Part 19 (1/2)
”YOUNG IRELAND.”
The camp and council chamber of the ”Young Ireland” party was the editor's room of _The Nation_ newspaper. There it found its inspiration, and there its plans were matured--so far, that is, as they can be said to have been ever matured. For an eminently readable and all things considered a wonderfully impartial account of this movement, the reader cannot do better than consult Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's ”Four Years of Irish History,” which has the immense advantage of being history taken at first hand, written that is by one who himself took a prominent part in the scenes which he describes.
The most interesting figure in the party had, however, died before those memorable four years began. Thomas Davis, who was only thirty at the time of his death in 1845, was a man of large gifts, nay, might fairly be called a man of genius. His poetry is, perhaps, too national to be appreciated out of Ireland, yet two, at least, of his ballads, ”Fontenoy” and ”The Sack of Baltimore,” may fairly claim to compare with those of any contemporary poet. His prose writings, too, have much of the same charm, and, if he had no time to become a master of any of the subjects of which he treats, there is something infectious in the very spontaneousness and, as it were, untaught boyish energy of his Irish essays.
The whole movement in fact was, in the first instance, a literary quite as much as a political one. Nearly all who took part in it--Gavan Duffy, John Mitch.e.l.l, Meagher, Dillon, Davis himself--were very young men, many fresh from college, all filled with zeal for the cause of liberty and nationality. The graver side of the movement only showed itself when the struggle with O'Connell began. At first no idea of deposing, or even seriously opposing the great leader seems to have been intended. The attempt on O'Connell's part to carry a formal declaration against the employment under any circ.u.mstances of physical force was the origin of that division, and what the younger spirits considered ”truckling to the Whigs” helped to widen the breach. When, too, O'Connell had partially retired into the background, his place was filled by his son, John O'Connell, the ”Head conciliator,” between whom and the ”Young Irelanders” there waged a fierce war, which in the end led to the indignant withdrawal of the latter from the Repeal council.
Before matters reached this point, the younger camp had been strengthened by the adhesion of Smith O'Brien, who, though not a man of much intellectual calibre, carried no little weight in Ireland. His age--which compared to that of the other members of his party, was that of a veteran--his rank and position as a county member, above all, his vaunted descent from Brian Boroimhe, all made him an ally and a convert to be proud of. Like the rest he had no idea at first of appealing to physical force, however loudly an abstract resolution against it might be denounced. Resistance was to be kept strictly within the const.i.tutional limits, indeed the very year of his junction with this the extreme left of the Repeal party, Smith O'Brien's most violent proceeding was to decline to sit upon a railway committee to which he had been summoned, an act of contumacy for which he was ordered by the House of Commons into the custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms, and committed to an extemporized prison, by some cruelly declared to be the coal-hole.
”An Irish leader in a coal-hole!” exclaims Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, indignantly, can more unworthy statement be conceived? ”Regullus in a barrel, however,” he adds, rather grandly, ”was not quite the last one heard of Rome and its affairs!”
In Ireland matters were certainly sad enough and serious enough without any such serio-comic incidents. Famine was already stalking the country with giant strides, and no palliative measures as yet proposed seemed to be of the slightest avail. Early in January, 1847, O'Connell left on that journey of his which was never completed, and by the middle of May Ireland was suddenly startled by the news that her great leader was dead.
The effect of his death was to produce a sudden and immense reaction. A vast revulsion of love and reverence sprang up all over the country; an immense sense of his incomparable services, and with it a vehement anger against all who had opposed him. Upon the ”Young Ireland” party, as was inevitable, the weight of that anger fell chiefly, and from the moment of O'Connell's death whatever claim they had to call themselves a national party vanished utterly. The men ”who killed the Liberator”
could never again hope to carry with them the suffrages of any number of their countrymen.
This contumely, to a great degree undeserved, naturally reacted upon the subjects of it. The taunt of treachery and ingrat.i.tude flung at them wherever they went stung and nettled. In the general reaction of grat.i.tude and affection for O'Connell, his son John succeeded easily to the position of leader. The older members of the Repeal a.s.sociation thereupon rallied about him, and the split between them and the younger men grew deeper and wider.
A wild, impracticable visionary now came to play a part in the movement.
A deformed misanthrope, called James Lalor, endowed with a considerable command of vague, pa.s.sionate rhetoric, began to write incentives to revolt in _The Nation_, These growing more and more violent were by the editor at length prudently suppressed. The seed, however, had already sown itself in another mind. John Mitch.e.l.l is described by Mr. Justin McCarthy as ”the one formidable man amongst the rebels of '48; the one man who distinctly knew what he wanted, and was prepared to run any risk to get it.” Even Mitch.e.l.l, it is clear, would never have gone as far as he did but for the impulse which he received from the crippled desperado in the background. Lalor was, in fact, a monomaniac, but this Mitch.e.l.l seems to have failed to perceive. To him it was intolerable that any human being should be willing to go further and to dare more in the cause of Ireland than himself, and the result was that after awhile he broke away from his connection with _The Nation_, and started a new organ under the name of _The United Irishmen_, one definitely pledged from the first to the policy of action.
From this point matters gathered speedily to a head. Mitch.e.l.l's newspaper proceeded to fling out challenge after challenge to the Government, calling upon the people to gather and to ”sweep this island clear of the English name and nation.” For some months these challenges remained unanswered. It was now, however, ”'48,” and nearly all Europe was in revolution. The necessity of taking some step began to be evident, and a Bill making all written incitement of insurrection felony was hurried through the House of Commons, and almost immediately after Mitch.e.l.l was arrested.
Even then he seems to have believed that the country would rise to liberate him. The country, however, showed no disposition to do anything of the sort. He was tried in Dublin, found guilty, sentenced to fourteen years' transportation, and a few days afterwards put on board a vessel in the harbour and conveyed to Spike Island, whence he was sent to Bermuda, and the following April in a convict vessel to the Cape, and finally to Tasmania.
The other ”Young Irelanders,” stung apparently by their own previous inaction, thereupon rushed frantically into rebellion. The leaders--Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Dillon, and others--went about the country holding reviews of ”Confederates,” as they now called themselves, a proceeding which caused the Government to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and to issue a warrant for their arrest. A few more gatherings took place in different parts of the country, a few more ineffectual attempts were made to induce the people to rise, one very small collision with the police occurred, and then the whole thing was over. All the leaders in the course of a few days were arrested and Smith O'Brien and Meagher were sentenced to death, a sentence which was speedily changed into transportation. Gavan Duffy was arrested and several times tried, but the jury always disagreed, and in the end his prosecution was abandoned. The ”Young Ireland” movement, however, was dead, and never again revived.
LVII.
THE FAMINE.
All the time the earlier of the foregoing scenes were being enacted, the famine had been drawing its python grasp tighter and tighter around the unhappy island. The first symptoms of the dread potato disease showed themselves in the autumn of 1845, and even that year there was much suffering, though a trifle to what was to follow. Many remedies were tried, both to stop the blight and save the crops, but all alike proved unavailing. The next year the potatoes seemed to promise unusually well, and the people, with characteristic hopefulness, believed that their trouble was over. The summer, however, was very warm and wet, and with August there came on a peculiarly dense white fog, which was believed by all who were in Ireland at the time to have carried the blight with it in its folds. Whether this was the case or not, there is no doubt that in a single fatal night nearly the whole potato crop over the entire country blackened, and perished utterly. Then, indeed, followed despair.
Stupor and a sort of moody indifference succeeded to the former buoyancy and hopefulness. There was nothing to do; no other food was attainable.
The fatal dependence upon a single precarious crop had left the whole ma.s.s of the people helpless before the enemy.
Soon the first signs of famine began to appear. People were to be seen wandering about; seeking for stray turnips, for watercresses, for anything that would allay the pangs of hunger. The workhouses, detested though they were, were crammed until they could hold no single additional inmate. Whole families perished; men, women, and children lay down in their cabins and died, often without a sign. Others fell by the roadside on their way to look for work or seek relief. Only last summer, at Ballinahinch in Connemara, the present writer was told by an old man that he remembered being sent by his master on a message to Clifden, the nearest town, and seeing the people crawling along the road, and that, returning the same way a few hours later, many of the same people were lying dead under the walls or upon the gra.s.s at the roadside. That this is no fancy picture is clear from local statistics. No part of Ireland suffered worse than Galway and Mayo, both far more densely populated then than at present. In this very region of Connemara an inspector has left on record, having to give orders for the burying of over a hundred and thirty bodies found along the roads within his own district.
Mr. W.E. Forster, who, above all other Englishmen deserved the grat.i.tude of Ireland for his efforts during this tragic time, has left terrible descriptions of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness, especially in the west. ”The town of Westport,” he tells us in one of his reports, ”was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look--a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poor-house clamouring for soup-tickets. Our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer and pay clerks, beset by a crowd of beggars for work.” In another place ”the survivors,” he says, ”were like walking skeletons--the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. When there before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides many sheep and pigs owned in the village. But now the sheep were all gone--all the cows, all the poultry killed--only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared--no potatoes; no oats.”
One more extract more piteous even than the rest: ”As we went along our wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have no doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprentices.h.i.+p to want in which the Irish peasant had been trained, and by that lovely touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbour.”
Of course all this time there was no lack of preventative measures.
Large sums had been voted from the Treasury; stores of Indian corn introduced; great relief works set on foot. An unfortunate fatality seemed, however, to clog nearly all these efforts. Either they proved too late to save life, or in some way or other to be unsuitable to the exigencies of the case. Individual charity, too, came out upon the most magnificent scale. All Europe contributed, and English gold was poured forth without stint or stay. Still the famine raged almost unchecked.
The relief works established by the Government, with the best intentions possible, too often were devoted to the most curiously useless, sometimes even to actually harmful, objects. To this day ”Famine roads”
may be met with in the middle of snipe bogs, or skirting precipices where no road was ever wanted or could possibly be used. By the time, too, they were in full working order the people were, in many cases, too enfeebled by want and disease to work. For close upon the heels of the famine followed an epidemic hardly less fatal than itself. In the course of the two years that it raged over two hundred thousand people are said to have perished from this cause alone, and three times the number to have been attacked and permanently enfeebled by it.
In 1849 a Relief Act was pa.s.sed which established soup kitchens throughout the unions, where food was to be had gratis by all who required it. Long before this similar kitchens had been privately set on foot, and men and women had devoted themselves to the work with untiring energy and the most absolute self-devotedness. Of these self-appointed and unpaid workers a large number shared the fate of those whom they a.s.sisted. Indeed, it is one of the most singular features of the time that not only old, or feeble, or specially sensitive people died, but strong men, heads of houses--not regarded as by any means specially soft-hearted--raised, too, by circ.u.mstances out of reach of actual hunger, died--just as O'Connell had died--of sheer distress of mind, and the effort to cope with what was beyond the power of any human being to cope with. In the single county of Galway the records of the times show--as may easily be verified--an extraordinary number of deaths of this type, a fact which alone goes far to disprove those accusations of heartlessness and indifference which have in some instances been too lightly flung.
After the famine followed ruin--a ruin which swept high and low alike into its net. When the poor rate rose to twenty and twenty-five s.h.i.+llings in the pound it followed that the distinction between rich and poor vanished, and there were plenty of instances of men, accounted well off, who had subscribed liberally to others at the beginning of the famine, who were themselves seeking relief before the end. The result was a state of things which has left bitterer traces behind it than even the famine itself. The smaller type of landowners, who for the most part had kindly relations with their tenants, were swept away like leaves before the great storm, their properties fell to their creditors, and were sold by order of the newly established Enc.u.mbered Estates Courts.