to Irishmen in exchange for beef and mutton, and bread, and bacon, and potatoes. The Irish provisions were not exported, they were eaten in Ireland. They are exported now-for Irish artisans, without work, must live on the refuse of the soil, and Irish peasants must eat lumpers or starve. Part of the exports go to buy rags and farming tools, which once went for clothes and all other goods to Irish operatives, and the rest goes to raise money to pay absentee rents and imperial taxes. Will you tax our absentees? Will you employ our artisans? Will you abate your taxes, or spend them among us? No: you refuse redressyou refuse inquiry. "And now, Englishmen, listen to us! Though you were to give us tomorrow the best tenures on earth-though you were to equalize Presbyterian, Catholic, Episcopalian, you were to give us the amplest representation in your Senate-though you were to restore our absentees, disencum-

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ber us of your debt, and redress everyone of our fiscal wrongs-and though, in addition to all this,you plundered the treasuries of the world to lay gold at our feet, and exhausted the resources of your genius to do us worship and honor-still we tell you-we tell you, in the names of liberty and country-we tell you, in the name of enthusiastic hearts, thoughtful souls, and fearless spirits-we tell you, by the past, the present and the future, we would spurn your gifts, if the conditions were that Ireland should remain a province. We tell you, and all whom it may concern, come what may, bribery or deceit, justice, policy, or war-we tell you, in the name of Ireland, that Ireland shall be a Nationl'l-e-Thornas Davis: Political Articles.

YIII. The Enslavement of the Irish Peasantry - Famine - Evictions "THESE (Irish tenant farmers) starve to pay racking rents and (as they call it) keep both ends together as long as their small stock shall hold out, till at last they have been turned out of their tenements, with, almost always, a wife and several children, to the inclemency of the weather, and all compelled to live in unroofed churches (for there are plenty of them in the country) stables, dog-kennels, hedges and under trees . . . If they happen to hear of the death of a horse they run to it as to a feast, and often quarrel among themselves for the just partition of the booty ... "Nor has this calamity kept itself within this class of people, and disturbed none but the lowest of our brethren. No, it has already ascended some stages higher, and has reached those in whose power it was to help and relieve the common poor, and who maintained their families decently, according to the bigness of their farms."-Dean Jonathan Swift. "The old and the sick were dying with cold and famine. The young laborers cannot get work, and pine away for want of nourishment to such a degree that if at any time they were accidentally hired to commence labor, they have not the strength to perform it."-Dean Jonathan Swift. "Twenty years after Swift's Letter to the Irish People, a 'country gentleman of Munster' wrote his Grace, the lord primate: 'I have seen the laborer endeavoring to work with his spade, but fainting for want of food, and 65

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forced to quit it, I have seen the aged father eating grass like a beast, and in the anguish of his soul wishing for dissolution. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed to the dunghill, and none to take it in for fear of infection, and I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of an already expired parent: "After another twenty years an English traveller in Ireland noted poverty no less pitiful ... 'Upon my word, he wrote to a friend, 'the inhabitants, in general, of this kingdom, are far from being what they too often and unjustly have been represented by those of our country who never saw them, a nation of wild Irish. Since I have been in Ireland, I have travelled from north to south, and from east to west through the provinces of Ulster and Leinster and Munster, and generally found them civil and obliging, even amongst the very lowest class of the natives. Miserable and oppressed as by far too many of them are, an Englishman will find as much civility in general, as amongst the same class of his own country . . . I never met with such scenes of misery and oppression as this country, in too many parts of it, really exhibits. What with the severe exactions of rent, even before the corn is housed, a practise that too much pre· vails here among the petty and despicable landlords, third, fourth and fifth from the real proprietor ... of the parish priest, in the next place, for tythes, who, not content with the tythe of grain, even the very tenth of half a dozen or half a score perches of potatoes, upon which a whole family probably subsists for the year, is exacted by the rapacious, insatiable (Protestant) priests. I am sorry, to tell you the truth, that too many of them are English parsons ... Add to these, the exactions of the,

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if possible, still more absolute Catholic priest who though he preaches charity by the hour on Sunday, comes around with the terrors of damnation and demands his full quota of unremitted offerings . . . By the time that they are all satisfied, the poor reduced wretches have hardly the skin of a potato to subsist on. The landlords, first and subordinate, get all that is made of the land, and the tenants, for their labor get poverty and potatoes."-Helen Landreth: Dear Dark Head. "In September, 1845, farmers along the coast of Wexford noticed brown spots on the leaves of their potato plants. When they harvested their crop, half were found to be decayed, and the part that seemed sound when dug were decayed three weeks later. The parish priest of Kells, a most fertile potato-growing locale, noted on October 24 his fear that 'one family in twenty will not have a single potato left on Christmas day next. With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our whole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have seen no less than fifty dray loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the soon and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food: The landed proprietors, warned that the Irish potato crop was blighted, were hurrying the shipment of the rentpaying crops."-Helen Landreth: Dear Dark Head . .. 'When the Irish nation, being then nine millions, produced by their own industry, on their own land, good food enough to feed eighteen millions, one cannot well say that providence sent them a famine, and when those nine million dwindled in two or three years to six and a

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half million, partly by mere hunger and partly by flight beyond the sea to escape it, and when we find all these same years the English people doing well and feeding well, upon that very food for want of which the Irish died, I suppose the term British famine will be admitted to be quite correct.' "-John Mitchell: An Apology for the British Government in Ireland. "Such then was the Irish land system during the years preceding the great famine, and indeed for many years following. It was an immediate cause of Irish poverty and from its toils the peasants could not escape. Back rents reduced them to the margin of subsistence; the law in regard to improvements deprived them of hope; and the insecurity of their tenure kept them in a state of terror. 'A situation more devoid of motives to either labor or self-command,' wrote (John Stuart) Mill, 'imagination itself cannot conceive. The inducements of free human beings are taken away and those of a slave not substituted.' "-John E. Pomfret: The Struggle for Land in Ireland. "Irish exports for the year 1847 were valued at approximately 45,000,000 pounds (sterling)."-John E. Pomfret: The Struggle for Land in Ireland. (1847 was one of the years in which hundreds of thousands of Irish starved to death.) "On such a scene of misery as the abodes of the Irish cotters the sun has rarely looked down. Their homes were the most miserable hovels, chimneyless, filthy. Of decent clothing they were destitute. Their food was the potato; sometimes they bled their cattle and mixed the blood with sorrel. The old and sick were everywhere dying by cold and hunger, and rotting amidst filth and vermin. When

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the potato failed, as it often did, there came famine, with disease in its train. Want and misery were in every face, the roads were spread with dead and dying, there was sometimes none to bear the dead to the grave, and they were buried in the fields and ditches where they perished. Fluxes and malignant fevers followed, laying these villages to waste."-Goldwin Smith. "Subscriptions were raised to help the starving people, and ships loaded with American maize sailed for Irish ports. When they reached there, they found a British policy which handicapped their work. All relief was to be administered through the government. All other relief bodies were induced to act in subordination to it. Ten thousand blank books and fourteen tons of paper were sent to Ireland to carry out the new poor law decision, by which a farmer applying for aid had to give up his land before he was given relief."-Helen Landreth, Dear Dark Head. "The horrors of the famine are such as would almost seem fabulous if we read of them in books . . . Great numbers are buried without coffins. Miserable creatures, crawling up the rocks on the coast in search of edible weeds, fall into the sea from inanition. The coffinless bodies that have been interred in kitchen gardens are rooted up by pigs and dogs and devoured. Pestilence is generated by the stench of unburied carcasses. The cereal crops have been very abundant; of oats, wheat, barley, and also of pigs, sheep and cattle there are within the four seas of Ireland more than enough to feed all the inhabitants. But these commodities are not for the people whose industry produced them."-O'Neill Daunt: Journal.

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"McCarthy, whose father had been physician to the Sultan of Turkey, told me that the Sultan had intended to give 10,000 pounds (sterling) to the famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English Ambassador, Lord Cowley, as her Majesty (Queen Victoria), who had only subscribed 1,000 pounds would have been annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum."-O'Neill Daunt: Journal. "The number of families evicted in 1848 was 16,686, and in the following year 19,949 more were turned out. From 1849 to 1882 the Irish evictions averaged 3,000 a year."-Sir Henry Doran, J. P., Permanent Member of the Congested Districts Board of Ireland: The Earliest of All "Evictions" (article published in The Voice of Ireland, A Survey of the Race and Nation from All Angles; Dublin, 1923 (?) "The people died on the roads, and they died in the fields; they died on the mountains, and they died in the glens; they died at the relief works, and they died in their houses, so that little streets or villages were left almost without an inhabitant; and at last some few, despairing of help in the country, crawled into the town, and died at the doors of residents and outside the union (workhouse) walls. Some were buried underground, and some were left unburied on the mountains where they died, there being no one able to bury them."-Stuart Trench: Realities of Irish Life. "In 1841 the population had been 8,115,124; in 1851 it was reduced to 6,552,385. The census commissioners calculated that if the ordinary rate of increase had been maintained, the population in 1851 would have been 9,018,799, or about two and a half millions more than it

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was in fact ... The constabulary returns of evictions begin in 1849; and we find that, in the four years 1849-1852, 58,423 families were evicted, or 306,120 men, women and children ... From 1846 to 1851 nearly a million persons died, and more than a million emigrated."-R. Barry O'Brien: Two Centuries of Irish History. "Though they (the Irish people) were perishing fast of hunger and typhus, they were not perishing fast enough. It was inculcated by the English press that the temperament and disposition of the Irish people fitted them peculiarly for some remote country in the East, or in the West-in fact, for any country but their own-that Providence had committed some mistake in causing them to be born in Ireland . . . By a careful census of the agricultural produce of Ireland for this year, 1847, made by Captain Larcom, as a Government Commissioner, the total value of that produce was 44,958,120 pounds sterling; which would have amply sustained double the entire people of the island . . . This was strictly an artificial famine-that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island, that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call that famine a dispensation of Providence; and ascribe it entirely to the blight of the potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is, first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."-John Mitchell: History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick to the Year 1868.

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"I have seen the Indian in his forest and the negro in his chains, and I thought that I beheld the lowest term of human misery; but I did not then know the lot of Ireland ... Irish misery forms a type by itself, of which there exists nowhere else either model or imitation."Gustave de Beaumont, French publicist, writing in 1835. "At the end of six years, I can set down these things calmly; but to see them might have driven a wise man mad. There is no need to recount how the Assistant Barristers and Sheriffs, aided by the Police, tore down the roof-trees and ploughed up the hearths of village after village-how the Quarter Acre clause laid waste the parishes, how the farmers and their wives and little ones in wild dismay, trooped along the highways; how in some hamlets by the seaside, most of the inhabitants being already dead, an adventurous traveler would come upon some family eating a famished ass;-how maniac mothers stowed away their dead children to be devoured at midnight;-how Mr. Darvy, of Clifden, describes a humane gentleman going to a village near that place with some crackers, and standing at the door of a house; 'And when he threw the crackers to the children (for he was afraid to enter), the mother attempted to take them from them; -how husband and wife fought like wolves for the last morsel of food in the house;-how families, when all was eaten and no hope left, took their last look at the Sun, built up their cottage-doors, that none might see them die nor hear their groans, and were found weeks afterwards, skeletons on their own hearth; how the 'law' was vindicated all this while; how the Arms-Bills were diligently put in force, and many examples were made; how starving wretches were transported for stealing vegetables by

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night, how overworked coroners declared they would hold no more inquests; how Americans sent corn, and the very Turks, yea, negro slaves, sent money for alms: which the British government was not ashamed to administer to the 'sister-country', and how, in everyone of these years, '46, '47, '48, Ireland was exporting to England, food to the value of fifteen millions pounds sterling, and had on her own soil at each harvest, good and ample provision for double her own population, not withstanding the potato blight."-John Mitchell; The Last Conquest of IrelandPerhaps. Also included in Introduction to failfournal. "Millions of acres of the best land in Ireland-land much richer than that of any country in Europe-are divorced from agricultural industry and devoted exclusively to pasturage purposes, while fully 1,000,000 of our land-working population are crowded in upon the very worst soil in Ireland, where the conditions of labouring life are opposed to all chances of industrial betterment and of social comfort. "Under this system of rule Ireland is today the only civilized land on earth where the law deliberately sanctions the destruction of homes as an instrument of civil government; where a family living in its own house may be evicted, and that house can be confiscated or destroyed for a civil debt due to a man who has no more right in equity to the house so confiscated than the Emperor of China, "No civilized nation in the world today, except England, sanctions a law of this kind levelled against the homes of a people as a means of subduing them to the acceptance of its dominion and rule."-Michael Davitt:

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Ireland's Appeal to America (address delivered at Chicago, August 15, 1901). "The bailiff . . . had to be sure that every living thing was out of the evicted house or British law was not fulfilled ... "It was a small two-roomed cottage inhabited by a bedridden old woman, her daughter and two children; the man was in Scotland seeking work. There could be no resistance, the door was closed and barred but it was easily smashed in by the Emergency Men; no need for the battering ram . . . The old woman ... was carried out on a mattress clutching in claw-like hands a little statue of the Blessed Virgin and her rosary beads, her eyes blinked sightlessly in the light-she had not been outside the house for years. She and her mattress were deposited on the roadside, and her daughter and the children cried beside her, while their little household goods were pitched out after them by the EmergencyMen. " 'Where will they go?' I asked Father Stephens. " 'The workhouse' . . . The bailiff was nailing a plank across the broken door; the eviction was well and duly carried out and the police were already moving across the field to the next house ... This time it was an old couple whose door was smashed in. They walked out themselves. They had built the house fifty years ago when they were married . . . They were going to live in their married daughter's tenement room in Derry. They took a last look at the neat little garden patch they loved and moved slowly across the fields, two lonely pathetic figures, and the eviction forces moved on to a cottage close by. Here when the door was smashed in a woman with a one-dayold baby was carried out by the Emergency Men on a

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mattress followed by a crowd of crying children and a man, his face white and distorted with helpless rage."Maud Gonne Macbride: A Servant of the Queen, "Now what became of poor Boland's twenty acres of crops? Part of it went to Gibraltar, to victual the garrison; part to South Africa, to provision the robber army; part went to Spain, to pay for the landlord's wine; part to London, to pay the interest of his honor's mortgage to the Jews. The English ate some of it, the Chinese had their share, the Jews and the Gentiles divided it amongst them; and there was none for poor Boland."-John Mitchell, commenting on an inquest on a family which tilled twenty acres and died of starvation; in The United Irishman, March 4, 1848. "The facts of Irish destitution are ridiculously simple. They are almost too commonplace to be told. The people have not enough to eat. They are suffering a real, though an artificial, famine. Nature does her duty. The land is fruitful enough. Nor can it be fairly said that man is wanting. The Irishman is disposed to work. In fact, man and nature together do produce abundantly. The island is full and overflowing with human food. But something ever interposes between the hungry mouth and the ample banquet. The famished victim of a mysterious sentence stretches out his hand to the viands which his own industry has placed before his eyes, but no sooner are they touched than they fly."-TheLondon Times, June 26, 1845. "The Irish landlord had less consideration for his tenants than a Virginia planter had for his slaves. If the rent was not forthcoming, no matter if the crop failed or not; if a member of the tenant's family married contrary to the 'rules of the estate'; if the tenant dared to vote for a

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member of Parliament contrary to his landlord's will; if a tenant killed game on the lands 'preserved' for the landlord's pleasure, or if another offered over the tenant's head and paid a 'fine', or a larger rent, for the lands; if, in fact, he acted in any way contrary to the pleasure of 'His Honour', the landlord-out on the roadside went he and his family, to starve or die; and if any other tenant on the property offered shelter to the unfortunates, out he went also. The farmers and their families were reduced to absolute submission to the landowner's will: if they displeased him, the punishment was a terrible one."-Cash· man: Life of Davitt, "The entire area of Ireland under land and water contains a total in acres of. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 20,819,947 "Of this there is under water. . . . . . . . . . . .

627,761

"Giving a total acreage in land of. . . . . . .. 20,192,186 "This acreage is distributed as follows:"Under towns, waste, bog, mountain, etc. 4,153,854 . "Under plantation .. , 324,990 "Under tillage . 5,642,057 "Under pasture . 10,071,285 20,192,186

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"Now, let us see how the land of Ireland is divided among the people:

Proprietors 110 holding 192 " 440 1,246 1,773 2,633 2,271 1,916 2,788 2,082 1,460 2,377

Acres 20,000 20,000 10,000 5,000 2,000 1,000 500 300 200 100 50

and over own to 10,000 " to 5,000 " to 2,000 " to 1,000 " 500" to to 300" to 200" to 100" to 50" to 25" under 25 "

19,288

Acres 4,151,142 2,607,719 3,071,471 3,872,611 2,474,756 1,871,171 884,493 471,646 408,699 152,004 52,804 29,056 20,047,572

"The total government yearly valuation of this acreage for taxation purposes is 10,182,681 pounds. These 19,288 landed proprietors are classed as follows in the official returns:

Acres Represented Proprietors resident in Ireland. .. 10,431 Absentee proprietors 2,973 Public Companies in England and 161 Proprietary Institutions .... Proprietors of under a hundred acres, not classed . . . . . . . . .. 5,982

14,095,813 5,129,169 584,327 236,873

19,547 20,046,182 -From the Irish Census of 1871.

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"Mr. John O'Connell, eldest. most amiable, and most imbecile son of the Liberator, read aloud in Conciliation Hall a letter from a Catholic Bishop in West Cork as the Famine reached its height: 'The famine is spreading with fearful rapidity, and scores of persons are dying of starvation and fever, but the tenants are bravely paying their rents: And Mr. John O'Connell cried out in pride: 'I thank God I live among a people who would rather die of hunger than defraud their landlords of rent: "-Desmond Ryan: The Phoenix Flame. "Sights that will never wholly leave the eyes that beheld them: cowering wretches, almost naked in the savage weather. prowling in turnip fields and endeavoring to grub up roots which had been left, but running to hide as the mail coach rolled by; very large fields where small farms had been 'consolidated; showing dark bars of fresh mould running through them, where the ditches had been levelled; groups and families, sitting and wandering on the high road, with failing steps and dim, patient eyes, gazing hopelessly into infinite darkness; before them, around them, above them, nothing but darkness and despair; parties of all brawny men, once the flower of Meath and Galway. stalking by with a fierce but vacant scowl as if they knew that this all ought not to be, but knew not whom to blame, saw none whom they could rend in their wrath; for Lord John Russell sat safe in Chesham Place; and Trevelyan, the grand commissioner and factotum of the pauper system, wove his webs of red tape around them from afar. "So cunningly does civilization work! Around those farmhouses that were still inhabited were to be seen hardly any stacks of grain; it was all gone; the poor-rate

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collector, the rent-agent, the country-cess collector had carried it off; and sometimes I could see, in front of the cottages, little children leaning against a fence when the sun came out-for they could not stand-their limbs fleshless, their bodies half-naked, their faces bloated yet wrinkled, and of a pale greenish hue-children who would never, it was too plain, grow up to be men and women. I saw Trevelyan's claw in the vitals of these chilo dren; his red tape would draw them to death; in his Govenment laboratory he had prepared for them the typhus poison."-John Mitchell in the Nation. "They or we must quit this island. It is a people to be saved or lost; it is the island to be kept or surrendered. They have served us with a general writ of ejectment. Wherefore, I say, let them get a notice to quit at once; or we shall oust possession under the law of nature. There are men who claim protection for them, and for all their tyrannous rights and powers, being 'as one class of the Irish people. I deny the claim. They form no class of the Irish people, nor of any other people. Strangers they are in this land they call theirs-strangers here and everywhere; owning no country and owned by none; rejecting Ireland and being rejected by England; tyrants to this island and slaves to another; here they stand, hating and hated-their hand ever against us as ours against them, an outcast and ruffianly horde, alone in the world and alone in its history, a class by themselves. They do not now, and never did, belong to this island at all. Tyrants and traitors have they ever been to us and ours since first they set foot upon our soil. Their crime it is and not England's, that Ireland stands where she does today-or rather it is our own, they have borne them so

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long. Were they a class of the Irish people the Union could be repealed without a life lost. Had they been a class of the Irish people that Union would never have been. But for them we should now be free, prosperous, and happy. Until they be removed, no people can ever take root, grow up, and flourish here. The question between them and us must, sooner or later, have been brought to a deadly issue. For heaven's sake and Ireland's let us settle it now, and not leave it to our children to settle. Indeed, it MUST be settled now; for it is plain to any ordinary sight that they or we are doomed. A cry has gone up to heaven for the living and the dead-to save the living, to avenge the dead."-Irish Felon: On the Landlords, June, 1848. "Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes on this one day. There was not a shilling of rent due on the estate, at the time, except by one man. The Sheriffs' assistants employed on the occasion to extinguish the hearths and to demolish the homes of those honest industrious men worked away with a will at their awful calling until evening fell. At length an incident occurred that varied the monotony of the grim and ghastly ruin which they were spreading all around. They stopped suddenly and recoiled, panic-stricken with terror, from two dwellings which they were directed to destroy with the rest. They had just learned that typhus fever held these houses in its grasp, and had already brought death to some of the inmates. They therefore supplicated the agent to spare these houses a little longer, but he was inexorable, and insisted that they should come down. He ordered a large winnowing sheet to be secured over the beds in which the victims lay-fortunately they happened

BLACK AND TAN DESTRUCTION IN THE CITY OF CORK

SINN FEIN PRISONERS BEING LED AWAY AFTER THE EASTER REBELLION OF 1916

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to be delirious at the time-and then directed the houses to be unroofed cautiously and slowly. I administered the last Sacrament of the Church to four of these fever victims next day, and save the above mentioned winnowing-sheet there was not a roof nearer to me than the canopy of heaven. The scene of that eviction day I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women, the screams, the terror, the consternation of children, the speechless agony of men, wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw the officers and men of a large police force who were obliged to attend on the occasion cry like children. The heavy rains that usually attend the autumn equinoxes descended in cold copious torrents throughout the night, and at once revealed to the houseless sufferers the awful realities of their condition. I visited them next morning, and rode from place to place administering to them all the comfort and consolation I could. The landed proprietors in a circle all round, and for many miles in every direction, warned their tenantry against admitting them to even a single night's shelter. Many of these poor people were unable to emigrate. After battling in vain with privation and pestilence, they at last graduated from the workhouse to the tomb, and in little more than three years nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves."Most Rev. Dr. Nulty, Bishop of Meath. "The land of Ireland-the land of any countrybelongs to the people of that country. The individuals called land-owners have no right, in morality and justice, to anything but the rent or compensation for its saleable value. When the inhabitants of a country quit the country en masse, because its government will not make it a place fit for them to live in, the government is judged and

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condemned . . . When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. NO MAN MADE THE LAND. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust."-John Stuart Mill: Political Economy. "Trial by jury is called the palladium of liberty in every constitutionally governed country as well as in England; yet Mr. Gladstone is about to abolish trial by jury in Ireland for three years. The right of public meeting is one of the most cherished privileges of a free people; yet Mr. Gladstone is about to make public meeting in Ireland dependent upon the will of a single English functionary. The liberty of the press is prized by every civilized nation as the greatest safeguard of its liberty; yet Mr. Gladstone is resolved upon gagging the Irish press. The inviolability of domestic privacy is one of the proudest boasts of Englishmen; yet Mr. Gladstone is about to empower an Irish policeman to intrude upon any Irishman's home at any hour of the night he may please to consider it the object of suspicion."-Michael Davitt, speaking in Liverpool in May, 1882. "England has destroyed the conditions of Irish society. First of all, she has confiscated the lands of the Irish; then by 'Parliamentary decrees' she has suppressed Irish industry; finally, by armed force she has broken the activity and energy of the Irish people. In this way England has created the 'social conditions' which allow a small caste of robber landlords to dictate to the Irish people the conditions in which they are allowed to hold the land

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and live on it,"-Karl Marx: in New York DailyTribune, July 11, 1853. "The landlords of Ireland are confederated for a fiendish war of extermination against the cotters; or, as they call it, they combine for the economical experiment of clearing the land of useless mouths. The small native tenants are to be disposed of with no more ado than vermin is by the housemaid."-Karl Marx: in New York Daily Tribune, January 11, 1859.

IX. The Irish Nation Fights On IN THE year 1318 A. D., Donal O'Neill, King of Ulster and High King of Ireland, together with a group of other chieftains, addressed a letter to Pope John XXII in which these words occur: "We cherish, at the bottom of our hearts, an inveterate hatred, produced by lengthened recollections of injustices -by the murder of our fathers, brothers and nearest kindred-and which will not be extinguished in our time, nor in that of our children-so that, as long as we have life, we will fight against them, without regret, or remorse, in defence of our rights. We will not cease to fight against and annoy them, until the day when they themselves, for want of power, shall have ceased to do harm, and the Supreme Judge shall have taken just vengeance on their crimes; which, we firmly hope, will sooner or later come to pass. Until then, we will make war upon them unto death, to recover the independence, which is our natural right; being compelled thereto by very necessity, and willing rather to brave danger like men, than to languish under insult." The French historian, Thierry, commenting on this letter, says: "This promise of war unto death, made upwards of four hundred years ago, is not yet forgotten; and it is a melancholy fact, but worthy of remark that in our own days blood has flowed in Ireland on account of the old quarrel of the conquest. The period of futurity when the quarrel shall be terminated, it is impossible to foresee; and aversion for England, its government, its manners and 84

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its language, is still the native passion of the Irish race. From the day of the invasion, the will of that race has been constantly opposed to the will of its masters; it has detested what they have loved, and loved what they have detested . . . This unconquerable obstinacy-this lengthened remembrance of departed liberty-this faculty of preserving and nourishing through the ages of physical misery and suffering, the thought of that which is no more-of never despairing of a constantly vanquished cause, for which many generations have successively, and in vain, perished in the field, and by the executioner-is perhaps the most extraordinary and the greatest example that a people has ever given:' The vitality of the Irish nation has indeed been amazing. We have seen that the greatest of all the numerous calamities which befell it occurred almost in our own time, less than a century ago-the great famine of the 1840s. Within a few years the very population of the country was reduced almost half. Nevertheless, in the 1850s, we find the people again organizing to fight for the land. Early in the 1860s a daring plan of armed rebellion and of secret organization toward that end was conceived by James Stephens in Ireland, who was seconded by the brilliant scholar John O'Mahoney in America. It was O'Mahoney who gave the name of Fenians to the members of this patriotic organization, in memory of the national militia of very ancient Irish days. Many thousands of Irishmen had fought in the Union armies in the American Civil War and some had also shown notable valor in the Southern armies. Thousands of these men were eager to put their military experience to use in the freeing of their native land. The conspiracy also enlisted many thousands

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of Irish soldiers in the British Army. But for all his skill as a conspirator and organizer, the plan for a rebellion in 1865 was called off, and when a blow was actually attempted in 1867 it was too late; the British government had arrested many of the leaders and had sent most of the Irish regiments to distant parts of the empire. The few small military actions which took place were the least important part of Fenianism. The organization continued strong throughout the 1870s and 1880s, and by means of scattered military operations against the English government in England itself, forced various concessions from that government, such as relieving Irish Catholics of the obligation to pay tithes to support the Church of Ireland, and the beginning of land reform laws. In the 1880s the Irish national struggle took two other forms which commanded the attention of the world. Michael Davitt founded the Land League, which organized the Irish tenant farmers to fight against rack-rents and eviction. Charles Stewart Parnell became the leader of the Irish members of the House of Commons, and by deliberately obstructing and tying up the business of parliament until attention was given to Ireland's sufferings and Ireland's demands, he wrung many concessions from the British. Through the influence of John Devoy the majority of the Fenians supported not only the Land League but also the Parliamentary Party as long as it was headed by Parnell, who stated that, "No man has a right to set bounds to the onward march of a nation." But when a bill for Home Rule seemed about to be passed, the British Premier, Mr. Gladstone, who had been elected on the Home Rule issue, betrayed Parnell and the Irish people. After Parnell's death the parliamentary

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movement became a pawn of the British Liberal Party, and the men who believed that Ireland's independence could only be won by physical force, though few in numbers, had to begin the hard work of building up again a secret revolutionary organization. Many of the men who kept the ideal of complete national independence alive and who labored through long years to marshall a new fighting force were men who had suffered tortures in British prisons for their Fenian activities. Nothing so strikingly illustrates the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the English ruling class claims to superior civilization as the cold, factual story of how England's government treated its Irish prisoners even in modern times. From a pamphlet, entitled The Fenians, by Brian O'Higgins, being the 1938 issue of the Wolfe Tone Annual, we take the following paragraphs describing the prison sufferings of two indomitable patriots, O'Donovan Rossa and Tom Clarke, both of whom emerged from British prison cells only to continue the struggle against their torturer. 0'Donovan Rossa

"Irish in thought, in speech, in spirit; and to the English enemy who tortured him in their jails and tried to kill him or drive him insane, he was Ireland in the flesh. They weighed him down with chains, they cast him into the darkest cell in their underground prisons, they made him eat his scanty share of food off the floor, with his hands manacled, they submitted him to every abuse and insult and humiliation in their power-and he laughed in their faces, sang songs when they commanded silence, and never

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once lost the dignity of his superb Irish manhood. He was, indeed, the embodiment of Ireland, and they could not break him." Tom Clarke

"From April 4, 1883, to September 29, 1898 (think of it!) Tom Clarke was a prisoner in the hands of the English and at constant war with them. Like many another brave man he had carried the fight into the enemy's own country (he came from America to England on a dangerous mission) and that was a crime against British Law and Order for which there was no mercy. The settled policy at that time in the British prisons plainly was that the Fenian prisoners were to be broken utterly in health and spirit or driven insane. They were never more to be men if they lived to come out of jail. Tom Clarke saw through the fiendish plan from the first and made up his mind to fight it without ceasing. When he got in touch with John Daly and James Egan of Limerick, and the men who had been sentenced along with himself-Dr. Gallagher, John Curtin, and Alfred Whitehead-he enlisted them in the fight, and saved three of them and himself from the fate of Whitehead and Gallagher-insanity. The story of that gallant fight against terrible odds and under the most amazing conditions would be told with pride to the children of a free Ireland, but how many know today that it was ever fought? Think of the man who, after ten long, slow, torture-filled years of it, could sit down in his prison cell and write these words to a comrade of his boyhood: "Time goes rapidly enough for you, I daresay. For me it creeps slowly enough, dear knows. By the

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third of August I shall have been in prison ten yearsalmost a third of my lifetime. Can you realise what that means? Ah, no, you cannot. No one can understand all the hardship and misery it means but myself . . . But you can realise that I do know that, notwithstanding it all, I am-from the heart's core to the finger tips-Irish still ... proudly Irish as in the old days. That, though my clothing from the top of my cap to the bottom of my boots be plentifully marked with the Government Broad Arrow, what does it matter when I can say within myself, 'Thank God! there is no Broad Arrow stamp on this Celtic heart of mine.' The English tried hard, but they could never break the spirit of such a man! "Even when his dear friends and comrades, John Daly and James Egan were, through pressure of public opinion, released from prison, and he was left alone to carry on the grim battle with his jailors, he did not lose heart or courage, but fought to the last hour of his imprisonment. And then, with the marks of those terrible years stamped on his light frame, he did not seek, in the apathetic world to which he was released, the rest and quiet which were his due. No, he was the same Tom Clarke that had been in the glory of his youth sixteen years before; he was a Fenian and his country was unfree. Into the fight he threw himself with a buoyancy and enthusiasm that were a reproach as well as an inspiration to younger men who had never known and who could never know the horror of the hardships he endured proudly and gladly for Ireland. And his faithful heart never faltered until on the morning of May 3, 1916, a bullet from an English rifle stilled it forever." The twilight of the parliamentary phase of Ireland's

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struggle was a disastrous period for that little country. Though there were no spectacular struggles and no widespread famines, alien rule was slowly bleeding the nation to death. The following table illustrates this slow wasting away of a people:

Country Greece Rownania Switzerland Wurtemberg Norway Denmark Sweden Ireland

Population . . . . . . . .

2,433,806 5,936,690 3,315,443 2,169,486 2,240,032 2,464,770 5,513,644 4,376,600

Taxation Per Head $5.64 5.76 6.60 6.84 7.80 7.92 8.04 10.38

And, while this scandalous overtaxation prevailed, the country was bleeding to death. Emigration ran at a rate of between 30 and 40 thousand every year of the first twenty years of this century. Under the terrific blows it had endured, the Irish nation had lost the greater part of its own ancient culture along with its national language, which at that time was spoken by only about one out of seven among the inhabitants of Ireland. In the latter years of the 19th century, however, the Gaelic League, under the brilliant leadership of Dr. Douglas Hyde, brought about a strong revival of the language and a real renaissance of ancient Irish culture in literature, music and the arts. Out of this national cultural reawakening there soon followed in natural course a new political and economic movement under the slogan SINN FEIN. These Gaelic

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words mean "ourselves" and the essence of the policy was that Ireland should no longer look for redress of her grievances and for the conditions of national progress to the cynicalparliament of her foes, but should proceed even under the handicap of alien rule to develop her own economy, to revive her ruined industries, to buy and use her own products and manufactures, to set up voluntary machinery to parallel and eventually to supersede the alien government machinery, and, in short, to rely on herself and save herself. The great theorist of the Sinn Fein movement was the brilliant economist, Arthur Griffith. From The Story of the Irish Race by Seumas MacManus, who was one of Griffith's earliest collaborators, we quote a paragraph or two which summarize the most striking ideas put before the Irish people by the proponents of this new policy. "In 1905 Mr. Griffith and his friends put before the nation a new political movement. In Dublin on Nov. 28, 1905. a National Council was called into being for the purpose of organising the nation with a view to withdrawing the representatives sitting at Westminster and setting up a provisional Irish Parliament made up of these members and representatives of public bodies. This de facto Parliament would call upon the people to cooperate with it voluntarily in the administration of Ireland. In a newly-founded weekly, Sinn Fein (succeeding the United Irishman), Mr. Griffith proceeded to show how the nation could thus conduct its own affairs even while the national parliament was denied recognition by outside powers. "Thus, through the Harbour Boards, difficulties could be imposed in the 'dumping' of foreign goods, which

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would amount to a system of protection for Irish industries. The public could be organised for the support of native industry, and capital could be encouraged by the offer of rate-free sites, etc. Arbitration Courts could be set up everywhere, superseding the British courts in civil matters. National insurance could be undertaken. National banks could divert from foreign fields the Irish money which could so much more profitably be invested in buying up Irish land, financing Irish developments and extending Irish control of home resources. A national mercantile marine could be co-operatively bought and set to carrying Irish produce to those Continental markets which offered so much better prices than the English markets to which English ships carried Irish cattle and manufactured goods. Irish commercial agents-consuls-could be sent to the great foreign trade centres. "It was this policy of boycotting foreign institutions, and of 'non-co-operation' with the usurping power, which, under Deak's leadership, won Hungary the status of an independent nation in the struggle with Austria that culminated in 1867." To counteract the progress of the Sinn Fein idea in Ireland the British politicians eventually decided to pass a so-called Home Rule measure setting up what Irish patriots scornfully called a "ditch and sewer parliament" that is, a governmental scheme giving the Irish control of many of the troublesome minor details of government, while leaving taxation, foreign affairs, defense and other important matters in British hands. Since the early days of the 19th century the British rulers had assiduously fostered in Ulster, the northernmost province of Ireland, a spirit of bigotry among the Protes-

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tant people of that province who were descended from Englishmen and Scotsmen planted on Irish soil by successive English governments and who constituted a small majority of the population of that province. By the lavish use of money and political favors and by discrimination in their favor in industrial employment, great numbers of these misguided men were organized into Orange Lodges which existed for the purpose of fostering religious bigotry. When the Home Rule Bill was on the point of passing in 1913, certain unscrupulous Irish Protestant politicians, seeking to advance themselves through the influence of the Orangemen and certain of powerful English backing, served notice that if Home Rule were passed, they would rebel. They organized a numerous body known as the Ulster Volunteers and armed themselves with rifles and munitions purchased in Germany. When the government ordered certain regiments of the British Army stationed in southern Ireland to proceed to Ulster to curb the followers of Sir Edward Carson, the officers of these regiments mutinied. As history is written by the British, supposedly this mutiny frightened the Liberal Government and caused them to back down. It is, of course, absurd to suppose that the might of the British Empire was really defied by this handful of Tory army officers. Clearly there was collusion between the government, which was supposedly intent on passing the Home Rule Bill, and the Orangemen who threatened rebellion if it were passed. To the watchful Irish revolutionary leaders the Carson rebellion and the rise of the Ulster Volunteers were events of very happy augury. They were delighted to see Irishmen defy the British Government even if in a bad cause; moreover, theycould now logically call for the formation of, and

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they did promptly form, a body known as the Irish Volunteers, to demand that the Home Rule Bill be enacted. They, too, brought in guns from Germany, but the British who had winked at Carson's gun running fired on the Irish Volunteers and on the people, killing four men and wounding many. The development of this situation was superseded by the outbreak of the World War. At this point it is necessary to refer to still another development which became an important factor in events soon to occur. The most numerous class of workers in the southern Irish cities at that time were the transport workers. Miserably underpaid and sweated by their employers, these men had at last formed a union, and in 1911 under the leadership of James Larkin and James Connolly had called a strike against which the employers, mainly Irishmen, with the aid of the Irish Police and the British civil and military authorities, tried to crush by savage methods of repression. The character of this industrial struggle is vividly illustrated by the following passage from Portrait of a Rebel Father, the biography of James Connolly by his daughter, Nora Connolly O'Brien. "Terrible isn't the word for it. You see, the meeting was proclaimed. But Jim Larkin said he'd be there. You see, O'Donnell Street was thronged. Not only by fellows like me who were going to be there, and by others who came to see if anything would happen, but by people who never gave a thought to Jim or us and were going home from twelve o'clock Mass in Marlborough Street. And then there was a long line of peelers stretched from the Pillar to O'Connell Monument. Everywhere you looked your eye fell on a peeler. There was no platform,

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you see, or anything, so we just hung round, and called to each other, and put up a cheer now and then to pass the time. Suddenly a window in Murphy's Hotel opened, and a long fellow in a frock coat, and a beard, and a tall hat, stepped out on the balcony and began to talk. I couldn't hear what he said and was wondering who the old josser was, when the crowd began to yell, 'It's Larkin!' And then a roar of cheering went up, and we rushed towards the hotel. At the same time about twenty peelers tore into the hotel. They came out in a few minutes with Larkin. The crowd gathered in and began to cheer Larkin and booh and jeer the police. A lad beside me yelled, 'Hey! the peelers have drawn their batons: I tried to get out of the crowd, but it was too thick. All you could hear was the thud, thump, crack of the batons as they fell on the heads of the crowd. There were screams and groans and yelps. There was no way to escape from the batonsthe peelers came steadily on like mowing machines, and behind them the street was like a battlefield dotted with bodies. Some of them were lying still, some twisting in pain. And the groaning! My God! Some of us tried to dodge round the peelers and get out of O'Connell Street down Princess Street. We raced for it. We weren't halfway down it when we met another bunch of peelers, and they came at us with their batons. We were in a trap. There was nothing but thuds, and cracks, and groans. I turned, thinking that I'd better chance O'Connel Street, and I don't remember anything after that. It was a massacre. The hospitals were full that night .. :' The strike was won and the transport workers not only maintained their organization but proceeded to organize on a military basis under the name of The Irish Citizens

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Army. The moving spirit in this army, James Connolly, Ireland's only Marxist, was also an Irish patriot with a very clear and conscientious determination to strike a blow sometime for Irish freedom. The Parliamentary Party demanded and secured a voice in control of the Irish Volunteers, but the perfidy of the Parliamentary leaders in pledging Irish aid to the traditional enemy in the war against Germany, gradually lost them their hold upon the people, and in the end the Volunteers came under the control of the revolutionary group. Connolly's Citizens Army co-operated with the Volunteers and plans were made for a rebellion, the date being finally fixed for Easter Sunday, 1916. Public opinion in Ireland was being unwittingly prepared by the British for such an outbreak in ways illustrated by the account given in The History of the Sinn Fein Movement and the Irish Rebellion of 1916, by Francis P. Jones. This historian records how in those days the British military made a practice of waylaying and ravishing Irish girls and women, frequently making sure of safety from punishment by murdering their victims; so that bodies were frequently found in the River Liffey. Ravished and mutilated bodies of young girls were discovered at the very door of British barracks. But the same English papers which as Mr. Jones reminds us were just then full of "German atrocity" stories, never recorded these triumphs of English civilization in Ireland. But the men of Ireland noted these things and stored them up inmemery. One of the leaders of the Irish Volunteers was Roger Casement, who had been knighted by the British when, as consul in the Belgian Congo, he unconsciously served

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British imperial interests by exposing the brutalities practiced by the Belgian administrators against the natives in the rubber forests. Later Sir Roger had exposed equal atrocities committed by British companies and British officials in the Putamayo District of South America. Casement, being in America to raise funds for the Irish Volunteers, at the outbreak of the war consented to go to Germany to convince the government of that country that it was to their interest to help free Ireland as a means of breaking the British rule of the seas. Darrell Figgis in his Recollections of the Irish War, says of Casement: "Of all men I have ever met, in a wayfaring life, men of every sort and description, I have never met any man of so single and selfless a mind, or of so natural and noble a gesture of soul, as he." That is no more than a just estimate of Casement, as the writer of these lines knows. He was not, however, a diplomat, and the Irish organizations in America who were also in touch with the German government, had to override him in the matter of negotiations with that government. Bewildered by a situation which he did not understand, Casement returned to Ireland to try to stop the projected rebellion. This had the unfortunate effect of causing Professor Eoin MacNeill, titular head of the Irish Volunteers, to countermand the orders for the general mobilization on Easter Sunday at which the rebellion was to have been begun. The more resolute revolutionary leaders hastily met and sent out orders for a mobilization on Easter Sunday, but only a fraction of the men received these orders in time. The German Government despatched to Ireland a considerable cargo of arms and munition and the steamer Aud

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arrived off Fenit Pier on the coast of Kerry on the date agreed. The managers of the rebellion, meanwhile, had asked that the boat's arrival be delayed two days, but since the Aud was not equipped with wireless it never received the message. The Irish did not meet the boat, and after two days it was discovered and captured by units of the British Navy. Thus the famous rebellion of Easter Week, 1916, began under tragic auguries. The Proclamation of the Republic, which has been quoted heretofore, was read to the populace of Dublin, many strong military points in the City were seized, but within two or three days it became evident to the leaders that their messages to the country countermanding MacNeill's countermand had not succeeded in bringing out the Volunteers in other places in sufficient force to relieve Dublin. When they took the field, however, they knew that nothing but a miracle could bring them success. Every man of them know that the chances were a thousand to one that he was laying his life on the altar of his country's cause, but one and all they were glad to make that sacrifice. The combined forces of the Volunteers and the Citizens Army, which under the command of James Connolly held out in Dublin for a week, numbered no more than eleven hundred men. Against them, before the end of the week, the British brought to Dublin sixty thousand troops, with artillery, and backed by gunboats in the Liffey. Once again the Irish were to learn that there is no such thing as a fair fight with the English military. Held at bay by the little patriot army whom they outnumbered more than 50 to 1, the English military took their revenge in ways illustrated by the following account of the massacres

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in North King Street, as cited by Brian O'Neill in the pamphlet, Easter Week: "During the night the 'civilizers' took vengeance on the people of the area. In one block of houses nine men and boys, none with any connection with the Rising, were murdered in their homes. At the opposite side of the street four men were dragged from their firesides and bayoneted. Sworn statements exist regarding these murders. This is how Miss Anne Fennel, an old woman living at 174 North King Street, described the deaths of Michael Noonan and George Ennis: " 'As well as I can recollect it was between 5 and 6 A. M. on Easter Saturday morning the military burst into the shop. There were one or more officers in command and about thirty soldiers. They burst in like wild beasts and shouted harshly at us. The officer shouted, "Hands up!" and ordered the two men, Ennis and Noonan, upstairs. As poor Mrs. Ennis saw her husband being led upstairs she clung to him and refused to be parted from him and said, "I want to go with him." One of the soldiers pulled her off and put a bayonet to her ear and uttered the foulest language. They then took the men upstairs and locked us women in the shop parlour, and told us not to move in peril of our lives. After a long time, it must have been a couple of hours, we heard a noise at the parlour door, and to our horror poor Mr. Ennis crawled in. He was bleeding to death, and when the military left the house he had crept down the stairs to see his wife for the last time. He said, 'They killed poor Noonan, too. I stayed with him as long as I could." , "At 170 North King Street, a father and his fifteenyear-old son, Thomas and Christopher Hickey, together

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with Peter Connolly, were murdered. Mrs. Hickey had been away from home on Friday night; when she returned on Saturday morning there was a military guard at the door and she was refused admission. On Sunday morning she heard from a neighbour that her son was shot, and she forced her way past the guard. .. 'When I rushed into the room, there I saw my darling son. He was lying on the ground, his face darkened, and his two hands raised above his head as if in silent supplication. I kissed him and put his little cap under his head, and settled his hands for death. Then I turned, and in another place I saw my poor Tom lying on the ground. "Oh, Jesus," I cried, "my poor husband, too!" and not far off lay the corpse of poor Connolly. I reeled round and remembered no more, as the soldiers hustled me down the stairs and into the street: "There were inquests on two who were murdered, Patrick Bealen and James Healy, and a woman witness told how soldiers had described the killing to her. They were ordered to bring the men into the cellar to shoot them. " 'We had not the heart to shoot them straight, so we told them to go upstairs again and when they were at the foot of the stairs we let bang at them.' "Municipal sanitary officials discovered the bodies buried in the cellar. "The jury's verdict was found immediately: .. 'We find that the said Patrick Bealen died from shock and hemorrhage, resulting from bullet wounds inflicted by a soldier, or soldiers, in whose custody he was, an unarmed and unoffending prisoner. We consider that the explanation given by the military authorities is very unsat-

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isfactory, and we believe that if the military authorities had any inclination they could produce the officer in charge.' "On James Healy there was a similar verdict. "Despite the outcry as the truth came to light, Asquith steadily refused a public inquiry." To save further suffering by the civilian population, the Irish forces surrendered. They had fought as soldiers according to the laws of war. They had observed all the laws of war and had been particularly considerate of all English who fell into their hands as prisoners. Nevertheless, in contempt of the laws of war and the practices of civilized nations, the English Military, within a few days following the surrender, executed fifteen of the leaders. Those who faced English firing squads without fear were Padraic Pearse, poet, dramatist and educator; Thomas Macfronagh, poet and critic; Thomas J. Clarke, veteran Fenian and head of the secret revolutionary organizations, the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood; Joseph Mary Plunkett, poet; Edward Daly, Michael O'Hanrahan, novelist; Wil· liam Pearse; John MacBride, veteran of the Irish Brigade in the Boer army; Con Colbert, a mere youth; Michael Mallen, a labor leader; Edmund Kent; Sean Heuston; Thomas Kent; James Connolly, labor leader and writer, and Sean MacDermott, the most beloved of all the leaders. Further executions were prevented only by the introduction in the American Congress of a resolution expressing horror at these British military murders. Before the summer was out, Roger Casement, who had been captured upon his return to Ireland, was hung. These things were done, it should be remembered, by the authorities of a government which had at that time

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been already fighting for nearly two years ostensibly in defense of liberty and the rights of small nations-a government which clamored to the world for support of its war in defense of "poor little Belgium," and which had, in fact, benefited by the military services of tens of thousands of Irishmen who had been lured into its army through the clever and unscrupulous propaganda which aroused their sympathy for the Belgian people. All of these executions of the noble leaders of Easter Week were repugnant to international law, but the shooting of James Connolly was an act of barbarism which has few parallels in modern times. Twice wounded during the fighting, Connolly, with a shattered ankle and weak from loss of blood, was borne from the General Post Office at the surrender on a stretcher, and was helpless and in pain during the entire time that he was in British hands. The court-martial that condemned him had to be held at the side of his hospital bed. Yet they did condemn this gallant man, who had risked his life during the fighting to protect British prisoners, and since he was unable to stand they shot him in a chair. His final confessor, Father Aloysius, described the execution to James Connolly's daughter in these words: "They carried him from his bed in a stretcher to an ambulance and drove him to Kilmainham Jail. They carried the stretcher from the ambulance to jail yard. They put him in a chair . . . He was very brave and cool ... I asked him: 'Will you pray for the men who are about to shoot you?' and he answered: 'I will say a prayer for all brave men who do their duty' ... And then they shot him . . ." (Nora Connolly O'Brien's Portrait of a Rebel Father.)

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Another instance of the brutal reality of British rnilitarism which at that time, as so often before and since, masqueraded as superior democracy and humanity was the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, which caused indignation and horror around the world. Sheehy-Skeffiington was one of the best known men in Ireland and in fact in Britain itself. He was a pacifist and active in the fight for women's suffrage and other good causes. On the first day of the Easter Rising hoodlums in Dublin took advantage of the confusion to break shop windows for purposes of loot. Sheehy-Skeffiington went to Padraic Pearse at the General Post Office and secured help in organizing a volunteer police which put an end to this looting. In the course of these activities he was arrested by the British, and after being held several days incommunicado he was murdered in one of the British barracks by the English captain Bowen-Colthurst. Because Sheehy-Skeffington was a man of such prominence and because his wife was not only a woman capable of public agitation but also a relative of an Irish member of the British Parliament, this murder could not be hushed up. It had to be aired in Parliament. Meanwhile, however, Captain Colthurst had been promoted. Evidently his exploit in murdering a defenseless pacifist was the sort of action that wins advancement in the British Army. Subsequently he was court-martialed and allowed to escape his due punishment by being conveniently pronounced of unsound mind. Within a few months after the Easter Rebellion the British, being hard-pressed for reinforcements for their army in France and Belgium, decided that the Irish must be sufficiently cowed by the suppression of the rebellion to make possible the enforcement of conscription in that

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country. In this, however, the British were greatly mistaken, for the entire Irish populace, exclusive of the little minority of landlords and government officials, served notice that if Irishmen were to die they would do fighting against conscription into an alien army rather than die on foreign fields as members of that army. In this stand the nation was backed unanimously by the Catholic bishops and clergy, and the idea of forcibly recouping Britain's staggering armies with Irishmen was dropped. The British government next attempted to confuse the Irish people, and blacken the Irish cause in the eyes of the world, especially in the eyes of Americans, by alleging the discovery of a great "German plot" in which the leaders of the rapidly growing Sinn Fein movement were supposedly implicated by the lure of German gold. The imaginary character of this "German plot" is sufficiently shown by the fact that after the British propagandists had squeezed all possible publicity out of the matter, the charges were conveniently forgotten. A general election was held in December, 1918, at which the Irish people chose, by a majority of about 3 to I, a panel of parliamentary candidates who were pledged to the Sinn Fein policy of refusing to attend the alien parliament in Westminster, setting up instead their own parliament in Dublin. On January 21, 1919, these elected representatives of the Irish people met in the capital city of their country. The situation at this moment was very illuminating. The British ruling class had plunged the entire world into war to crush their commercial rival, Germany, and had deceived their own people and the American people by calling their criminal military adventure a crusade for

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liberty and the rights of small nations. They had been saved from defeat by the powerful help of the United States of America, which entered the war ostensibly for a number of noble objectives, foremost among which was the right of all peoples to "self-determination," and this slogan the British Government had hypocritically made its own. Now here was a small nation practicing selfdetermination in the most open and undeniable way. Voting under the terms of British law itself, the Irish people by a very decisive majority had endorsed the Sinn Fein program of liberation of Ireland from England, and had elected representatives with a mandate to declare their country's independence, and these elected representatives proceeded to carry out that mandate---that is, such of them as were at liberty to do so. For the situation that had been created in Ireland by the great British crusaders for the right of self-determination is vividly illustrated by such incidents as Frank O'Connor recounts in his biography of Michael Collins, Death in Dublin. O'Connor recalls how when the first Dail Eireann-the first assembly of the duly elected representatives of the Irish people---was called to order in the Mansion House, Dublin, on January 21, 1918, and when the roll was called, the clerk answered for deputy after deputy, "Imprisoned by the English." The Irish Nation, having formally presented their demand for independence to the British Government, and the British Government having responded with further measures of coercion, it was determined by the Irish Republican Army, under the dynamic leadership of Michael Collins, to wage aggressive guerilla warfare against the invaders of their country. The glaring contrast

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between British pretenses of concern for small nations and self-determination, and the British treatment of Ireland caused a great movement of sympathy and support for the Irish cause in America and was also pointed out by many Englishmen, but all this had no effect upon the British government. They determined upon a course of coercion so savage that they could not even trust the British Army to carry it out, but they recruited two special forces for this murderous campaign. One force operated as reinforcements of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and being hastily outfitted in a bastard uniform of which some parts were khaki and some parts black, they acquired the name of Black and Tans, which was soon to become horribly synonymous throughout the world with murderous brutality. The members of the Black and Tans were chiefly recruited from the British jails and criminal classes. The second body specially organized to attempt to shoot the Irish people into submission was known as the Auxiliaries, and it surpassed the Black and Tans in the savagery of its operations. It consisted entirely of discharged officers of the British army, misfits and men of warped mentality, men desperately without economic prospects. At the direct order of their government these two British forces now carried out in Ireland, deliberately, the same kind of devastation which, when it had been visited upon Belgium in the inevitable course of military operations, had caused the British to call upon the world to anathematize the Germans. The central portion of the City of Cork was deliberately burned to the ground. Village after village was put to the torch, and the number of individual homes burned or wrecked runs into the thousands. The creameries through which the Irish farmers

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marketed their dairy products were an especial object of destruction. People were murdered singly and en masse. Both civilians and members of the Irish Republican Army, when captured, were tortured and savagely done to death. Many women and children and several priests were among the victims of this furor Britannicus. Against these tactics the Irish Republican Army waged a vigorous campaign which took a heavy toll of the savages running amok in their country, and as we shall see resulted in a partial victory. The humane and superior way which the representatives of the great liberty-loving British Empire had with prisoners in their clutches has been recorded by Ernie O'Malley in his book, Army Without Banners. O'Malley, a University man who took up arms as a soldier of his country, fell into the hands of the Auxiliaries. He describes some features of his long-drawn-out torture, which began with minor pleasantries like the heavily-booted soldiers stamping on his stockinged feet and jabbing him in the abdomen with their bayonets just enough to make the blood run down his legs. Finding that after this initiation O'Malley was unable to walk, gentle British soldiers thereupon picked him up and flung him bodily onto the stone floor of a cell. Later two Auxiliary officers, both obviously sadistic neurotics, examined him. When his answer to their first question didn't please them, one of them struck him in the face, with all his weight in the blow, dropping him to his knees. Again and again this British gentleman and officer struck the bound and helpless Irishman, meanwhile threatening that when they learned his identity, his mother would suffer for his obstinacy!

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Next the Briton heated a poker and made as if to jab it in the young man's eyes.That failing to frighten O'Malley into answering to his taste, he resumed his blows. O'Malley fell again and again; every feature of his face was cut and swollen, and he was blinded by blood. In a last passion the crusader for British ideals gripped the helpless victim's throat and dug his nails into the flesh, meanwhile asking his companion, "Shall we do him in?" But they decided not to do Bernie O'Mally in for awhile, and they never got around to it in his case; in hundreds of other cases they get around to "doing in" their captives. But if it is thought that testimony from members of the patriotic party should be offset by testimony from the other side, here are two bits of evidence supplied by the Countess of Fingall, the wife of one officer in the British Army and mother of another. "Presently the British Government made one of the worst mistakes they had ever made, even in Ireland . . . They increased the numbers of the R. I. C. with new recruits, many ex-soldiers fresh from the battlefieldsand some ex-convicts fresh from goal. The supply of dark green cloth being limited, these appeared half in their old khaki and half in R. 1. C. uniform, and were christened after a famous old pack of Hounds, the 'Black and Tans.' In addition, a new force was formed, called the Auxiliaries. These were mostly ex-officers, many of them shell-shocked. They had little or no discipline, being all of equal rank. Some were Irishmen, wanting any job after the War, and little knowing what they were going to be asked to do. They were dropped down in barracks throughout the country, where they led as unsuitable a life as could be chosen for men still war-shattered. Their

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barracks were fortified with steel shutters and barbed wire entanglements, as though they were in dug-outs in France. But here they lived in the midst of a populace where any man's hand or any woman's, might be against them. No social life was possible, and they spent their days in their fortified barracks, with occasional lorry drives at breakneck speed through the country, leaving terror and destruction behind them. They drank a great deal, and their usual raiding time was at night, when the villages trembled at the sound of their lorries coming through the dark and quiet country. As well they might tremble. "A policeman had been shot. It was the signal for a reprisal, and a reprisal meant the burning of a village. Very often the inhabitants had nothing to do with the first outrage, the perpetrators of which usually came from a distance. Then the neighbouring Big House might be burnt down, in turn, as a counter-reprisal. And so it went on, following the circle. "One of those days, as we drove to Dublin from Killen, our car was pushed into the ditch by a lorry load of drunken Black and Tans.t'