The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

[Milesian]

THE IRISH RACE IN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

by Rev. Aug. J. Thebaud, S.J.




PREFACE



COUNT JOSEPH DE MAISTRE, in his "Principe Generateur des Constitutions
Politiques" (Par. LXI.), says: "All nations manifest a particular
and distinctive character, which deserves to be attentively considered."

This thought of the great Catholic writer requires some development.

It is not by a succession of periods of progress and decay only
That nations manifest their life and individuality. Taking any
one of them at any period of its existence, and comparing it with
others, peculiarities immediately show themselves which give it a
particular physiognomy whereby it may be at once distinguished
from any other; so that, in those agglomerations of men which we
call nations or races, we see the variety everywhere observable
in Nature, the variety by which God manifests the infinite activity
of his creative power.

When we take two extreme types of the human species--the Ashantee
of Guinea, for instance, and any individual of one of the great
civilized communities of Europe-the phenomenon of which we speak
strikes us at once. But it may be remarked also, in comparing
nations which have lived for ages in contiguity, and held constant
intercourse one with the other from the time they began their
national life, whose only boundary-line has been a mountain-chain
or the banks of a broad river. They have each striking peculiarities
which individualize and stamp them with a character of their own.

How different are the peoples divided by the Rhine or by the
Pyrenees! How unlike those which the Straits of Dover run between!
And in Asia, what have the conterminous Chinese and Hindoos in
common beyond the general characteristics of the human species
which belong to all the children of Adam?

But what we must chiefly insist upon in the investigation we are
Now undertaking is, that the life of each is manifested by a
special physiognomy deeply imprinted in their whole history,
which we here call character. What each of them is their history
shows; and there is no better means of judging of them than by
reviewing the various events which compose their life.

For the various events which go to form what is called the
history of a nation are its individual actions, the spontaneous
energy of its life; and, as a man shows what he is by his acts,
so does a nation or a race by the facts of its history.

When we compare the vast despotisms of Asia, crystallized into
forms which have scarcely changed since the first settlement of
man in those immense plains, with the active and ever-moving
smaller groups of Europeans settled in the west of the Old World
since the dispersion of mankind, we see at a glance how the
characters of both may be read in their respective annals. And,
coming down gradually to less extreme cases, we recognize the
same phenomenon manifested even in contiguous tribes, springing
long ago, perhaps, from the same stock, but which have been
formed into distinct nations by distinct ancestors, although they
acknowledge a common origin. The antagonism in their character is
immediately brought out by what historians or annalists have to
say of them.

Are not the cruelty and rapacity of the old Scandinavian race
Still visible in their descendants? And the spirit of organization
displayed by them from the beginning in the seizure, survey, and
distribution of land--in the building of cities and castles--in
the wise speculations of an extensive commerce--may not all these
characteristics be read everywhere in the annals of the nations
sprung from that original stock, grouped thousands of years ago
around the Baltic and the Northern Seas?

How different appear the pastoral and agricultural tribes which
have, for the same length of time, inhabited the Swiss valleys and
mountains! With a multitude of usages, differing all, more or less,
from each other; with, perhaps, a wretched administration of
internal affairs; with frequent complaints of individuals, and
partial conflicts among the rulers of those small communities--with
all these defects, their simple and ever-uniform chronicles reveal
to us at once the simplicity and peaceful disposition of their
character; and, looking at them through the long ages of an obscure
life, we at once recognize the cause of their general happiness in
their constant want of ambition.

And if, in the course of centuries, the character of a nation has
changed--an event which seldom takes place, and when it does is
due always to radical causes--its history will immediately make
known to us the cause of the change, and point out unmistakably
its origin and source.

Why is it, for instance, that the French nation, after having lived
for near a thousand years under a single dynasty, cannot now find
a government agreeable to its modern aspirations? It is insufficient
to ascribe the fact to the fickleness of the French temper. During
ten centuries no European nation has been more uniform and more
attached to its government. If to-day the case is altogether
reversed, the fact cannot be explained except by a radical change
in the character of the nation. Firmly fixed by its own national
determination of purpose and by the deep studies of the Middle
Ages--nowhere more remarkable than in Paris, which was at that
time the centre of the activity of Catholic Europe--the French
mind, first thrown by Protestantism into the vortex of controversy,
gradually declined to the consideration of mere philosophical
utopias, until, rejecting at last its long-received convictions,
it abandoned itself to the ever-shifting delusions of opinions and
theories, which led finally to skepticism and unbelief in every
branch of knowledge, even the most necessary to the happiness of
any community of men. Other causes, no doubt, might also be assigned
for the remarkable change now under our consideration. The one we
have pointed out was the chief.

To the same causes, acting now on a larger scale throughout Europe,
we ascribe the same radical changes which we see taking place in
the various nations composing it: every thing brought everywhere
in question; the mind of all unsettled; a real anarchy of intellect
spreading wider and wider even in countries which until now had
stood firm against it. Hence constant revolutions unheard of
hitherto; nothing stable; and men expecting with awe a more
frightful and radical overturning still of every thing that makes
life valuable and dear.

Are not these tragic convulsions the black and spotted types
wherein we read the altered character of modern nations; are they
not the natural expression of their fitful and delirious life?

These considerations, which might be indefinitely prolonged, show
the truth of the phrase of Joseph de Maistre that "all nations
manifest a particular and distinctive character, which deserves
to be attentively considered."

The fact is, in this kind of study is contained the only possible
philosophy of history for modern times.

With respect to ages that have passed away, to nations which have
run their full course, a nobler study is possible--the more so
because inspired writers have traced the way. Thus Bossuet wrote
his celebrated "Discours." But he stopped wisely at the coming of
our Lord. As to the events anterior to that great epoch, he spoke
often like a prophet of ancient times; he seemed at times to be
initiated in the designs of God himself. And, in truth, he had
them traced by the very Spirit of God; and, lifted by his elevated
mind to the level of those sublime thoughts, he had only to touch
them with the magic of his style.

But of subsequent times he did not speak, except to rehearse
the well-known facts of modern history, whose secret is not yet
revealed, because their development is still being worked out,
and no conclusion has been reached which might furnish the key
to the whole.

There remains, therefore, but one thing to do: to consider
each nation apart, and read its character in its history. Should
this be done for all, the only practical philosophy of modern
history would be written. For then we should have accomplished
morally for men what, in the physical order, zoologists accomplish
for the immense number of living beings which God has spread
over the surface of the earth. They might be classified according
to a certain order of the ascending or descending moral scale.
We could judge them rightly, conformably with the standard of
right or wrong, which is in the absolute possession of the Christian
conscience. Brilliant but baneful qualities would no longer
impose on the credulity of mankind, and men would not be led
astray in their judgments by the rule of expediency or success
which generally dictates to historians the estimate they form and
inculcate on their readers of the worth of some nations, and the
insignificance or even odiousness of others.

In the impossibility under which we labor of penetrating, at
the present time, the real designs of Providence with respect to
the various races of men, so great an undertaking, embracing the
principal, if not all, modern races, would be one of the most
useful efforts of human genius for the spread of truth and virtue
among men.

Our purport is not of such vast import. We shall take in
these pages for the object of our study one of the smallest and,
apparently, most insignificant nations of modern Europe--the
Irish. For several ages they have lost even what generally
constitutes the basis of nationality, self-government; yet they have
preserved their individuality as strongly marked as though they
were still ruled by the O'Neill dynasty.

And we may here remark that the number of a people and the
size of its territory have absolutely no bearing on the estimate
which we ought to form of its character. Who would say that
the Chinese are the most interesting and commendable nation
on the surface of the globe? They are certainly the most ancient
and most populous; their code of precise and formal morality is
the most exact and clear that philosophers could ever dictate,
and succeed in giving as law to a great people. That code
has been followed during a long series of ages. Most discoveries
of modern European science were known to them long before
they were found out among us; agriculture, that first of arts,
which most economists consider as the great test whereby to
judge of the worth of a nation, is and always has been carried by
them to a perfection unknown to us. Yet, the smallest European
nationality is, in truth, more interesting and instructive than
the vast Celestial Empire can ever be--whose long annals
are all compassed within a few hundred pages of a frigid
narrative, void of life, and altogether void of soul.

But why do we select, among so many others, the Irish nation,
which is so little known, of such little influence, whose history
occupies only a few lines in the general annals of the world,
and whose very ownership has rested in the hands of foreigners
for centuries?

We select it, first, because it is and always has been thoroughly
Catholic, from the day when it first embraced Christianity;
and this, under the circumstances, we take to be the best proof,
not only of supreme good sense, but, moreover, of an elevated,
even a sublime character. In their martyrdom of three centuries,
the Irish have displayed the greatness of soul of a Polycarp,
and the simplicity of an Agnes. And the Catholicity which
they have always professed has been, from the beginning, of a
thorough and uncompromising character. All modern European
nations, it is true, have had their birth in the bosom of the
Church. She had nursed them all, educated them all, made
them all what they were, when they began to think of emancipating
themselves from her; and the Catholic, that is, the Christian
religion, in its essence, is supernatural; the creed of the
apostles, the sacramental system; the very history of Christianity,
transport man directly into a region far beyond the earth.

Wherever the Christian religion has been preached, nations
have awakened to this new sense of faith in the supernatural,
and it is there they have tasted of that strong food which made
and which makes them still so superior to all other races of men.
But, as we shall see, in no country has this been the case so
thoroughly as in Ireland. Whatever may have been the cause, the
Irish were at once, and have ever since continued, thoroughly
impregnated with supernatural ideas. For several centuries after
St. Patrick the island was "the Isle of Saints," a place midway
between heaven and earth, where angels and the saints of heaven
came to dwell with mere mortals. The Christian belief was
adopted by them to the letter; and, if Christianity is truth,
ought it not to be so? Such a nation, then, which received such
a thorough Christian education--an education never repudiated
one iota during the ages following its reception--deserves a
thorough examination at our hands.

We select it, secondly, because the Irish have successfully
refused ever since to enter into the various currents of European
opinion, although, by position and still more by religion, they
formed a part of Europe. They have thus retained a character of
their own, unlike that of any other nation. To this day, they
stand firm in their admirable stubbornness; and thus, when Europe
shall be shaken and tottering, they will still stand firm. In
the words of Moore, addressed to his own country:

"The nations have fallen and thou still art young;
Thy sun is just rising when others are set;
And though slavery's cloud o'er thy morning hath hung,
The full noon of freedom shall beam round thee yet."

That constant refusal of the Irish to fall in with the rapid torrent
of European thought and progress, as it is called, is the strangest
phenomenon in their history, and gives them at first an outlandish
look, which many have not hesitated to call barbarism. We hope
thoroughly to vindicate their character from such a foul aspersion,
and to show this phenomenon as the secret cause of their final
success, which is now all but secured; and this feature alone of
their national life adds to their character an interest which we
find in no other Christian nation.

We select it, thirdly, because there is no doubt that the Irish
is the most ancient nationality of Western Europe; and although,
as in the case of the Chinese, the advantage of going up to the
very cradle of mankind is not sufficient to impart interest to
frigid annals, when that prerogative is united to a vivid life
and an exuberant individuality, nothing contributes more to render
a nation worthy of study than hoariness of age, and its derivation
from a certain and definite primitive stock.

It is true that, in reading the first chapters of all the various
histories of Ireland, the foreign reader is struck and almost
shocked by the dogmatism of the writers, who invariably, and with
a truly Irish assurance, begin with one of the sons of Japhet, and,
following the Hebrew or Septuagint chronology, describe without
flinching the various colonizations of Erin, not omitting the
synchronism of Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman history. A
smile is at first the natural consequence of such assertions; and,
indeed, there is no obligation whatever to believe that every thing
happened exactly as they relate.

But when the large quartos and octavos which are now published from
time to time by the students of Irish antiquarian lore are opened,
read, and pondered over, at least one consequence is drawn from
them which strikes the reader with astonishment. "There can be no
doubt," every candid mind says to itself, "that this nation has
preceded in time all those which have flourished on the earth, with
the exception, perhaps, of the Chinese, and that it remains the same
to-day." At least, many years before Christ, a race of men inhabited
Ireland exactly identical with its present population (except that
it did not enjoy the light of the true religion), yet very superior
to it in point of material well-being. Not a race of cannibals, as
the credulous Diodorus Siculus, on the strength of some vague
tradition, was pleased to delineate; but a people acquainted with
the use of the precious metals, with the manufacture of fine tissues,
fond of music and of song, enjoying its literature and its books;
often disturbed, it is true, by feuds and contentions, but, on the
whole, living happily under the patriarchal rule of the clan system.

The ruins which are now explored, the relics of antiquity which
are often exhumed, the very implements and utensils preserved by
the careful hand of the antiquarian--every thing, so different
from the rude flint arrows and barbarous weapons of our North
American Indians and of the European savages of the Stone period,
denotes a state of civilization, astonishing indeed, when we reflect
that real objects of art embellished the dwellings of Irishmen
probably before the foundation of Rome, and perhaps when Greece
was as yet in a state of heroic barbarism.

And this high antiquity is proved by literature as well as by art.
"The ancient Irish," says one of their latest historians, M.
Haverty, "attributed the utmost importance to the accuracy of their
Historic compositions for social reasons. Their whole system of
society--every question as to right of property--turned upon the
descent of families and the principle of clanship; so that it cannot
be supposed that mere fables would be tolerated instead of facts,
where every social claim was to be decided on their authority. A
man's name is scarcely mentioned in our annals without the addition
of his forefathers for several generations--a thing which rarely
occurs in those of other countries.

"Again, when we arrive at the era of Christianity in Ireland, we
find that our ancient annals stand the test of verification by
science with a success which not only establishes their character
for truthfulness at that period, but vindicates the records of
preceding dates involved in it."

The most confirmed skeptic cannot refuse to believe that at the
introduction of Christianity into Ireland, in 432, the whole island
was governed by institutions exactly similar to those of Gaul when
Julius Caesar entered it 400 years before; that this state must
have existed for a long time anterior to that date; and that the
reception of the new religion, with all the circumstances which
attended it, introduced the nation at once into a happy and social
state, which other European countries, at that time convulsed by
barbarian invasions, did not attain till several centuries later.

These various considerations would alone suffice to show the real
importance of the study we undertake; but a much more powerful
incentive to it exists in the very nature of the annals of the
nation itself.

Ireland is a country which, during the last thousand years, has
maintained a constant struggle against three powerful enemies,
and has finally conquered them all.

The first stage of the conflict was that against the Northmen.
It lasted three centuries, and ended in the almost complete
disappearance of this foe.

The second act of the great drama occupied a period of four Hundred
years, during which all the resources of the Irish clans were arrayed
against Anglo-Norman feudalism, which had finally to succumb; so
that Erin remained the only spot in Europe where feudal institutions
never prevailed.

The last part of this fearful trilogy was a conflict of three centuries
with Protestantism; and the final victory is no longer doubtful.

Can any other modern people offer to the meditation, and, we must
say, to the admiration of the Christian reader, a more interesting
spectacle? The only European nation which can almost compete with
the constancy and never-dying energy of Ireland is the Spanish in
its struggle of seven centuries with the Moors.

We have thought, therefore, that there might be some real interest
and profit to be derived from the study of this eventful national
life--an interest and a profit which will appear as we study it
more in detail.

It may be said that the threefold conflict which we have outlined
might be condensed into the surprising fact that all efforts to
drag Ireland into the current of European affairs and influence
have invariably failed. This is the key to the understanding of
her whole history.

Even originally, when it formed but a small portion of the great
Celtic race, here existed in the Irish branch a peculiarity of its
own, which stamped it with features easy to be distinguished. The
gross idolatry of the Gauls never prevailed among the Irish; the
Bardic system was more fully developed among them than among any
other Celtic nation. Song, festivity, humor, ruled there much more
universally than elsewhere. There were among them more harpers and
poets than even genealogists and antiquarians, although the branches
of study represented by these last were certainly as well cultivated
among them as among the Celts of Gaul, Spain, or Italy.

But it is chiefly after the introduction of Christianity among
them, when it appeared finally decreed that they should belong
morally and socially to Europe, it is chiefly then that their
purpose, however unconscious they may have been of its tendency,
seems more defined of opening up for themselves a path of their
own. And in this they followed only the promptings of Nature.

The only people in Europe which remained untouched by what is
called Roman civilization--never having seen a Roman soldier on
their shores; never having been blessed by the construction of
Roman baths and amphitheatres; never having listened to the
declamations of Roman rhetoricians and sophists, nor received the
decrees of Roman praetors, nor been subject to the exactions of
the Roman fisc--they never saw among them, in halls and basilicas
erected under the direction of Roman architects, Roman judges,
governors, proconsuls, enforcing the decrees of the Caesars
against the introduction or propagation of the Christian religion.
Hence it entered in to them without opposition and bloodshed.

But the new religion, far from depriving them of their characteristics,
consecrated and made them lasting. They had their primitive traditions
and tastes, their patriarchal government and manners, their ideas of
true freedom and honor, reaching back almost to the cradle of mankind.
They resolved to hold these against all comers, and they have been
faithful to their resolve down to our own times. Fourteen hundred years
of history since Patrick preached to them proves it clearly enough.

First, then, although the Germanic tribes of the first invasion,
as it is called, did not reach their shore, for the reason that
the Germans, as little as the Celts, never possessed a navy--although
neither Frank, nor Vandal, nor Hun, renewed among them the horrors
witnessed in Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Africa--they could not remain
safe from the Scandinavian pirates, whose vessels scoured all the
northern seas before they could enter the Mediterranean through
the Straits of Gibraltar.

The Northmen, the Danes, came and tried to establish themselves
among them and inculcate their northern manners, system, and
municipal life. They succeeded in England, Holland, the north of
France, and the south of Italy; in a word, wherever the wind had
driven their hide-bound boats. The Irish was the only nation of
Western Europe which beat them back, and refused to receive the
boon of their higher civilization.

As soon as the glories of the reign of Charlemagne had gone down
in a sunset of splendor, the Northmen entered unopposed all the
great rivers of France and Spain. They speedily conquered England.
On all sides they ravaged the country and destroyed the population,
whose only defence consisted in prayers to Heaven, with here and
there an heroic bishop or count. In Ireland alone the Danes found
to their cost that the Irish spear was thrust with a steady and
firm hand; and after two hundred years of struggle not only had
they not arrived at the survey and division of the soil, as wherever
else they had set foot, but, after Clontarf, the few cities they
still occupied were compelled to pay tribute to the Irish Ard-Righ.
Hence all attempts to substitute the Scandinavian social system
for that of the Irish septs and clans were forever frustrated.
City life and maritime enterprises, together with commerce and trade,
were as scornfully rejected as the worship of Thor and Odin.

Soon after this first victory of Ireland over Northern Europe, the
Anglo-Norman invasion originated a second struggle of longer
duration and mightier import. The English Strongbow replaced the
Danes with Norman freebooters, who occupied the precise spots
which the new owners had reconquered from the Northmen, and never
an inch more. Then a great spectacle was offered to the world,
which has too much escaped the observation of historians, and
to which we intend to draw the attention of our readers.

The primitive, simple, patriarchal system of clanship was
Confronted by the stern, young, ferocious feudal system, which
was then beginning to prevail all over Europe. The question was,
Would Ireland consent to become European as Europe was then
organizing herself? The struggle, as we shall see, between the
Irish and the English in the twelfth century and later on, was
merely a contest between the sept system and feudalism, involving,
it is true, the possession of land. And, at the end of a contest
lasting four hundred years, feudalism was so thoroughly defeated
that the English of the Pale adopted the Irish manners, customs,
and even language, and formed only new septs among the old ones.

Hence Ireland escaped all the commotions produced in Europe by
the consequences of the feudal system:

I. Serfdom, which was generally substituted for slavery, never
existed in Ireland, slavery having disappeared before the entry
of the Anglo-Normans.

II. The universal oppression of the lower classes, which caused
the simultaneous rising of the communes all over Europe, never
having existed in Ireland, we shall not be surprised to find no
mention in Irish history of that wide-spread institution of the
eleventh and following centuries.

III. An immense advantage which Ireland derived from her isolation,
on which she always insisted, was her being altogether freed from
the fearful mediaeval heresies which convulsed France particularly
for a long period, and which invariably came from the East.

For Erin remained so completely shut off from the rest of Europe,
that, in spite of its ardent Catholicism, the Crusades were never
preached to its inhabitants; and, if some individual Irishman
joined the ranks of the warriors led to Palestine by Richard Coeur
de Lion, the nation was in no way affected by the good or bad
results which everywhere ensued from the marching of the Christian
armies against the Moslem.

The sects which sprang from Manicheism were certainly an evil
consequence of the holy wars; and it would be a great error to
think that those heresies were short-lived and affected only for
a brief space of time the social and moral state of Europe. It may
be said that their fearfully disorganizing influence lasts to this
day. If modern secret societies do not, in point of fact, derive
their existence directly from the Bulgarism and Manicheism of the
Middle Ages, there is no doubt that those dark errors, which Imposed
on all their adepts a stern secrecy, paved the way for the conspiracies
of our times. Hence Ireland, not having felt the effect of the former
heresies, is in our days almost free from the universal contagion now
decomposing the social fabric on all sides.

But it is chiefly in modern times that the successful resistance
offered by Ireland to many wide-spread European evils, and its
strong attachment to its old customs, will evoke our wonder.

Clanship reigned still over more than four-fifths of the island
when the Portuguese were conquering a great part of India, and
the Spaniards making Central and South America a province of
their almost universal monarchy.

The poets, harpers, antiquarians, genealogists, and students of
Brehon law, still held full sway over almost the whole island,
when the revival of pagan learning was, we may say, convulsing
Italy, giving a new direction to the ideas of Germany, and
penetrating France, Holland, and Switzerland. Happy were the
Irish to escape that brilliant but fatal invasion of mythology
and Grecian art and literature! Had they not received enough of
Greek and Latin lore at the hands of their first apostles and
missionaries, and through the instrumentality of the numerous
amanuenses and miniaturists in their monasteries and convents?
Those holy men had brought them what Christian Rome had purified
of the old pagan dross, and sanctified by the new Divine Spirit.

Virgin Ireland having thus remained undefiled, and never having
even been agitated by all those earlier causes of succeeding
revolutions, Protestantism, the final explosion of them all, could
make no impression on her--a fact which remains to this day the
brightest proof of her strength and vigor.

But, before speaking of this last conflict, we must meet an objection
which will naturally present itself.

To steadily refuse to enter into the current of European thought,
and object to submit in any way to its influence, is, pretend many,
really to reject the claims of civilization, and persist in refusing
to enter upon the path of progress. The North American savage has
always been most persistent in this stubborn opposition to civilized
life, and no one has as yet considered this a praiseworthy attribute.
The more barbarous a tribe, the more firmly it adheres to its
traditions, the more pertinaciously it follows the customs of its
ancestors. They are immovable, and cannot be brought to adopt
usages new to them, even when they see the immense advantages
they would reap from their adoption. Hence the greater number of
writers, chiefly English, who have treated of Irish affairs,
unhesitatingly call them barbarians, precisely on account of their
stubbornness in rejecting the advances of the Anglo-Norman invaders.
Sir John Davies, the attorney-general of James I., could scarcely
write a page on the subject without reverting to this idea.

We answer that the Irish, even before their conversion to
Christianity, but chiefly after, were not barbarians; they never
opposed true progress; and they became, in fact, in the sixth,
seventh, and eighth centuries, the moral and scientific educators
of the greater part of Europe. What they refused to adopt they
were right in rejecting. But, as there are still many men who,
without ever having studied the question, do not hesitate, even
in our days, to throw barbarism in their teeth, and attribute to
it the pitiable condition which the Irish to-day present to the
world, we add a few further considerations on this point.

First, then, we say, barbarians have no history; and the Irish
certainly had a history long before St. Patrick converted them.
Until lately, it is true, the common opinion of writers on Ireland
was adverse to this assertion of ours; but, after the labors of
modern antiquarians--of such men as O'Donovan, Todd, E. O'Curry,
and others--there can no longer be any doubt on the subject. If
Julius Caesar was right in stating that the Druids of Gaul
confined themselves to oral teaching--and the statement may very
well be questioned, with the light of present information on the
subject--it is now proved that the Ollamhs of Erin kept written
annals which went back to a very remote age of the world. The
numerous histories and chronicles written by monks of the sixth
and following centuries, the authenticity of which cannot be denied,
evidently presuppose anterior compositions dating much farther back
than the introduction of our holy religion into Ireland, which the
Christian annalists had in their hands when they wrote their books,
sometimes in Latin, sometimes in old Irish, sometimes in a strange
medley of both languages. It is now known that St. Patrick brought
to Ireland the Roman alphabet only, and that it was thenceforth
used not merely for the ritual of the Church, and the dissemination
of the Bible and of the works of the Holy Fathers, but likewise
for the transcription, in these newly-consecrated symbols of thought,
of the old manuscripts of the island; which soon disappeared, in
the far greater number of instances at least, owing to the favor
in which the Roman characters were held by the people and their
instructors the bishops and monks. Let those precious old symbols
be called Ogham, or by any other name--there must have been something
of the kind.

If any one insists that such was not the case, he must of necessity
admit that the oral teaching of the Ollamhs was so perfect and so
universally current in the same formulas all over the island, that
such oral teaching really took the place of writing; and in this
case, also, which is scarcely possible, however, Ireland had an
authentic history. This last supposition, certainly, can hardly
be credited; and yet, if the first be rejected, it must be admitted,
since it cannot be imagined that subsequent Irish historians,
numerous as they became in time, could have agreed so well
together, and remained so consistent with themselves, and so
perfectly accurate in their descriptions of places and things in
general, without anterior authentic documents of some kind or other,
on which they could rely. Any person who has merely glanced at
the astonishing production called the "Annals of the Four Masters,"
must necessarily be of this opinion.

In no nation in the world are there found so many old histories,
annals, chronicles, etc., as among the Irish; and that fact alone
suffices to prove that in periods most ancient they were truly a
civilized nation, since they attached such importance to the
records of events then taking place among them.

But the Irish were, moreover, a branch of the great Celtic race,
whose renown for wisdom, science, and valor, was spread through
all parts, particularly among the Greeks. The few details we
purpose giving on the subject will convince the reader that among
the nations of antiquity they held a prominent position; and not
only were they possessed of a civilization of their own, not
despicable even in the eyes of a Roman--of the great Julius
himself--but they were ever most susceptible of every kind of
progress, and consequently eager to adopt all the social benefits
which their intercourse with Rome brought them. At least, they
did so as soon as, acknowledging the superior power of the enemy,
they had the good sense to feel that it was all-important to
imitate him. Hence sprang that Gallo-Roman civilization which
obtained during the first five or six centuries of the Christian
era--a civilization which the barbarians of the North endeavored
to destroy, but to which they themselves finally yielded, by
embracing Christianity, and gradually changing their language
and customs.

Everywhere--in Gaul, Italy, Britain, and Ireland--did the Celts
manifest that susceptibility to progress which is the invariable
mark of a state antagonistic to barbarism. In this they totally
differed from the Vandals and Huns, whom it took the Church such
a dreary period to conquer, and whom no other power save the
religion of Christ could have subdued.

These few words are sufficient for our present purpose. We proceed
to show that, in their stubborn opposition to many a current of
European opinion, they acted rightly.

They acted rightly, first of all, in excluding from their course
of studies at Bangor, Clonfert, Armagh, Clonmacnoise, and other
places, the subtleties of Greek philosophy, which occasioned
heresies in Europe and Asia during the first ages of the Church,
and were the cause of so many social and political convulsions.
By adhering strictly---a little too strictly, perhaps--to their
traditional method of developing thought, they kept error far from
their universities, and presented, in the sixth, seventh, and eighth
centuries, the remarkable spectacle in Ireland, France, Germany,
Switzerland, and even Northern Italy, of numerous schools wherein
no wrangling found a place, and whence never issued a single
proposition which Rome found reason to censure. They were at that
time the educators of Christian Europe, and not even a breath of
suspicion was ever raised against any one of their innumerable
teachers. If their mind, in general, did not on that account
attain the acuteness of the French, Italians, or Germans, it was
at all times safer and more guarded. Even their later hostility
to the English Pale, after the eleventh century, was most useful,
from its warning against the teachings of prelates sent from the
English Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; and Rome seems to
have approved of that opposition, by using all her power in
appointing to Irish sees, even within the Pale, prelates chosen
from the Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, and Carmelite orders,
in preference to secular ecclesiastics educated in the great seats
of English learning.

Thus the Irish, by opening their schools gratuitously to all Europe,
but chiefly to Anglo-Saxon England, were not only of immense service
to the Church, but showed how fully they appreciated the benefits
of true civilization, and how ready they were to extend it by their
traditional teaching. Nor did they confine themselves to receiving
scholars in their midst: they sent abroad, during those ages, armies
of zealous missionaries and learned men to Christianize the heathen,
or educate the newly-converted Germanic tribes in Merovingian and
Carlovingian Gaul, in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian England, in
Lombardian Italy, in the very hives of those ferocious tribes
which peopled the ever-moving and at that time convulsed Germany.

II. They were right in refusing to submit to the Scandinavian yoke,
and accept from those who would impose it their taste for city life,
and the spirit of maritime enterprise and extensive commerce. We
shall see that this was at the bottom of their two centuries of
struggle with the Danes; that they were animated throughout that
conflict by their ardent zeal for the Christian religion, which
the Northmen came to destroy. There is no need of dwelling on this
point, as we are not aware that any one, even their bitterest
enemies, has found fault with them here.

III. They were right in opposing feudalism, and steadily refusing
to admit it on their soil. Feudal Europe beheld with surprise the
inhabitants of a small island on the verge of the Western Continent
level to the ground the feudal castles as soon as they were built;
reject with scorn the invaders' claim to their soil, after they
had signed papers which they could not understand; hold fast to
their patriarchal usages in opposition to the new-born European
notions of paramount kings, of dukes, earls, counts, and viscounts;
fight for four hundred years against what the whole of Europe had
everywhere else accepted, and conquer in the end; so that the Irish
of to-day can say with just pride, "Our island has never submitted
to mediaeval feudalism."

And hence the island has escaped the modern results of the system,
which we all witness to-day in the terrible hostility of class
arrayed against class, the poor against the rich, the lower orders
against the higher. The opposition in Ireland between the oppressed
and the oppressor is of a very different character, is we shall see
later. But the fact is, that the clan system, with all its striking
defects, had at least this immense advantage, that the clansmen did
not look upon their chieftains as "lords and masters," but as men
of the same blood, true relations, and friends; neither did the
heads of the clans look on their men as villeins, serfs, or chattels,
but as companions-in-arms, foster-brothers, supporters, and allies.
Hence the opposition which exists in our days throughout Europe
between class and class, has never existed in Ireland. Let a son
of their old chiefs, if one can yet be found, go back to them,
even but for a few days, after centuries of estrangement, and
they are ready to welcome him yet, as a loyal nation would welcome
her long-absent king, as a family would receive a father it esteemed
lost. We knowing what manner a son of a French McMahon was lately
received among them.

All hostility is reserved for the foreigner, the invader, the
oppressor of centuries, because, in the opinion of the natives,
these have no real right to dwell on a soil they have impoverished,
and which they tried in vain to enslave. This, at least, is their
feeling. But the sons of the soil, whether rich or poor, high or
low, are all united in a holy brotherhood. This state of things
they have preserved by the exclusion of feudalism.

IV. The Irish were right in not accepting from Europe what is
known as the "revival of learning;" at least, as carried almost
to the excess of modern paganism by its first promoters.

This "revival" did not reach Ireland. Many will, doubtless,
attribute this fact to the almost total exclusion then supposed
to exist of Ireland from all European intercourse. It would be
a great error to imagine such to have been the cause. Indeed, at
that very time, Ireland was more in daily contact with Italy,
France, and Spain, than had been the case since the eighth century.

If the Irish were right in holding steadfast to the line of their
traditional studies, in rejecting the city life and commercial
spirit of the Danes, in opposing Anglo-Norman feudalism, and,
finally, in not accepting the more than doubtful advantages flowing
from the literary revival of the fifteenth century; if, in all
this, they did not oppose true progress, but merely wished to
advance in the peculiar path opened up to them by the Christianity
which they had received more fully, with more earnestness, and
with a view to a greater development of the supernatural idea,
than any other European nation--then, beyond all other modes, did
they display their strength of will and their undying national
vitality in their resistance to Protestantism--a resistance which
has been called opposition to progress, but the success of which
to-day proves beyond question that they were right.

It was, the reader may remark, a resistance to the whole of
Northern Europe, wherein their island was included. For, the
whole of Northern Europe rebelled against the Church at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, to enter upon a new road of
progress and civilization, as it has been called, ending finally
in the frightful abyss of materialism and atheism which now gapes
under the feet of modern nations--an abyss in whose yawning womb
nullus ordo, sed sempiternus horror habitat. The end of that
progress is now plain enough: political and social convulsions,
without any other probable issue than final anarchy, unless nations
consent at last to retrace their steps and reorganize Christendom.

But this was not apparent to the eyes of ordinary thinkers in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only a few great minds saw
the logical consequences of the premises laid down by Protestantism,
and predicted something of what we now see.

The Irish was the only northern nation which, to a man, opposed
the terrible delusion, and, at the cost of all that is dear, waged
against it a relentless war.

"To a man;" for, in spite of all the wiles of Henry VIII., who
brought every resource of his political talent into play, in order
to win over to his side the great chieftains of the nation--in
spite of all the efforts of Elizabeth, who either tried to overcome
their resistance by her numerous armies, or, by the allurements
of her court, strove her best, like her father, to woo to her
allegiance the great leaders of the chief clans, particularly O'Neill
of Tyrone--at the end of her long reign, after nearly a hundred
years of Protestantism, only sixty Irishmen of all classes had
received the new religion.

At first, the struggle assumed a character more political than
religious, and Queen Elizabeth did her best to give it, apparently,
that character. But for her, religion meant politics; and, had the
Irish consented to accept the religious changes introduced by her
father and herself, there would have been no question of
"rebellion," and no army would have been sent to crush it. The
Irish chieftains knew this well; hence, whenever the queen came
to terms with them, the first article on which they invariably
insisted was the freedom of their religion.

But, under the Stuarts, and later on, the mask was entirely thrown
aside, and the question between England and Ireland reduced itself,
we may say, to one of religion merely. All the political
entanglements in which the Irish found themselves involved by their
loyalty to the Stuarts and their opposition to the Roundheads, never
constituted the chief difficulty of their position. They were
"Papists:" this was their great crime in the eyes of their enemies.
Cromwell would certainly never have endeavored to exterminate them
as he did, had they apostatized and become ranting Puritans. One of
our main points in the following pages will be to give prominence to
this view of the question. If it had been understood from the first,
the army of heroes who died for their God and their country would
long ere this have been enrolled in the number of Christian martyrs.

The subsequent policy of England, chiefly after the English
Revolution of 1688 and the defeat of James II., clearly shows the
soundness of our interpretation of history. The "penal code," under
Queen Anne, and later on, at least has the merit of being free from
hypocrisy and cant. It is an open religious persecution, as, in
fact, it had been from the beginning.

We shall have, therefore, before our eyes the great spectacle of
a nation suffering a martyrdom of three centuries. All the
persecutions of the Christians under the Roman emperors pale
before this long era of penalty and blood. The Irish, by numerous
decrees of English kings and parliaments, were deprived of every
thing which a man not guilty of crime has a right to enjoy. Land,
citizenship, the right of education, of acquiring property, of
living on their own soil--every thing was denied them, and death
in every form was decreed, in every line of the new Protestant
code, to men, women, and even children, whose only crime consisted
in remaining faithful to their religion.

But chiefly during the Cromwellian war and the nine years of the
Protector's reign were they doomed to absolute, unrelenting
destruction. Never has any thing in the whole history of mankind
equalled it in horror, unless the devastation of Asia and Eastern
Europe under Zengis and Timour.

There is, therefore, at the bottom of the Irish character, hidden
under an appearance of light-headedness, mutability of feeling--nay,
at times, futility and even childishness--a depth of according to
the eternal laws which God gave to mankind. Nothing else is in
their mind; they are pursuing no guilty and shadowy Utopia. Who
knows, then, whether their small island may not yet become the
beacon-light which, guiding other nations, shall at a future day
save Europe from the universal shipwreck which threatens her?
The providential mission of Ireland is far from being accomplished,
and men may yet see that not in vain has she been tried so long in
the crucible of affliction.

Another part of the providential plan as affecting her will show
itself, and excite our admiration, in the latter portion of the
work we undertake.

The Irish are no longer confined to the small island which gave
them birth. From the beginning of their great woes, they have
known the bitterness of exile. Their nobility were the first to
leave in a body a land wherein they could no longer exist; and,
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they made the
Irish name illustrious on all the battle-fields of Europe. At the
same time, many of their priests and monks, unable longer to labor
among their countrymen, spent their lives in the libraries, of
Italy, Belgium, and Spain, and gave to the world those immense
works so precious now to the antiquarian and historian. Every one
knows what Montalembert, in particular, found in them. They may be
said to have preserved the annals of their nation from total ruin;
and the names of the O'Clearys, of Ward and Wadding, of Colgan and
Lynch, are becoming better known and appreciated every day, as
their voluminous works are more studied and better understood.

But much more remarkable still is the immense spread of the people
itself during the present age, so fruitful in happy results for
the Church of Christ and the good of mankind. We may say that the
labors of the Irish missionaries during the seventh and eighth
centuries are to-day eclipsed by the truly missionary work of a
whole nation spread now over North America, the West India Islands,
the East Indies, and the wilds of Australia; in a word, wherever
the English language is spoken. Whatever may have been the visible
causes of that strange "exodus," there is an invisible cause clear
enough to any one who meditates on the designs of God over his
Church. There is no presumption in attributing to God himself what
could only come from Him. The catholicity of the Church was to be
spread and preserved through and in all those vast regions colonized
now by the adventurous English nation; and no better, no more
simple way of effecting this could be conceived than the one whose
workings we see in those colonies so distant from the mother-country.

This, for the time being, is the chief providential mission of
Ireland, and it is truly a noble one, undertaken and executed in
a noble manner by so many thousands, nay millions, of men and
women--poor, indeed, in worldly goods when they start on their
career, but rich in faith; and it is as true now as it has ever
been from the beginning of Christianity, that haec est victoria
nostra, fides vestra.

These few words of our Preface would not suffice to prepare the
reader for the high importance of this stupendous phenomenon. We
We purpose, therefore, devoting our second chapter to the subject,
as a preparation for the very interesting details we shall furnish
subsequently, as it is proper that, from the very threshold, an
idea may be formed of the edifice, and of the entire proportions
it is destined to assume.

We have so far sketched, as briefly as possible, what the following
pages will develop; and the reader may now begin to understand
what we said at starting, that no other nation in Europe offers so
interesting an object of study and reflection.

Plato has said that the most meritorious spectacle in the eyes of
God was that of "a just man struggling with adversity." What must
it be when a whole nation, during nine long ages, offers to Heaven
the most sublime virtues in the midst of the extremest trials? Are
not the great lessons which such a contest presents worthy of study
and admiration?

We purpose studying them, although we cannot pretend to render
full justice to such a theme. And, returning for a moment to the
considerations with which we started, we can truly say that, in
the whole range of modern history, it would be difficult, if not
impossible, to find a national life to compare with that of poor,
despised Ireland. Neither do we pretend to write the history itself;
our object is more humble: we merely pen some considerations
suggested naturally by the facts which we suppose to be already
known, with the purpose of arriving at a true appreciation of the
character of the people. For it is the people itself we study;
the reader will meet with comparatively few individual names.

We shall find, moreover, that the nation has never varied. Its
history is an unbroken series of the same heroic facts, the same
terrible misfortunes. The actors change continually; the outward
circumstances at every moment present new aspects, so that the
interest never flags; but the spirit of the struggle is ever the
same, and the latest descendants of the first O'Neills and
O'Donnells burn with the same sacred fire, and are inspired by
the same heroic aspirations, as their fathers.

Happily, the gloom is at length lighted up by returning day. The
contest has lost its ferocity, and we are no longer surrounded
by the deadly shade which obscured the sky a hundred years ago.
Then it was hard to believe that the nation could ever rise; her
final success seemed almost an impossibility. We now see that
those who then despaired sinned against Providence, which waited
for its own time to arrive and vindicate its ways. And it is
chiefly on account of the bright hope which begins to dawn that
our subject should possess for all a lively interest, and fill the
Catholic heart with glowing sympathy and ardent thankfulness to God.





CONTENTS



I The Celtic Race

II The World Under The Lead Of European Races.--Mission Of The
Irish Race In The Movement

III The Irish Better Prepared To Receive Christianity Than Other Nations

IV How the Irish received Christianity

V The Christian Irish and the Pagan Danes

VI The Irish Free-Clans and Anglo-Norman Feudalism

VII Ireland separated from Europe.--A Triple Episode

VIII The Irish and the Tudors.--Henry VIII.

IX The Irish and the Tudors.--Elizabeth.--The Undaunted Nobility.--The
Suffering Church

X England prepared for the Reception of Protestantism--Ireland not

XI The Irish and the Stuarts.--Loyalty and Confiscation

XII A Century of Gloom.--The Penal Laws

XIII Resurrection.--Delusive Hopes

XIV Resurrection.--Emigration

XV The "Exodus" and its Effects

XVI Moral Force all-sufficient for the Resurrection of Ireland



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