The Land-War In Ireland (1870) | Page 4

help to seat it on its own broad foundations. Giving up the Viceroy's dreams that the glorious mission of Ireland was to be a kitchen garden, a dairy, a larder for England, we must come frankly to the conclusion that the national life of the Irish people, without distinction of creed or party, increases in vigour with their intelligence, and is now invincible. Let the imperial legislature put an end for ever to such an unnatural state of things--thus only can they secure the harmonious working and cordial Union of the two nations united together in one State--thus only can they insure for the landlords themselves all the power and all the influence that can be retained by them in consistency with the industrial rights and political freedom of the cultivators of the soil. These now complain of their abject dependence, and hopeless bondage, under grinding injustice. They are alleged to be full of discontent, which must grow with the intelligence and manhood of the people who writhe under the system. Their advocates affirm that their discontent must increase in volume and angry force every year, and that, owing to the connection of Ireland with the United States, it may at any time be suddenly swollen with the fury of a mountain torrent, deeply discoloured by a Republican element.
It must be granted, I fear, that the Celts of Ireland feel pretty much as the Britons felt under the ascendency of the Saxons, and as the Saxons in their turn felt under the ascendency of the Normans. In the estimation of the Christian Britons, their Saxon conquerors, even after the conversion of the latter, were 'an accursed race, the children of robbers and murderers, possessing the fruits of their fathers' crimes.' 'With them,' says Dr. Lingard, 'the Saxon was no better than a pagan bearing the name of a Christian. They refused to return his salutation, to join in prayer with him in the church, to sit with him at the same table, to abide with him under the same roof. The remnant of his meals and the food over which he had made the sign of the cross they threw to their dogs or swine; the cup out of which he had drunk they scoured with sand, as if it had contracted defilement from his lips.'
It is not the Celtic memory only that is tenacious of national wrong. The Saxon was doomed to drink to the dregs the same bitter cup which he administered so unmercifully to the Briton. His Teutonic blood saved him from no humiliation or insult. The Normans seized all the lands, all the castles, all the pleasant mansions, all the churches and monasteries. Even the Saxon saints were flung down out of their shrines and trampled in the dust under the iron heel of the Christian conqueror. Everything Saxon was vile, and the word 'Englishry' implied as much contempt and scorn as the word 'Irishry' in a later age. In fact, the subjugated Saxons gradually became infected with all the vices and addicted to all the social disorders that prevailed among the Irish in the same age; only in Ireland the anarchy endured much longer from the incompleteness of the conquest and the absence of the seat of supreme government, which kept the races longer separate and antagonistic. Perhaps the most humiliating notice of the degrading effects of conquest on the noble Saxon race to be found in history, is the language in which Giraldus Cambrensis, the reviler of the Irish Celt, contrasts them with his countrymen, the Welsh. 'Who dare,' he says, 'compare the English, the most degraded of all races under heaven, with the Welsh? In their own country they are the serfs, the veriest slaves of the Normans. In ours whom else have we for our herdsmen, shepherds, cobblers, skinners, cleaners of our dog kennels, ay, even of our privies, but Englishmen? Not to mention their original treachery to the Britons, that hired by them to defend them they turned upon them in spite of their oaths and engagements, they are to this day given to treachery and murder.' The lying Saxon was, according to this authority, a proverbial expression.
The Saxon writers lamented their miserable subjection in a monotonous wail for many generations. So late as the seventeenth century an English author speaks in terms of compassion of the disinherited and despoiled families who had sunk into the condition of artisans, peasants, and paupers. 'This,' says M. Thierry, 'is the last sorrowful glance cast back through the mist of ages on that great event which established in England a race of kings, nobles, and warriors of foreign extraction. The reader must figure to himself, not a mere change of political rule, not the triumph of one of two competitors, but the intrusion of