THE FALLACY OF IRISH HISTORY.

"WE are on the eve," says Sir Stafford Northcote, "of a struggle for the Union." Evidently you are, and the struggle concerns us in Canada and the United States as well as you, for if you let the enemies of Anglo-Saxon civilization get the better of you in the mother country, fresh force will be added to their attacks here. The masters of the Caucus intend apparently to carry the elections by the help of the Irish vote, which is ranked as equal in importance with party discipline in pages which speak their mind; and the price which, as the bargain made by Dr. Pankhurst shows, they will have to pay to their ally in one form or another, is the dismemberment of the country, for an Irish legislature, as the blindest see, means speedy if not immediate separation. Everything has been done that could be done by Radical journals to foster what is called the Irish revolution, to enhance its prestige, to unbrace the sinew of national resistance, to prepare the public mind for a concession which the writers did not venture to name. Extreme Toryism also holds out its hand, for its factious purposes, to the leaders of rebellion, as Sir Stafford Northcote knows. The gravest part of the situation to the anxious eye of an onlooker appears to be the feeble and wavering condition of public sentiment. England is moulting. Opinions on all subjects, political, social, and religious, are just now in a state of flux which makes it difficult to organise resistance to anything aggressive and armed with votes. Combined with this uncertainty is a levity which turns from serious questions, and pays more attention to the sports of beardless boyhood than to the perils of the nation. Among the artisans trade interests probably prevail over all others, and there is a socialistic sympathy with the agrarian aspect of the rebellion. The Government proposes, by its Irish Franchise Bill, to put political weapons into the hands of people who avow beforehand their intention of turning them against the State. task set before the Liberal party was that of guiding England and helping to guide Europe in the final transition from the hereditary to the elective system, and putting elective government on such a footing that it might be a government of reason and justice, not of passion. But from this task the Liberals have turned to link themselves with socialism, agrarianism, the revolution in the relations between the sexes, and all the other social movements of change, though, when the flood-gates are opened, if a cataclysm should ensue, as ensue it well may, they have no government or authority of any kind to meet it except organised faction, under the specious name of party, draped

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in the old robes of feudal monarchy-not even the safeguard, no trifling one, of a written constitution. There are independent Liberals not a few, it is to be hoped, like Mr. Leatham, who see that it is their duty to adjourn, if necessary, all questions between them and other loyal citizens till the Union is out of peril. But the force of the Caucus is great, as we on this side of the water know too well, and the national cause is weighted with the unpopularity of absentee landlordism, and of an aristocratic reaction which the chief of the Conservative party labours to make as narrow and repulsive as he can, though he vainly tries, by economical demagogism, to mask the politics of caste. If a patriotic leader, independent of faction, untainted by class interest, and true to national unity, would appear, the people, bewildered as they are by the vacillations and the factious divisions of their rulers, would probably still follow him; but one might as well expect an angel to descend from heaven. The man may come, as there is plenty of force left in England; but he will come only after some sort of convulsion, called by necessity to the front to reconquer what will have been lost.

I am not going into the general question, nor am I going to encroach on the domain of statesmanship by propounding an Irish policy. My point is historical, and my aim is to help in removing from the national conscience a fancied burden of historical guilt, which, if it be not removed, may sit heavy on the spirit of the nation in the day of battle. Englishmen generally are under the impression that they have done Ireland some extraordinary and unparalleled wrong, in expiation of which they are bound for ever not only to relieve Irish distress, however caused, and receive curses as their reward, but to agree to every concession which Irish agitators demand, and to bear meekly every outrage which Irish agitators choose to inflict. Wrong was done in the dark past to the native race and to the popular religion of Ireland, though in its perpetration no living Englishman or living Englishman's father had any part; but even in the dark past it was not extraordinary or unparalleled wrong. The belief that it was is an illusion created in part by the fallacious habit of historians who treat British history as a subject by itself, unconnected with the history of Europe, and thus produce the impression that the misdeeds of bygone times were special manifestations of English character, when they ought in truth to be ascribed to the spirit of the age. Even Macaulay is an instance of this tendency. Great Britain and Ireland are islands, and their history is to a considerable extent insular, but they are not in an ocean by themselves.

So far as history is concerned, there are two main fountains of Irish calamity, the bitter waters of both of which have continued to flow even to the present day. One is the Norman Conquest, the other

is the great European schism which gave birth to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Norman Conquest led to the formation of the Pale, to the long conflicts of races, and to the enmities which it bred. A Roman Catholic writer so respectable as Ozanam permits himself to speak of "the English archers who invaded and enslaved Ireland." He must have known well that the invaders were Normans, sailing under the banner of the Papacy; that the enterprise was part of the cycle of Norman conquest, itself a sequel of the great migration of the barbarians; that it was the supplement of the Norman invasion of England; and that it was in like manner promoted and sanctified by the centralising policy of Rome. The English had no more to do with it than the conquered Mexicans had to do with the Spanish conquest of Peru. They had themselves resisted the Norman, manfully, while the Irish doubly invited him; for while the Romanising ecclesiastics called him in to protect their privileges and property against the aggressions of the chiefs, an Irish chief called him in as his ally and avenger in a clan feud. Irish feebleness and self-betrayal were not British crime. That the strong have always a right to subjugate the weak is a theory which would make the world a robber's den ; yet there was an age of conquest preceding the settlement of Europe, as there was a stone age, and an age of glaciers, and we must accept its legacies as we accept the other legacies of the historical and geological past. That conquest would extend its march from England to Ireland was a moral certainty. Geography has manifestly and inextricably linked the destinies of the two islands, which, if they were torn asunder by disunion to-morrow, would be soon joined again by fresh conquest. Never had a people less ground for imputing anything to another people than the Irish have for charging the English people with the consequences of the Norman Conquest.

So with the other and more recent sources of Irish woe. The Catholic monarchies of Europe conspired with the Papacy to extirpate Protestantism and liberty with sword and faggot. The British islands were of course drawn into the struggle. The native Irish, following the religious bent of their race as well as the dictates of local antipathy, cast in their lot with the Catholic powers and seconded the Armada. As a weak and outlying portion of the confederacy, they suffered cruelly by the fortune of war, yet they endured nothing which they would not have inflicted, nor a tithe of what their confederates inflicted, in the way of persecution on the Protestants, wherever Catholicism had power. In 1641, inflamed at once by agrarian vengeance and religious hatred, they rose again and slaughtered every Protestant on whom they could lay hands, as (if the language of some of their orators and journalists is to be

trusted) they would, as soon as they were free from the restraint of the Imperial Government, slaughter the objects of their hatred at the present hour. Rinuccini, the papal envoy in Ireland, triumphantly reports in his despatches that in battle no prisoners were taken by the Catholics, but every Protestant was cut down not only on the field but in the flight. Cromwell refused quarter to the garrisons of two towns taken by storm after summons to surrender, wherein he acted in strict accordance with the laws of war in that age; while not only in Ireland, but over Europe, quarter had been continually refused by the Catholic armies to the helpless inhabitants as well as to the garrisons of conquered towns. The latter part of the same century found the Irish again arrayed under what was no doubt their natural banner, as auxiliaries of the last Stuart king and his patron, the despot of France, in their deadly attack at once upon Protestantism and British liberty. The Celtic Catholic Parliament at Dublin doomed by act of attainder every Protestant proprietor, including the women and infants, to confiscation and death; and we may guess what the fate of the defenders of Londonderry would have been had they fallen into the hands of the besiegers. Having narrowly escaped with its life after a fearful struggle, Protestantism bound down its mortal enemy with a penal code, the memory of which, like that of all works of intolerance of which the period was full, is thrice hateful, but which was framed, as we are bound to recollect, by men who had read their own deathwarrant in the Catholic act of attainder. Where Catholicism reigned the Inquisition was in full activity, and the autos da fé were going on. The revocation of the Edict and the dragonnades were present to every heart; England and Ireland were full of Protestant exiles. The memory of Tilly, and even of Alva, was as fresh as in our day is the memory of the wars of Napoleon. With fear, severity abated. After the viceroyalty of Chesterfield, though intolerance and exclusion continued, persecution was pretty well over, though the autos da fé were not. In the meantime the valour of the Irish brigades had been working the cruel will of the Catholic powers, while in our own day about the last stand against Italian independence was made by an Irish army in the service of the Pope.

In the sixteenth century another ruthless force, also European, was in action. This was the era of monarchical centralization. The Tudor monarchy, rising in its might out of the wreck of conquered feudalism, trod the same path as its compeers. Cruelly it enforced its authority in England, still more cruelly it pressed, through its lieutenants, the subjugation of Ireland, where the struggle presented the hideous aspect which is presented by every struggle between civilised or half-civilised men and savages; by the war of the American with the red Indian, and of the French with the Arab and

the Annamite. If the hapless Celtic tribes of those days whose land was confiscated for what the Tudor Government styled treason in their chiefs could rise again, though they would rise in startling garb, they would be entitled to restoration as well as to pity; nor can it be doubted that the popular feeling about the land question has retained the traces of these iniquities; but it is as preposterous to identify the sitting tenant of the present day with the tribesman, or the sitting tenant's demands with the tribesman's wrongs, as it would be to identify Lord Spencer with a lieutenant of the Tudors. The representative of the tribesman is at least as likely to be found in the labourer, on whom the tenant-farmer too often tramples like the harshest of landlords, as in the tenant-farmer. It is equally preposterous to charge the English people specially with the unjust operation of feudal land laws which prevailed throughout Europe, and from which nobody has suffered more than themselves.

In 1782 Ireland extorted independence. And now Irish traducers of England take different lines. Some call the Parliament at Dublin English, and charge England with its corruption and mismanagement. Others call it Irish, and charge England with being unjust to its oratorical glories. As it was the offspring of a revolt against England, her responsibility for its acts can hardly be unqualified. After a duration of seventeen years, Irish independence ended in a civil war of friends, amidst which the only powers of mercy were the English soldiers, Abercromby and Cornwallis. Government perished in the wreck of society, and nothing was left to avert an indefinite reign of sanguinary anarchy but the military force of England. Under similar circumstances Cromwell, like a strong man, had looked the situation in the face, and at once united Ireland to England. Pitt being not strong, but only stiff, bought a union from the profligate Irish aristocracy, and thus left a fatal stain on a measure which otherwise would have been entirely right and essential to the salvation of the weaker, though more numerous, race in Ireland.

The restrictions on Irish trade again, though utterly detestable, were dictated not by English malignity but by the commercial policy which then held all Europe in dark thraldom, and against which Adam Smith was preparing to write. Smith's first great practical disciple, Pitt, tried to remove them, and was opposed by the Irishman Burke, whose speech upholding the necessity of the connection and the supremacy of England must, by the way, be pleasant reading for disunionists. Perhaps the injury done by the restrictions at the time has been overstated. Adam Smith says that when the ports were opened but few cattle were imported, and that the common people in Ireland were said to have violently opposed exportation. At the Union the restrictions finally fell, and for the last eighty years