Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

while the sweat drops from their brows, they never touch the bread into which their harvests are converted. For you they toil, for you they delve; they reclaim the bog, and drive the plough to the mountain's top, for you. And where does all this misery exist? In a country teeming with fertility, and stamped with the beneficent intents of God! When the famine of Ireland prevailed, — when her cries crossed the Channel, and pierced your ears, and reached your hearts, the granaries of Ireland were bursting with their contents; and, while a People knelt down and stretched out their hands for food, the business of deportation, the absentee tribute, was going on! Talk of the prosperity of Ireland! Talk of the external magnificence of a poor-house, gorged with misery within!

But the Secretary for the Treasury exclaims: "If the agitators would but let us alone, and allow Ireland to be tranquil!" — The agitators, forsooth! Does he venture-has he the intrepidity- to speak thus? Agitators! Against deep potations let the drunkard rail; at Crockford's let there be homilies against the dice-box; let every libertine lament the progress of licentiousness, when his Majesty's ministers deplore the influence of demagogues, and Whigs complain of agitation! How did you carry the Reform? Was it not by impelling the People almost to the verge of revolution? Was there a stimulant for their passions, was there a provocative for their excitement, to which you did not resort? If you have forgotten, do you think that we shall fail to remember your meetings at Edinburgh, at Paisley, at Manchester, at Birmingham? Did not three hundred thousand men assemble? Did they not pass resolutions against taxes? Did they not threaten to march on London? Did not two of the cabinet ministers indite to them epistles of gratitude and of admiration? and do they now dare-have they the audacity- to speak of agitation? Have we not as good a title to demand the restitution of our Parliament, as the ministers to insist on the reform of this House?

109. ENGLAND'S MISRULE OF IRELAND. — Id.

Ir in Ireland, a country that ought to teem with abundance, there prevails wretchedness without example, if millions of paupers are there without employment, and often without food or raiment, where is the fault? Is it in the sky, which showers verdure? is it in the soil, which is surprisingly fertile? or is it in the fatal course which you, the arbiters of her destiny, have adopted? She has for centuries belonged to England. England has used her for centuries as she has pleased. How has she used her, and what has been the result? A code of laws was in the first place established, to which, in the annals of legislative atrocity, there is not a parallel; and of that codethose institutes of unnatural ascendency the Irish Church is a remnant. In Heaven's name, what useful purpose has your gorgeous Establishment ever promoted? You cannot hope to proselytize us

through its means. You have put the experiment to the test of three centuries. You have tried everything. If the truth be with you, it may be great; but in this instance it does not sustain the aphorismfor it does not prevail. If, in a religious point of view, the Establishment cannot conduce to the interests of religion, what purpose does it answer? It is said that it cements the Union-cements the Union! It furnishes the great argument against the Union; it is the most degrading incident of all the incidents of degradation by which that measure was accompanied; it is the yoke, the brand, the shame and the exasperation, of Ireland!

-

[ocr errors]

Public opinion and public feeling have been created in Ireland. Men of all classes have been instructed in the principles on which the rights of Nations depend. The humblest peasant, amidst destitution the most abject, has learned to respect himself. I remember when, if you struck him, he cowered beneath the blow; but now, lift up your hand, the spirit of insulted manhood will start up in a bosom covered with rags, his Celtic blood will boil as yours would do, - and he will feel, and he will act, as if he had been born where the person of every citizen is sacred from affronts, and from his birth had breathed the moral atmosphere which you are accustomed to inhale. In the name of millions of my countrymen, assimilated to yourselves, I démand the reduction of a great abuse, the retrenchment of a monstrous sinecure, -I demand justice at your hands!- Justice to Ireland" is a phrase which has been, I am well aware, treated as a topic for derision; but the time will come, -nor is it, perhaps, remote,— when you will not be able to extract much matter for ridicule from those trite but not trivial words. "Do justice to America," exclaimed the father of that man by whom the Irish Union was accomplished; "do it to-night, do it before you sleep." In your National Gallery is a picture on which Lord Lyndhurst should look it was painted by Copley, and represents the death of Chatham, who did not live long after the celebrated invocation was pronounced. "Do justice to America, do it to-night, - do it before you sleep!" There were men by whom that warning was heard who laughed when it was uttered. Have a care lest injustice to Ireland and to America may not be followed by the same results, lest mournfulness may not succeed to mirth, and another page in the history of England may not be writ in her heart's blood!

[ocr errors]

110. CIVIL WAR THE GREATEST NATIONAL EVIL, 1829.-Lord Palmerston.

THEN come we to the last remedy, —civil war. Some gentlemen say that, sooner or later, we must fight for it, and the sword must decide. They tell us that, if blood were but shed in Ireland, Catholic emancipation might be avoided. Sir, when honorable members shall

* Lord Lyndhurst's father. John Singleton Copley was born in Boston, Massachusetts, 1738, and died in 1815. Many of his best paintings are in the United States, and are much esteemed.

be a little deeper read in the history of Ireland, they will find that in Ireland blood has been shed, that in Ireland leaders have been seized, trials have been had, and punishments have been inflicted. They will find, indeed, almost every page of the history of Ireland darkened by bloodshed, by seizures, by trials, and by punishments. But what has been the effect of these measures? They have, indeed, been successful in quelling the disturbances of the moment; but they never have gone to their cause, and have only fixed deeper the poisoned barb that rankles in the heart of Ireland. Can one believe one's ears, when one hears respectable men talk so lightly- nay, almost so wishfully-of civil war? Do they reflect what a countless multitude of ills those three short syllables contain? It is well, indeed, for the gentlemen of England, who live secure under the protecting shadow of the law, whose slumbers have never been broken by the clashing of angry swords, whose harvests have never been trodden down by the conflict of hostile feet, it is well for them to talk of civil war, as if it were some holiday pastime, or some sport of children:

"They jest at scars who never felt a wound."

But, that gentlemen from unfortunate and ill-starred Ireland, who have seen with their own eyes, and heard with their own ears, the miseries which civil war produces, who have known, by their own experience, the barbarism, ay, the barbarity, which it engenders, that such persons should look upon civil war as anything short of the last and greatest of national calamities, is to me a matter of the deepest and most unmixed astonishment. I will grant, if you will, that the success of such a war with Ireland would be as signal and complete as would be its injustice; I will grant, if you will, that resistance would soon be extinguished with the lives of those who resisted; I will grant, if you will, that the crimsoned banner of England would soon wave, in undisputed supremacy, over the smoking ashes of their towns, and the blood-stained solitude of their fields. But I tell you

that England herself never would permit the achievement of such a conquest; England would reject, with disgust, laurels that were dyed in fraternal blood; England would recoil, with loathing and abhorrence, from the bare contemplation of so devilish a triumph!

111. ON PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.-Lord John Russell, June 24, 1831.

I AM not one of those, Sir, who would hold out to the People vain hopes of immediate benefit, which it could not realize, from this measure. Neither am I one of those who maintain the opposite theory, such as is well expressed in a well-known couplet,

"How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!"

Far am I from agreeing in the opinion which the poet has so well expressed in those lines. They are very pretty poetry, but they are

not true in politics. When I look to one country as compared to another, at the different epochs of their history, I am forced to believe that it is upon law and government that the prosperity and morality, the power and intelligence, of every Nation depend. When I compare Spain (in which the traveller is met by the stiletto in the streets, and by the carbine in the high roads) to England, in the poorest parts of which the traveller passes without fear, I think the difference is occasioned by the different Governments under which the People live. At least, Sir, it cannot be denied, that the end attained by the two Governments of these respective countries is essentially different. Is it possible, indeed, for any intelligent person to travel through countries, and not trace the characters and conduct of the inhabitants to the nature of their Institutions and Governments? When I propose, therefore, a Reform of Parliament, - when I propose that the People shall send into this House real Representatives, to deliberate on their wants and to consult for their interests, to consider their griev ances and attend to their desires, - when I propose that they shall in fact, as they hitherto have been said to do in theory, possess the vast power of holding the purse-strings of the monarch, I do it under the conviction that I am laying the foundation of the greatest improvement in the comforts and well-being of the People.

112. THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF IRELAND, 1845. — T. B. Macaulay. Or all the institutions now existing in the civilized world, the Established Church of Ireland seems to me the most absurd. Is there anything else like it? Was there ever anything else like it? The world is full of ecclesiastical establishments. But such a portent as this Church of Ireland is nowhere to be found. Look round the continent of Europe. Ecclesiastical establishments from the White Sea to the Mediterranean; ecclesiastical establishments from the Wolga to the Atlantic; but nowhere the church of a small minority enjoying exclusive establishment. Look at America. There you have all forms of Christianity, from Mormonism if you call Mormonism Christianity

to Romanism. In some places you have the voluntary system. In some you have several religions connected with the State. In some you have the solitary ascendency of a single Church. But nowhere, from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, do you find the Church of a small minority exclusively established. In one country alone-in Ireland alone is to be seen the spectacle of a community of eight millions of human beings, with a Church which is the Church of only eight hundred thousand!

[ocr errors]

Two hundred and eighty-five years has this Church been at work. What could have been done for it in the way of authority, privileges, endowments, which has not been done? Did any other set of bishops and priests in the world ever receive so much for doing so little? Nay, did any other set of bishops and priests in the world ever receive half as much for doing twice as much? And what have we to show

for all this lavish expenditure? What, but the most zealous Roman Catholic population on the face of the earth? On the great, solid Lass of the Roman Catholic population you have made no impression whatever. There they are, as they were ages ago, ten to one against the members of your Established Church. Explain this to me. I speak to you, the zealous Protestants on the other side of the House. Explain this to me on Protestant principles. If I were a Roman Catholic, I could easily account for the phenomenon. If I were a Roman Catholic, I should content myself with saying that the mighty hand and the outstretched arm had been put forth according to the promise, in defence of the unchangeable Church; that He, who, in the old time, turned into blessings the curses of Balaam, and smote the host of Sennacherib, had signally confounded the arts and the power of heretic statesmen. But what is the Protestant to say? Is this a miracle, that we should stand aghast at it? Not at all. It is a result which human prudence ought to have long ago foreseen, and long ago averted. It is the natural succession of effect to cause. A Church exists for moral ends. A Church exists to be loved, to be reverenced, to be heard with docility, to reign in the understandings and hearts of men. A Church which is abhorred is useless, or worse than useless; and to quarter a hostile Church on a conquered People, as you would quarter a soldiery, is, therefore, the most absurd of mistakes.

113. ON LIMITING THE HOURS OF LABOR, 1846.-T. B. Macaulay.

If we consider man simply in a commercial point of view, simply as a machine for productive labor, let us not forget what a piece of mechanism he is, how "fearfully and wonderfully made." If we have a fine horse, we do not use him exactly as a steam-engine; and still less should we treat man so, more especially in his earlier years. The depressing labor that begins early in life, and is continued too long every day, enfeebles his body, enervates his mind, weakens his spirits, overpowers his understanding, and is incompatible with any good or useful degree of education. A state of society in which such a system prevails will inevitably, and in no long space, feel its baneful effects. What is it which makes one community prosperous and flourishing, more than another? You will not say that it is the soil; you will not say that it is its climate; you will not say that it is its mineral wealth, or its natural advantages, its ports, or its great rivers. Is it anything in the earth, or in the air, that makes Scotland a richer country than Egypt; or, Batavia, with its marshes, more prosperous than Sicily? No; but Scotchmen made Scotland what she is, and Dutchmen raised their marshes to such eminence. Look to America. Two centuries ago, it was a wilderness of buffaloes and wolves. What has caused the change? Is it her rich mould? Is it her mighty rivers? Is it her broad waters? No; her plains were then as fertile as they are now, her rivers were as numerous. Nor was it any great

-

« ZurückWeiter »