LETTERS TO THE EDITOR..
THE MEMORIES OF IRISHMEN.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " BrECTATOR."] SIR,—I have only just seen the interesting paper on " The Memories of Irishmen" in the Spectator of June 22nd. I should like to point out that the writer has made a mistake in taking as parallel cases for his argument the Indian Mutiny and the Cromwellian period in Ireland. Though agreeing with him that the English easily forget their wrongs, while we Irish do not, in holding up as a point of contrast the Englishman's forgetfulness of Azimoollah he has failed to see the cause that has kept the memory of Cromwell alive and black in the hearts of Irishmen. The English in India were aliens, conquerors with no root in the land. The butcheries of Nana Sahib took no lasting hold on the memories of the English people at home because those butcheries were done in a strange country some thousands of miles away. The Irish in the seventeenth century were butchered in their own land, suffered as a nation, and it is to-day as a nation that they remember the effort made to exterminate their race. Crom- well's transplantation scheme, so cruelly carried out, and the thousands of men and women he sold into slavery in New England and Barbados, have, together with the slaughters at Drogheda and Wexford, made his name to Irishmen as Haman's is to the Jews. No doubt he believed himself to be a Joshua cleansing a land of Canaan. We Irish deny and have always denied—relying on the facts of history—the alleged massacre of 1641. That outrages occurred in some places is true, but that there was any general massacre of Protestants cannot be supported by any satisfactory evidence. And where there were cases of violence, we must remember that they were the result of terrible provoca- tions. The people who rose were the men, or the sons of the men, who had been forced to give up their homes and lands to James I's Undertakers. The English nation at the time regarded the Catholics with abhorrence. It was for the interest of the Adventurers, and the numerous companies started in London for buying up Irish lands from the Eng- lish Government, to spread and exaggerate every tale of violence, whether true or not, that came from Ireland. Any one who reads some of the pamphlets published in London at this time can verify the truth of this statement. When the Scotch soldiers rode down on Island Magee, and killed every man, woman, and child of the native Irish, they did so in the belief that their own wives and children had been murdered. Yet in a few days they found that they were not only alive, but that their lives had never been in danger. Bedell, the good Protestant Bishop, though living in the midst of the Irish, was protected by the people when they rose. They took his church from him, it is true, and gave it to one of their own priests, but they would allow no vio- lence to be shown him, and treated him with respect. When the Parliamentary Commissioners were collecting evidence about the alleged massacres, they were only able to convict two hundred persons in all Ireland, and only one man in Ulster, Sir Phelim O'Neil, where they were said to have occurred. And this, too, in a court called " Cromwell's Slaughter House," where the Judges were not very careful over the evidence they obtained. Now, for myself, I regard Cromwell in a curious and divided way,—a fact perhaps due- t° the English blood I inherit from one of my parents. Thus. the English half of me decires that the great Lord-Protector of the English liberties, the gran who helped to abolish the- Stuarts, who tried to purify the English laws, who would have given freedom of conscience to the English people, and who made his nation feared and respected in Europe, should have a statue; while that which is Irish in me protests with passion against that statue being raised with the money of G- race to whom liberty of conscience was denied, and whom the Lord-General of Ireland tried to exterminate.—I am, Sir, 81.c.,,
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