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CHAPTER II. THE TWO IRELANDS:

NATIONAL IRELAND

OVER against the British "Colony " stands the Ireland of the people-the national Ireland of history, the Ireland which England has not dared to exterminate, and which she has been unable in seven centuries either to conciliate or to absorb. It is in this Ireland that a political and social regeneration is slowly going forward, the results of which are still incomplete.

This Ireland is to be defined and delimited in a negative way. All those who belong neither to the "Garrison " nor to the "Colony" may be classed within it. It is mainly, but not exclusively, Catholic. It has won and continues to win many recruits from the Protestant ranks, as, on the other hand, many Catholics rally to the support of the "Garrison." There is no homogeneity in its ethnic origins; it includes descendants of the old Gaels, of the Danish invaders, of the Anglo-Normans, of the English of Elizabeth and of Cromwell. The great-grand-children of the Ironsides rub shoulders in its ranks with the greatgrand-children of the old Celtic chiefs, the greater number of whom are now to be found, as Sir Jonah Barrington has said, among the coal-porters and quay-labourers of Dublin.

It was, as we have said, in the seventeenth century, under the strong hand of the Protector, that this national Ireland was formed, through the braying and fusing together of all the Irish of that day, of all the former Occupants of Erin. The plantations and massacres turned the conquered into a rabble of miserable and pitiful helots without land, law, or rights of any kind.

The aristocracy was destroyed; the bourgeoisie had fled or had been run to earth; the peasant democracy, in the phrase of Lord Derby, was "nothing more than a part of the live stock upon the estate of the landlord." A century went by, and with the relaxation of the Penal Laws in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the period of freedom from 1782 to 1795, an improvement set in. Ireland, by means of commerce and education, began to reconstruct for herself an independent middle class, taught in good classical schools by old priests with a continental education. There was a Limerick draper in those times the story is still told by his descendants-who would recite Homer for half an hour without a mistake. His eldest son translated Horace. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 enabled Catholics, who had been electors since 1793, to hold seats in Parliament. But the same Act withdrew the vote from the greater part of the peasantry. It opened public offices to Catholics; but this was a vain concession, for they were still excluded by custom and practice. In certain respects the concession was even hurtful, for it whetted the appetites of all the renegades, Whigs, and opportunists, made them eligible for governmental patronage, and thus destroyed Catholic solidarity. Soon afterwards the Great Famine and emigration dealt a mortal blow to the peasantry and even to the middle classes, for the latter were recruited from the peasants, and that source was now exhausted. It was Mr. Gladstone, who, as everyone knows, in 1869 opened the era of those great reforms which were, if not to make Ireland wholly free, at least to liberate her from most of her chains. Legislation was passed which gave the peasantry security of tenure, and led the way to a scheme of voluntary land purchase. In 1884 the Suffrage was made quasi-universal, and in 1898 a system of elective local administration was established. But

I Ireland had, in 1832, 92,152 electors out of 7,767,401 inhabitants, i.e., 119 per cent. (Acts of 1829 and 1832). An Act of 1850 slightly enlarged the Irish electorate, which the English reforms of 1867-8 did not touch; in 1868 Ireland had 222,450 electors. The Act of 1884

Ireland did not succeed in obtaining either a government of her choice, or the political reforms which, by whatever names, they may be called, would confer autonomy upon her.

way.

Her political evolution has stopped half

Stripped of her aristocracy, with no leaders except the clergy, cruelly decimated and drained by the everlasting curse of emigration, Ireland still finds in the peasantry her most numerous class and her best support. The farmers or tenants, who are now legally invested with real rights, and with guarantees against the landlords, although in many respects they are from the social point of view still enslaved, are tending to become by purchase the owners of the soil. But the labourers and agricultural workers are in poorer case. They have neither decent homes nor an assured wage, for if there is a shortage of labour in Ireland, there is also a shortage of regular work for the labourers. Industry is in a very reduced condition, and the working classes naturally share in the depression. Finally, the middle class, which was so profoundly affected by the Great Famine, is regaining its ground, but only by slow and difficult stages, for lack of opportunity. As a consequence, they are still weak both in numbers and in culture; their secondary education is bad, and higher education is practically closed to them; and they have little wealth, for Irish commerce and industry are in a stagnant condition. Moreover, they are thrown back, by an unintelligent system of education, upon the so-called liberal professions, and at their highest can only hope to reach the level of the Protestant bourgeoisie, without becoming really one with it. The Protestants are a fallen aristocracy, and they are contemptuous of the Catholics, who are a rising democracy.

It would be pleasant to believe that the various classes which make up national Ireland have derived from their finally put Ireland on the same electoral footing as England; in 1886 she had 742,120 electors in a population of 5,174,836, or 14 per cent. (Comte de Franqueville, Le Gouvernment et le Parlement Britanniques, Paris, 1887, II., p. 300-325).

common misfortunes and their common struggles such wisdom as would lead them to confront England and the English colony in a solid and coherent mass, free from division and strong in unity. Unfortunately it would seem to be a very general law that slavery and suffering engender dissension, and excite party against party. Each party has the same end before it, the salvation and liberty of the country; but this end is understood in various ways, and there is no agreement on the methods of attaining it. Ireland, during her ascent in the nineteenth century, has given birth to political divisions, and from the time of O'Connell's first triumphs she has hardly once achieved, even under Parnell, that perfect political cohesion which is no doubt a chimera, and which in any case the conqueror can so easily break, and has so much interest in breaking. The Liberator found his enemies in Young Ireland, and Young Ireland had to encounter the opposition of John Mitchel and the Revolutionaries. Democratic, or (to use the consecrated term) "Nationalist " Ireland has always had its factions, not to speak of those perverts who have gone over to Unionism, sometimes from conviction-for anything may happenand sometimes from interest and ambition, as did Keogh, who in 1852 betrayed the hopes of the constitutional party. It is an example which will never lack imitators. We may surely accept it as a platitude that political divisions of men in the same social strata may be referred in origin to their temperament rather than to their doctrines. If we put on one side, then, the moderates and the opportunists, and on the other the more violent and extreme parties, we find ourselves confronted in Ireland with the constitutional Nationalists, who are the most numerous and most powerful party, and the Separatist minority-the Intransigeants or Extremists, the adherents of "Physical Force," who are the successors and modern emulators of the old Fenians.

I. SEPARATISM OR "PHYSICAL FORCE."

Fenianism, or "physical force" that is to say, revolutionary action, by conspiracy or armed rebellion, with the overthrow of British power in Ireland and the separation of Ireland from England as the end in view, is but one phase in the eternal war of the two countries. It is the secret war which has replaced open war since the time when Ireland ceased to be in a position to fight her powerful neighbour on equal terms. The first great date in the new period is the Insurrection of 1798, and its first great man is Theobald Wolfe Tone, closely followed by Robert Emmet, the young and generous martyr of the patriotic rebellion. The gospel of "Physical Force" was discredited for a long while by the success, rather apparent perhaps perhaps than real, of O'Connell and Constitutional agitation; but it awoke again to life towards the middle of the nineteenth century amid the horrors of the Great Famine and the stir of Continental revolutions. With John Mitchel it created that movement of revolt into which Young Ireland was drawn, and which with Smith O'Brien Came to a miserable endkilled rather by the thunderbolt of the clergy, than by the powder of the British army.

It reappeared in a new form in 1858, 1865, and 1867, under the name of Fenianism, with Stephens and O'Donovan Rossa, aided by support from America, and made itself active through secret societies, raids, and coups de main. But the Revolution failed to come into being, and the movement fell into the ways of crime, and was dishonoured by the outrages of the Invincibles and the dynamiters. But although insurrection and rebellion have proved abortive, and conspiracy given way to anarchy, the revolutionary spirit is not yet dead in Ireland. It has survived its reverses, altering its methods but not its doctrines, and we recognise its spirit in the intransigeant Separatism" of to-day.

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