slaves the vices of slavery took possession of the Irish, idleness and servility, falsehood and contempt for law. Despised by the Protestants, they learnt to despise themselves, and the feeling of social inferiority burnt into their souls. They bent under the yoke of the landlords, who, in their threefold capacity of landlords, Protestants, and magistrates, treated the Irish, as Lord Chesterfield put it, "worse than negroes."19 In such conditions poverty rapidly increased, till it became appalling. "We found the people heretics and idolators," said Burke.20 "We have, by way of improving their condition, rendered them slaves and beggars; they remain in all the misfortune of their old errors, and all the superadded misery of their recent punishment." In 1727 Swift declares that the peasants of Ireland "live worse than English beggars."21 Two years later he published his famous Modest Proposal. In the course of twenty years there were no less than three or four great famines. 400,000 persons perished in that of the year 1740-41, according to a contemporary. In 1741 one-third of the cottiers in Munster died of famine or fever.22 At length the poverty of the people and the oppression from which they suffered gave birth to outrages and popular risings directed against "rent" and "tithes," against the exactions of the landlords and of the Protestant clergy. From 1760 onwards the Whiteboys or as they were called in some places, Levellers, Houghers, Oakboys or Steelboys, spread terror through the country. This was the first purely agrarian movement in Ireland. Papists were hanged and transported wholesale. Repressive laws of terrible severity were enacted and applied with severity yet more terrible by the Irish 19 Lecky, op. cit. II., 291. 20 Quoted by Matthew Arnold, Irish Essays, p. 15. The population increased, it is true, for the poverty was too great to act as any restraint. Cf. Lecky, op. cit. II., 222. 21 A Short View of the State of Ireland. 22 Lecky, op. cit. II., 217 to 220. judges. But, in the long run, judges and hangmen proved powerless to cope with this jacquerie. There seems to be a retributive principle in nature which brings it to pass that the persecutor is commonly! more degraded than his victim. A Protestant writer23 tells us that the net effect of the Penal Laws upon Protestant Ireland was to taint the whole body politic with profound and widespread corruption. The morals of that privileged class, the "garrison," were, in truth, not long in becoming corrupted. Luxury brought with it a certain development of the arts, but a much greater development of gaming, licentiousness, and✔ extravagance.. The Squires and Squireens were needy, harsh, quarrelsome and dissipated, and they were often "absentees,"24 who handed over their rights to middlemen of low character. Lord Chesterfield declared towards the middle of the century that if as many landlords had been killed by the troops as Whiteboys, it would have been better for the public peace.25 Froude's description of the abandoned lives of the smaller gentry of the period 26 is well worth reading: "The Irish blackguard, the racing, drinking, duelling, swearing squireen, the tyrant of the poor, the shame and scandal of the order to which he affected to belong." Justice itself was corrupted at the fountain-head, for there was no habeas corpus in Ireland, and the judges and lawyers were mere Castle-hacks. "The poor," as Grattan said, "were struck out of the protection of the law, the rich out of its penalties." The Established Church, an authority rather temporal than spiritual, shared in all the abuses of the period. was, in Macaulay's phrase, "a church that filled the rich with good things and sent the hungry empty away." It 23 O'Connor Morris, Ireland, 1494-1868. Cambridge, 1898, p. 410. 24 Lecky, op. cit. II., 239. 25 Stanhope, History of England, V., 123. them as 20 The English in Ireland, I., 279, et seq. Arthur Young spoke of "the vermin of the country." See his account of their lives in his Tour in Ireland (II., 50 et seq.). See also the famous pamphlets of Swift. "A true Irish Bishop," declared Archbishop Bolton, “has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow rich, fat, and die."27 Moreover, the Protestants were divided against themselves. The Presbyterians of the North had greatly increased in numbers, as the result of a large Scotch immigration into Ulster after the Revolution. But the Episcopalians secured their exclusion from public office and emoluments. They were compelled to pay tithes to the Established Church, and Presbyterian marriages were declared null and void. A society which had fallen into such a state of demoralisation was not fit to enjoy the benefits of liberty, and we need not be surprised to find that the tyranny exercised over Catholics by Irish Protestants had a counterpart in the tyranny exercised over Irish Protestants in the eighteenth century by the Protestants of England. This tyranny was twofold, being in part legislative, and in part economic. The Irish Parliament-Catholics were not eligible to sit as members of it or even to vote at parliamentary elections-was made subordinate to the English Parliament and deprived of all real authority and initiative. It was a mere shadow, a caricature of a parliament, which Swift never wearied of ridiculing.28 Political subjection, as might be expected, resulted in commercial and industrial subjection. This had its origin in Henry VIII.'s time, but more especially in Cromwell's. It was the theory in those days that a colony or dependency existed only for the profit and advantage of the mothercountry, and by a system of carefully marshalled laws, passed between 1663 and 1669, England succeeded in completely ruining Irish industry and Irish trade. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the work had been accomplished and Swift, when he heard the customary toast of "Irish Manufactures," proposed, was wont to declare: "I drink no memories! "29 It was, of course, 27 O'Connor Morris, op. cit. II., 215. (Cf. Lecky, op. cit. 226 to 236) 28 See, for instance, Swift's The Legion Club. 29 Brodrick, Political Studies, London, 1879, p. 343. the Protestants who suffered most by this economic ruin, since Catholics were excluded from trade and industry! by the Penal Laws. The effects were soon felt, and, during the first half of the eighteenth century, there was a wholesale emigration of Presbyterians from Ulster. Most of them settled in America, where they became the bitterest enemies of England. 200,000 Presbyterians left the country in this way in the course of fifty years.30 The Protestants of Ireland endured this two-fold slavery with "abject servility," as an Irish writer puts it.31 But it is only fair to say that there were among them a few men of sufficiently independent spirit to protest against British tyranny and assert the rights of Ireland against the oppressor. As early as the year 1698 an Irish gentleman, named William Molyneux, a friend of Locke, had written a book, proving the Independence of the Irish Parliament upon historical grounds.32 This work the Parliament of England at once directed to be burned by the common hangman. Some time later Jonathan Swift published his Pamphlet on Manufactures (1720), his views on Ireland and his famous Drapier's Letters (1723), in which he denounced the oppression and abuses of the English Government, and proclaimed the wrongs of the colonists, setting out those of the Catholics to complete the picture.33 At once the Dean became the most popular man in Dublin, though he had never concealed his contempt for Papists and his dislike for Ireland, which he looked upon as a place of exile. When he was threatened with arrest the populace of the "Liberties" rose in a body to protect him, as it rose a century later to protect O'Connell. Soon afterwards Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher, aroused a new public spirit with his Querist, and awakened interest in the condition of the Catholics. At last, in the latter half of 30 Lecky, op. cit. II., 260 to 262. 31 Sir C. Gavan Duffy, Bird's-eye View of Irish History. 32 The Case of Ireland Stated, 1698. 33 J. Flack, Swift, son action politique en Irlande, Paris, 1886. the century, the Penal Laws were relaxed, and there sprang up in the colony an Irish party or "interest," opposed to the English party or "interest." Though it failed to reform those abuses, which were a source of profit to its members,34 it made it its business to govern Ireland for the benefit of the Irish instead of conducting the government in the interests of England. From this party came the Protestant Liberals or Irish "Whigs," first Flood and Lucas, then Burke, and above all Grattan. These men realised that Ireland was their country and began to lay aside hatred of the Papists, realising that oppression by England was a heavy price to pay for the pleasure of persecuting Catholics. The Irish Protestant never could be free," declared Grattan, "while the Irish Catholic was a slave." The idea of Irish nationality and Irish independence became popular, alike with Protestant and with Catholic, and both parties were soon to unite in the effort to secure its realisation.35 VI. THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND THE UNION Independence! It was the success of the American revolution that brought about the Independence of Ireland, and it was the reaction from the French revolution, or rather from its excesses, that was destined to destroy that independence. The events that illuminate the pages of Irish History during the last quarter of the eighteenth century are well known. When in 1776 war broke out between England and her American colonies, Ireland, being without means of defence, raised a militia of 40,000 34 They were called "Undertakers (i.e., of the public service). F 35 The question was, said Grattan, whether they were to be an English colony or an Irish nation. I See especially on this period the lives and speeches of Flood, Burke, Grattan, Curran and Plunket; the Life and Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone; the Cornwallis, Fitzwilliam and Castlereagh Correspondence, etc. Cf. Madden, Literary Remains of the United Irishmen, London, 1887-8. Gordon, History of the Rebellion of 1798, |