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

other country has reverted back to its original foundations,
and so remains firm and strong without dangerous rents or fissures. No
doubt, the operation is difficult and critical. But what has been done
once may be done again; and as it was England that kept Irish society
so long rocking on its smaller end, it is her duty now to lend all her
strength to 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