Notes on Goldwin Smith's Book Irish History and Irish Character

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Notes on Goldwin Smith’s book Irish History and Irish Character (Oxford and London, 1861) are to be found in Notebook IV, one of those with excerpts that Engels wrote while working on The History of Ireland. Smith’s book drew Engels’ attention not as a source for the study of Irish history, but rather as a specimen of the Liberal falsification of this history that reflected the colonialist tendencies of the English bourgeoisie. Engels considered refutation of such chauvinistic conceptions to be one of his most important tasks, as witnessed by his sharp criticism of Smith in this and other articles, in particular by his description of this author in The History .of Ireland, Varia on the History of the Irish Confiscations, as well as in his excerpts from M. O’Conor’s History of the Irish Catholics... and in his letter to Marx of November 29, 1869 (see present edition, Vol. 43). Engels set down these excerpts and critical remarks on Smith’s book in November 1869. The work consists of two parts: Notebook IV begins with the first; the second follows Engels’ excerpts from another book on Irish history and is entitled: “Goldwin Smith. Conclusion (passages quoted word for word and addenda)”. Apart from new excerpts referring to the book as a whole, Engels quotes entire passages that were merely mentioned in the first part. In both parts there are insertions in the margin made by Engels at a later date and references to other notebooks with excerpts comparing Smith’s views to those of other authors and to data obtained from other sources.

In Engels’ manuscript there are direct quotations from Smith’s book (and from other authors) in the original English and also his own renderings of certain passages, also in English (these are given in this volume, like the quotations, in brevier but without quotation marks). Engels wrote his own remarks mostly in German (the English translation is in great primer) and in English (these are in small caps in this volume). Words doubly underlined by Engels are printed here in bold face. Italics in the quotations are by Engels.

The notes were first published in English in Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow, 1978.

1) GOLDWIN SMITH,

IRISH HISTORY AND IRISH CHARACTER

(PART OF IT IN NOTEBOOK III UNDER O'CONOR)

Gold win Smith, Irish History and Irish Character, Oxford and London, Parker, 1861.

Behind the cloak of objectivity, the apologetic English bourgeois professor. Even from a geographical point of view, Ireland, he says, was destined to be subjugated by England, and he attributes the slow and incomplete conquest to the width of the Channel and to the position of Wales between England and Ireland.

Ireland is said to be a GRAZING COUNTRY by nature, see Léonce de Lavergne. Smith thinks that

“it is difficult, over a great part of the island, to get in a wheat harvest ... its natural way to commercial prosperity seems to be to supply with the produce of its grazing and dairy farms the population of England” (p. 3).

There are coalfields in Ireland (p. 4).

The climate is supposed to have debilitated the Irish and retarded their development, in comparison with such BRACED PEOPLE as the Scandinavians

(and Laplanders?). On the other hand, the prospect is held out to the Irish

of the VILLAS OF NOBLES and MERCHANT PRINCES, such as can now be found in Scotland (p. 5)

(lN THE GROUSE MOORS AND DEER FORESTS!).

Greatly deplores the lack of moderation in Irish eloquence. Nevertheless the Irishman complements the Englishman, and it would be unfortunat e if as a result of emigration the Celtic element were DRAINED OFF.

Originally the clan or tribe [was] the social form common to all Celts (and to othe r nations)

in Wales as well. Soon more intermingling of the different clans in the Irish plain and loosening of ties within the clans; on the other hand [there existed] the rule of the more powerful over those who were weaker, the beginnings of monarchy. The main prerogative of the king seems to have been the exaction of tribute, rather than regular jurisdiction.

The FACTION FIGHTS of the Irish, TWO YEAR OLDS and THREE YEAR OLDS, are vestiges of the old clanships, as are also the COUNTY jealousies and COUNTY FIGHTS

(cf. the FIGHT between Cork and Tipperar y on the emigrant ship).

The FAIRIES too have their FACTION and COUNTY FIGHTS

(cf. Kohl).

The old loyalty to the clan chief and submission to his will explain much in the Irish character.

The land of the clan [was] communa l property. In this context Smith realises that in Ireland it was never the Irishman, but only the Englishman who held land as private property, although he merely says that private property confronted the Irishman only

in the “form of insecurity, degradation, and despair” (p. 21).

Sir John Davies, pp. 135, 136, writes of the CHIEFRIES that

“though they had some portions of land allotted to them”, [their income] “did consist chiefly in cuttings and cosheries and other Irish exactions, whereby,

the English LAWYER says,

“they did spoil and impoverish the people at their pleasure. And when their chieftains were dead, their sons or next heirs did not succeed them but their tanists who were elective and bought their election by strong hand; and by the Irish custom of gavelkind, the inferior tenancies were partable amongst all the males of the sept both bastards and legitimate and after partition made, if anyone of the sept had died, his portion was not divided among his sons, but the chief of the sept made a new partition of all the lands belonging to the sept and gave everyone his part according to his antiquity.”

Quote d p. 22.

The English LAWYERS are supposed to have called this, and TANLSTRY in particular, “no estate, but only a transient and scambling possession”, and Davies was entirely in agreement with this and also with the king being obliged to compel the people, if necessary by force, to accept CIVILITY,

i.e. the English law.

How often a new division took place is not clear (!!), certainly not at every death. (See Hallam.)

Every two or three years, see Davies, excerpts, p. 82.In any case it is obvious that because of the English conquest, the Irish up to 1600 had not yet gone beyond communal property! But Smith (p. 24) asserts that as early as the

“invasion the land which a member of a sept had occupied seems generally to have passed at his death, as a matter of course, to all his sons”.

This is wrong; see Davies, who considers that partition still exists at least in the northern part of Ireland.

Even today, he says, “spend me and defend me” is more natural to the Irish peasant than the relationship of landlord and tenant.

The term GAVELKIND was introduced into Ireland by English LAWYERS, for they confused Irish law with the Kentish GAVELKIND, which knows no primogeniture either (P- 25).

St. Bernard’s pronouncement about the Irish Church, on the basis of which Henry II justified Adrian’s Papal Bull, because it was necessary to bring the whole church under the sway of Rome in the face of external enemies, contains nothing but trash:

1) They pay no first-fruits or tithes. 2) they do not properly marry

(i.e. not in accordance with the formalities prescribed by Rome),

nor do they go to confession (?), no one exhorts them to do penance and no one imposes a penance. Moreover, 3) there are far too few priests. But all this had already been put right by St. Malachy, as St. Bernard himself admits. (De vita St. Malachiae, ch. 8.)

Giraldus Cambrensis however repeats the same accusations: they pay neither tithes nor first-fruits, disregard the “rites of marriage, do not come to church and marry the wives of deceased brothers”.In addition one can merely say that the hierarchy is incomplete, there are far too many bishops and for a long time there were no archbishops at all, and their ORDINATIONS are not quite lawful (P- 33).

The only towns were those of the Danes

(says Davies).

That heathen elements are still evident in their religion is obvious, it was so everywhere. Thus in Ireland one can find “the pledge of blood” in addition to the touching of a relic when concluding an agreement, the noisy, orgiastic WAKES which accompany funerals, the fact that the right arm is not baptised etc.

In German y and England one can find quite different things.

FOSTERAGES and the special emphasis laid on sponsorship (GOSSIPREDE) as being binding for life, are probably also of pagan origin. Cambrensis: “As for their own brethren and kinsmen, the Irish persecute them when living unto death, and avenge them when slain; while such love and fidelity as they show is confined to their foster-brethren and foster-children.” Quoted p. 37.

Marriage however seems to have been in a bad way, for Davies, p. 146, speaks of “their common repudiation of their wives, their promiscuous generation of children, their neglect of lawful matrimony”; he associates this with “their uncleanness in apparel, diet, and lodging, and their contempt and scorn of all things necessary for the civil life of man”.

The fact that in law BASTARD CHILDREN are placed on a pa r with legitimate children is connected with this but also with communal property.

The Irish squire of the last century is said to have still eaten at the same table with the RETAINERS of his HOUSEHOLD, almost like the old clan chief (p. 39).

The laws of the conquerors against bards and STROLLING SINGERS were directly political,

because they were the upholders of the NATIONAL tradition. As late as the end of the 18th century there were still a few old travelling harpists.

But their Irish can no longer be understood today.

The Normans in Ireland “formed only a military colony, or rather garrison, holding its ground against the natives with difficulty, and living in a perpetual state of border war”. From the outset therefore [they tried to gain the] ASCENDANCY. The Pale was a part of feudal England on the other side of the Channel (p. 56).

The ENGLISH INTEREST and the ANGLO-IRISH INTEREST in the Pale arose already at that time. The Irish barons were jealous of the English officials who came from England, etc., and of those who also owned English ESTATES, and who for the most part were absentees and remained English.

During the.Wars of the Roses

the government of the Pale became so weak that it entrusted the policing and keeping of order to the private BROTHERHOOD of St. George.

(Moore sub ann o 1472, not in the Chronology.)

The Statute of Kilkenny is said to be merely an act of self-defence AND there was NOTHING PECULIARLY MALIGNANT IN IT. That crimes against Irishmen were not punishable is said to have been the natural consequence of the fact that in Ireland two nations living in the same country were subject to two different codes of law!

“An Irishman who had murdered an Englishman would have been only fined for it by his Brehon!!”

Proof of this is

the affair of the sheriff whom an Irish chief was prepared to admit into his territory, provided the government fixed the wergeld to be paid for him should the case arise.

The quinque sanguines are correctly understood as 5 clans.

English statesmen, such as Spenser, Davies and Bacon, who were interested in Ireland, regarded “the settlement and subjugation of Wales by Edward I” as an ideal.

At any rate Davies, see pages 105-07, notebook 3, 2.

Finally under Poynings’ administration (Henry VII) every murder was made punishable according to English law

(i.e. within the Pale). Almost all his laws are said to have benefited Ireland, because they placed IMPERIAL (here it is simply a euphemism for English) INTERESTS AND POLICY above ASCENDANCY (!).

“It can hardly be doubted that the most obnoxious of his statutes, as they tended to make imperial policy and imperial interests paramount over the policy aud interests of ascendancy, were at the time of their enactment beneficial to the Irish people”!! (p. 73).

These Acts were effective only within the Pale, and not a trace of the Irish people could be found there! (Davies, pp. 136-39.)

He claims that with Henry VIII and Wolsey “the deep and reflecting statecraft of a politic age now began to appear” in the Irish administration of the regents sent to Ireland (p. 74).

Yes indeed, the French wars and the Wars of the Roses had come to an end!

The war against the Geraldines in the reign of Henry VIII was waged by both sides with great cruelty and caused much destruction; in addition there was treachery and perfidity on the part of the English against Fitzgerald and his five uncles, and against others as well.

Under Elizabeth “there was corruption, corruption in the very vilest form, corruption which preferred war to peace because war held out hopes of lucre which peace threatened to destroy”.

Then, in the age of the adventurers,

“the eagle took wing for the Spanish main, the vultures descended upon Ireland”....

But in Ireland, too, Raleigh had a castle and an estate granted to him at Lismore. Wakefield, Vol. T, p. 70.“A dexterous use of intrigue, chicanery and the art of inciting to rebellion, procured for the sharper in Ireland wealth ... in the shape of confiscated lands” (p. 79).

In 1561 Shane O’Neill came to England with a guard of GALLOWGLASSES, who were bareheaded, wore GLIBS, SAFFRON shirts, short skirts and shaggy cloaks and were armed with hatchets

(at a time when muskets were in use!).

P. 86. Elizabeth’s expenditure for the war in Ireland amounted to at least £4-500,000 per annum, hence the counterfeit money. “Assuredly whoever may have profited by the misery and depression of Ireland, it has not been the English nation.” (!!) “To the English nation Ireland has been a source of expense, danger, and weakness without intermission from the conquest almost down to the present hour.”

And à qui la faute?” Surely that of THE ENGLISH NATION!

James is said to have been obliged to create SHAM BOROUGHS, not only to obtain a majority, but also because there were no real boroughs!!! (p. 96).

Just as Potemkin’s villages had likewise been a historical necessity.Good for the reformers.

Sir Thomas Smith’s first colonies “were planted in Down and Antrim on lands which were presumed in law to be vacant by the attainder of O’Neill”. This failed, “the native occupants, says Hallam, not acquiescing in this doctrine of our lawyers”.

Arthegal in Spenser’s Faerie Queene is LORD DEPUTY Gray.

“When the chieftains of the septs O’More and 0’Connell were attainted, in the reign of Mary”

(King’s and Queen’s Counties), “the septs pleaded that the chieftain could not by his attainder forfeit the sept land which he never had possessed. A feeling that the land was still theirs and that they were unjustly kept out of their possessions ... is perhaps not extinct even at the present day” (p. 101).

To show his impartiality, Strafford also extorted considerable sums from the colonists of Londonderry, because they had committed a small formal BREACH OF THE COVENANT, thus arousing the wrath of London, the mother city, against him and Charles.

“It is not too much to say that the English Puritans regarded the Irish Catholics, after O’Neill’s massacre, with the rage of the Orangeman towards the Papists added to the rage of the Englishman of Calcutta towards the Sepoy mutineer(p. 113),

so that on the whole, Cromwell countenanced as few murders as he possibly could.

Cromwell’s transportation of Irish rebels to the West Indies to be employed there as slaves is said to be less harsh

“than the measure which the Catholic House of Austria dealt at the same time to the Protestants of Bohemia and other conquered provinces in the Thirty Years’ War” (p. 114).

To be looked up.

In defence of the judicial murder of Archbishop Plunket [he says that] although Titus Oates’ plot was an invention, “there was a Popish plot for the extirpation of Protestantism and liberty throughout Europe, of which the King of France was the powerful head, of which the Jesuits were the restless and unscrupulous agents, in which the King and the heir presumptive to the crown were deeply engaged and which all but overthrew the religion and liberties of England in the next reign” (p. 119).

Not a word about the breach of the Treaty of Limerick

“James II issued a mandate nominating a Papist to the Professorship of the Irish language in Trinity College. It turned out that no such Professorship existed” (p. 135).

The money which the ABSENTEES take with them is said to be mainly expended on unproductive work and thus for the most part lost in any case; therefore it does not matter much that the money is not spent in Ireland (p. 144).

What does the West End of London say to this?

In his Modest Proposal, Swift speaks of young unemployed Irishmen (A. D. 1729) “who either turn thieves for want of work or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes”.

That is into slavery lasting for a longer or shorter time.

He then proposes that some of the children be assigned to the butcher, and in his Maxims he suggests that the Irish be permitted to sell their surplus population into slavery.

Even before the reign of James II the potato is said to have been the symbol and REPROACH OF IRELAND. Under James II “an Irish deputation was followed about the streets of London by a mob with potatoes stuck on poles” (p. 150).

Ireland’s distress ... “overflowed to England, and bringing pauperism” (!) “and disease” (!!) “into our great cities, punished England for whatever share she may have had in Irish wrongs” (p. 151).

According to Phelan’s Remains, Vol. II, p. 42, the landlords preferred Catholic SERFS to Protestant TENANTS, especially because the former always offered to pay the highest rent. The Protestants therefore emigrated to America.

(No date mentioned.)

MacGeoghegan says in his History of Ireland’: “from calculations and researches made at the French war-office, it has been ascertained that from the arrival of the Irish troops in France in 1691, up to 1745, the year of the battle of Fontenoy, more than 450,000 Irishmen died in the service of France.”

In the independent Irish Parliament before the Union

(according to an INQUIRY MADE [in] 1784 FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT) out of “300 seats 116 were shared among 25 proprietors (one nobleman had 16) and that the government could count on 86 votes of members for proprietary seats, the owners of which let them out for titles, places or pensions, 12 votes of their own, 45 votes of placemen, and 32 of gentlemen who had promises or had avowed their expectations” (Massey, History of England, Vol. Ill, p. 264).

And what about the English Parliament of the time?

Sir Jonah Barrington was JUDGE OF THE HIGH COURT OF ADMIRALTY IN IRELAND.

Pitt would have given parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation to Ireland, but his

“liberal policy ... was fatally arrested and the world” (!) “was flung into dismay, despair of liberty and absolutist reaction, by the tremendous eruption of absurdity, cruelty, and ultimately of military vanity and rapacity, which Frenchmen imagine to be the grandest and most beneficent event in history” (p. 165).

No trace of objectivity remains here.

“An alien and disaffected element incorporated in a nation can only be a source of internal division and weakness. It would be better in every point of view, that the British Empire should be reduced to a single island, to England, to Yorkshire, or Kent, than that it should include anything which is not really its own” (p. 179).

!! Done—! After 700 years of struggle!

Federation, he declares, is impossible between Ireland and England (he does not speak of a real federation with a federal parliament responsible for federal affairs, but only of a personal union).

“This dog-collar-union, two independent parliaments and two independent governments linked together by a nominal allegiance to the same crown ... must be an irony or a nuisance” and would end either in complete separation or in the rule of the English parliamentary government over Ireland too, as between 1782 and 1798, as a result of corruption and intrigue (p. 181).

What about Sweden and Norway? And Austria-Hungary?

“The course of events has left no basis whereon Irish nationality can be established.” The Irish and the English are said to be composed of the same elements, although in different proportions ... “but what is of most importance and in fact almost decisive, the language of both islands is the same” (p. 183).

Hence , the two are one nation and separation of any kind is absurd! As though the English language had not made the Irishman even more Irish!

From p. 184 onwards [he deals with] “the agrarian outrages, of which the surplus population was the main cause”!!

GOLDWIN SMITH.

CONCLUSION

(PASSAGES QUOTED WORD FOR WORD AND ADDENDA)

“The dampness of the climate, while it is the source of vegetable wealth and vegetable beauty, could not fail to relax the energies of the people and to throw them back in the race of nations for preeminence in things requiring physical exertions. We see this when we compare the early history of the Irish with that of the Scandinavians, braced to daring and enterprise by the climate of the North” (p. 4).

Edward III and Henry V fought the battles of Crécy, Poitiers, etc., in France,“on these famous fields where, in the overthrow of the French chivalry by peasant hands, feudalism found its grave!” (p. 65, see below p. 7l).

Statute of Kilkenny:

“ There is nothing peculiarly malignant in the attempt of that Statute to restore a sharp division between the English and the natives. The object of the framers was not to prevent the beneficial fusion of the two races into one nation, but to prevent the one which they very naturally and rightly thought the more civilised, from degenerating into the barbarism of the other; and at the same time to check the increase of the ‘rebel’ elements in the country ... the same legislators forbid, under the severest penalties, the making of private war upon the Irishry, and the exciting them to war” (p. 68).

(Very kind!)

“It sounds shocking that the killing of an Irishman by an Englishman should have been no felony and that it should have been a good plea to an indictment for murder that the murdered person was not an Englishman nor a member of one of the five ‘bloods’ or septs which had been admitted within the pale of English law. But nothing more is in fact implied in this than that the Irish were not under the English but under the native or Brehon jurisdiction. The existence of two races in the same country under different laws, and with different punishments for crimes, inconceivable as it appears now”

(he does not know the Levant!),

“appeared quite natural at a time when the distinction of races was far stronger and when law was the peculiar custom of the race, not a set of principles common to all mankind. It would have been the same in England had the Anglo-Saxons succeeded in obtaining from {William} the Conqueror ‘the laws of Edward the Confessor’. One kingdom would then have contained two nations, ‘ the Normans and the Saxons, living under different penal codes. The rule of impunity held good for both sides. An Irishman who had murdered an Englishman would have been only fined for it by his Brehon. The Government having on one occasion desired a native chief to receive a sheriff into his territories, the chief consented, but at the same time desired the Government to say what sum of money, or eric, they set upon the sheriff’s head, in order that, if he was killed, that sum might be duly assessed upon the sept” (p. 69).

England as a government is said to have always been well disposed towards Ireland:

“The truth is that the Plantagenet Government, when it found time to attend to Ireland, intended not evil but good to the Irish people (p. 68).... The English Government was not unwilling to admit the Irishry to the English law. Five whole septs” (!!) “the five bloods ... were admitted collectively, and individual denization seems to have been freely granted” (pp. 69-70).

But the bad Irish barons did not want this and it is they who frustrated the good intentions of the government (pp. 68, 69).

“The idea that the English Government deliberately excluded the Irish from the pale of humanity vanishes away” (p. 70).

(Certainly—in his mind!)

“From the ruins of the feudal aristocracy which the Wars of the Roses had laid in the dust, arose the powerful monarchy of the Tudors” (p. 71).

Hence it had not found its grave as a result of those battles in France!

“At no period of the struggle” (Henry VIII and Elizabeth) “unhappily could England put forth her whole power to strike, in mercy, a decisive blow” (p. 77).

Under Elizabeth:

“Finally, there was corruption; corruption in the very vilest form; corruption which preferred war to peace because war held out hopes of lucre which peace threatened to destroy. The great events and discoveries of the Elizabethan era produced a love of adventure which broke forth in every direction, and varied in the dignity of its objects and its character, from the height of heroism to the depth of baseness. The eagles took wing for the Spanish main; the vultures descended upon Ireland. A daring use of his sword procured for the adventurer in the Spanish colonies romantic” (!) “wealth in the shape of ingots and rich bales; a dexterous use of intrigue, chicanery and the art of inciting to rebellion, procured for the sharper in Ireland wealth less romantic but more solid and lasting in the shape of confiscated lands” (p. 79).

“The reign” (of James I) “began well, with a broad act of oblivion” (?). “Even the arch-rebel Tyrone was received into favour”

(! after all, he had made his peace even before the death of Elizabeth!) (p. 94).

By the judgment of the King’s Bench (1605) which stated that Irish TENURE was unlawful, and introduced English law, “the chiefs gained a boon by having their demesne lands and their territorial rights finally made hereditary instead of elective” (p. 95).

Ten years later living in exile and completely expropriated these chiefs (those of them that still lived in 1605) were able to ponder what a BOON it was!

“There seems no reason to doubt that it was in honest pursuance of the same policy of civilising and conciliating” (!!) “the Irish, by giving them English institutions, that a Parliament more regular and comprehensive than any which had preceded, was called for all Ireland, without distinction of race or religion.” (??) “It is true that the Government took active measures to obtain a majority, and that it created a number of rotten, or rather of sham boroughs. But it does not seem that freedom of election was otherwise” (!!) “interfered with” (!) (pp. 95-96).... “It was necessary to create sham boroughs, not only to give the Government a majority, but also because real boroughs there were none” (!!!) (p. 96).

“It appears, to say the least, extremely doubtful whether the lands of Tyrone and Tyrconnel, on which the Ulster colony was planted, had been forfeited for any real offence and whether the plot in which these noblemen were alleged to have been engaged, was not invented by the teeming brain of officials desirous of sharing their estates. They fled, it is true, but not from justice; for justice, when the forfeiture of land was in prospect, there was none” (p. 100).

He asserts that in 1640 and 1641, Richelieu and the Pope fomented civil war in England and Ireland, and the Irish officers who had returned from France and Spain also added fuel to it. Then came the Catholic rising

“with that great massacre of the Protestants in Ulster which is connected with the name of Sir Phelim O’Neill.To doubt that there was a great massacre seems idle, since Clarendon,” a contemporary, well informed and sober writer, reckoned the number of persons killed at 40 or 50,000” (!). “It seems not less idle to doubt which party struck the first blow; as well might it be doubted which party struck the first blow in the Sicilian Vespers.An abstract of depositions describing some of the scenes which occurred in the massacre has been preserved by Rush worth (Collections, Vol. IV, p. 405). It presents an appalling but perfectly credible picture of the vengeance which a people brutalised by oppression wreaks, in the moment of its brief triumph, on the oppressor. Well might phantoms of horror haunt the accursed spots and the ghosts of the murdered be heard to shriek from beneath the bridge at Portnadown” (pp. 107-08).

This is again very vague!

“Under the Protectorate” (Cromwell) “... the Protestant community at least (in Ireland) presented a picture of prosperity such as the island had never before seen” (??) (p. 114).

This sycophant regards Macaulay as A GREAT WRITER.

“It would be as easy to sing of the siege of Troy after Homer, as to write about the siege of Londonderry after Macaulay” (p. 120).

While he advises the Irish (see Preface)

“to pay more attention to general causes” so as to be able to explain away such infamies in an objective manner, he always attributes the actions of the Irish to petty parochial causes. Thus under James II:

“The Irish people, it has been justly observed, in entering upon the civil war, were moved, not by attachment to the House of Stuart or to its political principles, but, like the Highland Clans, by motives of their own ... probably the mass of James’s party, though they were fighting for the Catholic religion, were fighting less for the Catholic religion than for that old and terrible subject of Irish civil wars, the land” (p. 121).

(That is their own land!).

“Land had been the great source of contention and misery in Ireland throughout her history” (p. 125).

Not the Englishmen’s greed for land, but the land itself must be blamed for it. ITS CHITTY THAT’S DONE IT.

“Their descendants” (the descendants of Cromwell’s landlords) “became probably the very worst Upper Class with which a country was ever afflicted. The habits of the Irish gentry grew beyond measure brutal and reckless, and the coarseness of their debaucheries would have disgusted the crew of Comus. Their drunkenness, their blasphemy, their ferocious duelling, left the squires of England far behind” (!). “If there was a grotesque side to their vices which mingles laughter to our reprobation, this did not render their influence less pestilent to the community of which the malice of destiny had made them the social chiefs. Fortunately their recklessness was sure, in the end, to work, to a certain extent, its own cure; and in the background of their swinish and uproarious drinking bouts, the Encumbered Estates Act rises to our view” (p. 140).

“In 1778 the increasing spirit of toleration began sensibly to exert its power” and the worst PENAL LAWS were repealed. In “1778 Lord North proposed (somewhat under duress, it is true) large relaxations of the iniquitous and absurd restrictions on Irish trade ... two years later the same minister, taught wisdom by his American disasters, proposed and carried further concessions. Twenty years more, and Mr. Pitt, having come into power instinct with all the liberal ideas of the new era, extinguished one” (!) “source of misery and discord by giving Ireland a full measure of Free Trade”

(that is with England!)

“as an article of the Union” (!!) (pp. 158-59).

The “nice spirit of toleration”, the “liberal ideas of the new era”, etc., have brought all this about. Not the Englishman’s fear of the Americans and French! These are the “general causes” which have to be kept in mind, but by no means the real ones!

“Among the phantoms of hatred and suspicion which arose from this field of carnage, was the horrible idea that the English Government had intentionally stimulated the Irish people into rebellion in order to pave the way for the Union. No evidence in support of this charge can be produced” (p. 176).

“A nation must be very shallow or very depraved which, in the meridian light of modern philosophy, can imagine that a mere extension of its territory, unsanctioned by nature and morality, can add to its greatness” (p. 179).

And this when the English have been engaged in conquests throughout the century!

Conclusion:

“The original source of the calamities of Ireland was the partial character of the Norman Conquest, which caused the conquerors instead of becoming an upper class, to remain a mere hostile settlement or Pale.... The next great source of mischief was the disruption of Christendom at the period of the Reformation and the terrible religious wars which ensued upon that disruption and into which both nations, in common with the other nations of Europe, were drawn. Then Ireland became a victim to the attempt of Louis XIV, which was in part a sequel of the religious wars, to destroy the liberty and religion of England through his vassals, the House of Stuart. Finally the French Revolution breaking out into anarchy, massacre and atheism, at the moment when the Government of England under Pitt had just entered on the path of reform and toleration, not only arrested political progress in this as in other cases, but involved Ireland in another civil war” (p. 193).

Again fine “general causes”! As general as possible!

Preface:

“It” (this book) “would serve a good purpose if it should fall into the hands of any popular writer on Irish history, and induce him to pay more attention than writers on that subject have generally paid to general causes, to cultivate the charities of history and in the case of the rulers as well as of the people, to take fair account of misfortunes as well as of crimes.”

On Ireland’s INDEPENDENCE, p. 180:

“Independence would of course be feasible in itself if it could only be accompanied by geographical separation; but so close a neighbourhood would involve contact and contact would bring on collision”

(hence as on the Continent where the countries are in direct contact?);

“rivalry, jealousy, hostility would spring up all the more certainly because there would be between the two countries the memory of a former union and of a recent divorce; and Ireland, menaced by the power of England, would become the ward and the vassal of France, or some other foreign power which for its own purposes would constitute itself her protector.”

All this applies also to Russia and Poland, to Hungary and Austria and indeed between 1815 and 1859 to Austria and Italy, and to every case of subjugation. It is appropriate that England’s former infamies have to serve as a pretext for the infamies committed at the present time.

Federation in this case requires two partners of equal strength, “but it could not be naturally or usefully formed between two states one of which is far more powerful than the other, since in the Federal Council the vote of the more powerful would always prevail”.