Part 59 (1/2)
In this sense nationality a.s.suredly belongs to Ireland. More, perhaps, than among any other people on earth, is there for the great bulk of them ”community of traditions and feeling,”
binding them together into ”a firm and indestructible unity;”
and who shall say that they feel no love for their past, because that past has been clouded with sorrow? Nay, this fact makes the past dearer, and tends all the more to direct their hopes and fears to the same future; a future, indeed, still dim and uncertain, and not to be named with perfect certainty, but wrapped in mists like the morning; yet the faint flush of the dawn is already there that shall pale and die away when the full orb of the sun appears.
The reader may remember what was said of the unanimity so striking in all Irishmen, wherever they may be found; that, though private disputes may be taken up among them with such ardor that their quarrels have become proverbial, when the question refers to their country or their G.o.d, in a moment they are united, suddenly transformed into steady friends, ready to shed their blood side by side for the great objects which entirely absorb their natures.
This feeling it is which forms the soul of a nation. Wherever this is to be found, there is an indestructible nationality; wherever it is absent, there is only a dead body, however strong may seem its government, however vast its armies, however high its so-called culture and refinement.
These reflections being kept in view, judicious men will agree that, among Europeans at least, there is scarcely any other nationality so strong and vigorous as the Irish. Their traditional feeling keeps their past ever present to their eyes; their ardent nature hopes ever against hope; misfortunes which would utterly break down and dishearten any other people, leave them still full of bright antic.i.p.ations, and, as they seem to weep over the cold body of a dear mother--Erin, their country-- they think only of her resurrection.
But are there not two nations among them--two nations radically opposed to each other and incapable of coalescing? Supposing a resurrection of the people, which of the two is to prevail--the numerical majority, or the so far influential minority? In either event, it is fair to suppose a new state of helotism for the one party or the other. Is this the spectacle which the regenerated nation is likely to present?
In speaking of the resurrection of Ireland, the old, ma.s.sive, compact body of the people, the venerable race, Celtic in its aspirations and tendencies, if not altogether in its origin, has always been kept in view; and that anomalous, foreign excrescence which has so steadily refused to a.s.similate with the ma.s.s, and has until our days remained ”encamped” in Ireland, as the Turks are justly said to have remained ”encamped” in Europe, has never entered into our reckoning.
The true Irishman has ever been catholic--the word is used in its grammatical and not in its religious sense--in fellows.h.i.+p.
The race, as now const.i.tuted, is a.s.suredly of mixed origin, and large drafts of foreign population have been added from time to time to the primitive stock, which has always been kind to admit, absorb, and make them finally Celtic. Strongbow's Normans were not the last who submitted to that process; as was seen, many Cromwellians became the fathers, or grandfathers at least, of as st.u.r.dy an Irish branch as ever flourished in the strong air of the country.
But a comparatively small body of men has doggedly refused to submit to this process, and continued to this day an English or Lowland Scotch colony on the Irish soil. The future of Ireland does not take them in, for the very simple reason that they are not of her, they do not belong to her, they are as much foreigners to-day as they ever were. Therefore do we admit the existence of two nations, if people are pleased to call them so, in Ireland, but of one nation only have we written. The only question in regard to this second ”nation” is: What will become of them in the future? Are they, in their turn, to become helots, after having vainly striven so long to make helots of the others? G.o.d forbid! No true Irishman nourishes in his soul such feelings of retaliation or revenge.
a.s.suredly, they will be prevented from disturbing any longer the public order, and forced at length to respect the majority, or rather, the ma.s.s of their countrymen. No one can object to having such a necessary measure imposed upon them. In the many civil discords which, for more than a century and a half, have disgraced the north of Ireland, they have almost invariably been the aggressors. The government openly taking their part for a long time, they had the whole field to themselves, and what use they made of their privilege, and how they improved their opportunity, is known to all. When, at last, the public authorities could no longer pretend to ignore their hateful spirit, and began to show some signs of protecting the hitherto much-abused majority, by forbidding those odious processions to which the others always attached such importance, they gave themselves the airs of a persecuted body of men, and pretended that henceforth their lives, and those of their wives and children, were no longer safe.
The province of Ulster being closed to them as a field of operations, they transferred to Upper Canada the exhibition of their blood-thirsty hatred, and on several occasions the Catholic population of the country had to protect their churches, musket in hand. Even in the United States they have rendered themselves odious to the people by foisting their spirit of strife on a land where they cannot but be strangers, and by staining some of the streets of New York with blood, in order to gratify their senseless animosity.
It is surely time that an end be put to such absurd and dangerous antics, not abroad only, but at home. In the new order of things now dawning upon Ireland, there can no longer be room for them; and the very name of Orangeman must disappear forever from the vocabulary of the new nation, to the joy of all peaceful and law-abiding citizens.
That is all the persecution they need expect. Not only will there be room for them still in the country of their birth, but of course they will have their due share in all the privileges of citizens.h.i.+p. Political distinctions between themselves and the old race will be unknown; social distinctions will be a question for themselves to settle. Should they show the slightest desire of combining with the majority of their countrymen, these latter will be generous enough to forget the past, and perhaps the others may imitate their predecessors, the Danes, the Normans, and even some of their Cromwellian kin, and become, at last, Hibernis hiberniores.
What is said of political and social distinctions will hold good also for religious tenets. Let them, if they choose, continue to stand by their Presbyterian dogmas, provided they do not quarrel with the majority for professing what they love to believe; but that belief must come to an external and public profession. They will often hear the bells of Catholic churches; as they pa.s.s outside, if they do not enter, the strains of the glorious music and n.o.ble anthems, resounding within, will fall on their ears; they will see the statue of the Blessed Virgin borne through the streets on the 15th of August, amid showers of snowy blossoms, falling from the innocent hands of children; all this they must endure, if it be so hard to endure it; but this is not persecution. Even to their eyes, if their heart be not frozen by a cold belief, the sight will bear some attractions. And if they come to think, that what is oldest in Christianity is the best, and that, after all, Catholicity has something in it which makes life sweet and pleasant, it can scarcely be held a crime in the universal Church to open her arms and receive back to her bosom those wandering and so long obstinate children.
When will all this come to pa.s.s? Who can tell? But stranger things than these have already taken place in Ireland, and we are confident that future historians of the race will have to record greater wonders still, and facts more stubborn and difficult of explanation.
At all events, should the inflexible Puritanism of the Scotch colony stand proof against the allurements of a motherly and tender-hearted Church, they must at least become subject to the iron laws of population and absorption. When the public statutes are no longer drawn up for their special benefit, when no new swarms of brethren come to swell their ranks, when they are abandoned to the merciless laws of loss and gain in numbers, then will people soon see on which side is true morality, and by which the ordinances of G.o.d are really respected; then will many vapid accusations against the holy Catholic Church of themselves disappear, and the eyes of men will open to the great fact that Ireland must be and remain one in race, feeling, and, above all, in religion. The foreign element will have dwindled to insignificance, if it shall not have utterly disappeared. Indeed, it may be safely predicted that the day will arrive when the announcement of the natural demise of the last Puritan in Ireland will appear in the daily newspapers as a curious piece of intelligence, not devoid of a certain interest.
Though moral force, as the agent of the regeneration of Ireland, has been our theme all through, we would not have our readers infer that Irishmen should adopt the do-nothing policy, and leave to G.o.d alone the work of raising them up. The moral force spoken of is that of human beings endowed with activity and determination; steady and persevering in the pursuit of well- organized plans of their own conception.
Let Irishmen lift up their eyes and behold what they might do, did they only appreciate their strength and husband it. Dire calamities, which G.o.d designed from the first to convert into blessings, have scattered them over the world, and brought out that power of expansion which was always in their nature, but lay dormant and cramped under the pressure of terrible circ.u.mstances. They again show themselves as that old race which three thousand years ago spread itself all over Europe and Asia.
They now bear in their hands an emblem which they had not then-- the cross of Christ! And the cross is the sign of universality in time and s.p.a.ce. To that sign, since the triumph of the Saviour on the day of his resurrection, is given the rule of the world till the end of time. Now that our globe is known at last, the cross must be planted all over its surface, and in this great work the Irish race is clearly destined to bear a conspicuous part.
In the fulfilment of that divine vocation they are dispersed, and whatever is dispersed is deprived of a great part of its strength. How can the disjecta membra, scattered far and wide by Typhon, become again Osiris? Under the guidance of G.o.d, by that great instrument of modern times, the power of a.s.sociation and organization, aided by a steady, energetic will.
Ezekiel has admirably described the process in his thirty- seventh chapter. The Lord must first speak: ”Ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. . . . Behold, I will send spirit into you, and ye shall live; and I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to grow over you, and will cover you with skin; and I will give you spirit, and ye shall live.”
All this seems to be the work of G.o.d alone, yet, in the very words of the prophet, the dry bones have their part to perform:
”As I prophesied, there was a noise, a commotion, and the bones came together, each one to his joint.”
There is the whole process; it supposes a noise, a commotion, a rising, an a.s.sembling together, and a fitting each one into his own joint. They possess an activity of their own, which they must use. And the phenomenon is to take place in the midst of ”a vast plain ”--two great continents--over the surface of which the ”bones” are found on every side, appearing ”exceeding dry.”
With what a power will that army be invested when it rises up and stands upon its feet! We may form some faint idea of it, when in our large cities any thing occurs to excite the interest and warm up the feeling of that apparently inert Celtic ma.s.s.
The largest halls constructed cannot contain the mult.i.tudes who have only read the announcement of a meeting, a lecture, or a charitable undertaking. Such scenes are witnessed every day along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Delaware Rivers; by the sh.o.r.es of Chesapeake Bay; in all the great centres of population dotting the Atlantic coast; in the heart of the continent along the winding course of the Mississippi and Missouri; and already, even in the far West, on the spreading sh.o.r.es of the Pacific Ocean. The same is occurring all over the inhabited portion of Australia and the adjacent islands. What power, then, would be theirs did those ”bones”
know how to come together each in his own joint!