SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY'S book, large as it is, will
have for politicians more than the interest of a novel, as well as more than the instructiveness of a history. It has come out in a happy moment, when men are puzzling over a great and very difficult Irish crisis, with far too little of the historical spirit in their minds, and far too much of its consequences in their actions. It is a book full of life and brilliance, and though it covers only a period of five years, and five years which elapsed between thirty and forty years ago,—namely, from 1840-1845,—yet those five years were so full of significant likeness, as well as still more significant unlikeness, to the epoch of the moment, and we are reaping so evidently to-day the evil fruits of the errors committed then, that the record of those five years is full of the most absorbing interest. We need not say that we cannot always agree in the drift of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's political criticism. It is a very powerful, and for the most part a very just, indictment against the Irish policy of Great Britain. The brief review of Irish history is one of the most vigorous and one of the most painful " acts of accusation" against this country which was
• Young Ireland: a Fragment of Irish History, 1840-1850. By Blr Charles 011.1333 Daffy, K.C.H.G. London : Cassell, Better, and Oalpin,
ever penned, and for English readers one of the most wholesome lessons. But granting this to the full, it seems to us equally evident that Sir Charles Duffy is not nearly so clear-sighted and eloquent concerning the general shortcomings of Irish states- men, as he is concerning both the general and the particular shortcomings of English statesmen. We do not mean that he fails to see and point out perspicuously enough some of the errors of O'Connell, and not unfrequently even of his own circle of more intimate friends. What we do mean is that, in estimating the general conditions of the prolonged struggle, he ignores the political variability of the Irish people generally, in the zeal of his just attack on the selfishness of the British Government. To take a single example :—Sir Charles Duffy is very fond of answering the imputation that the Irish are never grateful for what they get, that they immediately forget all they have obtained, in their resentment that they have not obtained something more and better. To this, Sir Charles Duffy has, we need not say, gives a most ade- quate reply, and give it over and over again ; but yet he does not recognise adequately, and often entirely ignores, the magnitude of the advantage gained, the very great effort that had often been made by the party through whose help it was gained, and the political importance of maintaining the old ground and of keeping the use of the powerful instruments by which the old ground was won, in the midst of the effort to gain new ground. O'Connell's character and policy seem to us to represent iu these respects the defects of the Irish nation. When one point was gained, instead of using it and using the alliances by the help of which he had gained it, to obtain another point of equal importance, he was so much elated that he threw off all sobriety, and either demanded what was certain to alienate the allies he had, or otherwise squandered the results of his victory. Sir Charles Duffy, after giving very good reasons why the Irish people had no occasion to be grateful to the Duke of Wellington for passing the CatholicEmaucipation Act, goes on to describe in the following sentences the miserable political results of Emancipation :-
" In the interval a few Catholics were elected to Parliament, two Catholic lawyers were raised to the Bench by the Melbourne Govern- ment, and smaller appointments distributed among a few laymen, each appointment being followed by a groan from the Tory Press, as if the Emancipation Act were an instrument intended only for show. A more important change had taken place in the administration of justice under Lord Mulgrave, advised by Thomas Drummond. The exclusion of Catholics from juries was restrained, and the practice of appointing partisans of too shameful antecedents to public functions was interrupted. Since the return of the Tories to power, however. such scruples disappeared, and the old ascendancy method of select- ing officials had been revived. A brace of legal gladiators, who had become intolerable to the House of Commons by violence and indis- cretion, were sent to administer what was called justice in Ireland. It was in relation to these appointments that O'Connell justified him- self for supporting the Whigs in office, by a memorable stroke of humour :—'A Whig Government,' he said, is like Paddy's old hat thrust into a broken pane; it is thrue it doesn't let in much light, but at any rate it keeps out the cotehl.' "
And lie adds in a note
Lord Mulgrave excited great indignation among a large class of highly respectable persons by refusing to permit the master of an Orange Lodge, who had been tried for murder, and who has since been tried for a second murder, to act as sub-sheriff, and select juries throughout a northern county. This man's name was Sam Gray, and his character was so little a matter of doubt, that several years before he was selected for official distinction, the Chief Secre- tary in Ireland, Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, wrote of him to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, as a man who had killed one Catholic, and would be very happy to kill another ;' and another he actually was tried for killing some years after, and a second time escaped punishment, it was believed, by the connivance of his con- federates in the jury-box."
No doubt the Irish nation had the greatest and best reason to be disappointed at these miserable fruits of a great victory. But who was to blame ? For our own parts, we do not doubt that in great measure the Whigs were to blame. Lord John Russell did not do what he might have done to overrule the indifferentism and social conservatism of Lord Melbourne. But we believe that O'Connell and the Irish Members were much more seriously to blame. They took none of the hold that they might have taken, by pertinacity and moderation, of the mind of Parliament. O'Connell frittered away his great abilities in violent attacks on the " base, bloody, and brutal " Whigs, words to which he showed at other times that he attached a very Piekwickian sort of meaning, and thus rendered it possible, first, for the Whig Government to abandon the "appropriation principle" to which they were committed, and next, to settle the Irish tithe question by a compromise that was in reality a dereliction of all principle. We do not believe that either a Scotch or English leader of a tenth part of the genius of O'Connell, followed by an equally strong party, would have squandered his vast in- fluence, as O'Connell squandered it in the two Parliaments which followed the passing of the Reform Act.
And with respect to the period with which Sir Charles Gavan Duffy is more specially dealing, we believe that the same kind of error is visible. It is obvious that Sir Charles Duffy thinks O'Connell wrong in not adhering to his threat of resisting by physical force the veto of the Government on the monster meeting at Clontarf. For our own parts, we think O'Connell much more wrong in ever threatening such resistance. The position taken by Sir Robert Peel's Government was utterly untenable,—so ludicrously untenable, indeed, that his own party, both in England and Ireland, were alienated and disgusted by it. And if, adhering to an attitude of purely passive resistance, O'Connell had gone on summoning Irishmen to meet, but also to disperse whenever threatened by physical force, he would soon have brought down upon the Government a universal con- demnation, as well as, in all probability, the still more dangerous responsibility for collisions with the people, which not the people, but the soldiers, would have caused. But the Irish National party have always estimated with far too sanguine and reckless a mind, their physical force, and neglected to appreciate at any- thing like its true value the moral force of their position. They have been elated too easily, till they hoped to carry all before them, and depressed too easily, till they thought a cause lost which but a little perseverance might have won- However, we are not now concerned with the faults of Irish politicians, except so far as we desire to point out where our estimate differs from that of Sir Charles Duffy. In recount- ing facts, he appears to us singularly scrupulous and accu- rate, as well as vivid, though in the inferences which he draws from these facts we are often unable to agree with him, for he seldom takes account of the English point of view of any question, though showing us all through, by his powerful delineation of the Irish point of view, how difficult it would be, on any theory of political connection, for England to satisfy Ireland, and how very different, and sometimes mutually destructive, were the Irish views she had to satisfy.
As a specimen of the narrative style of this book,—which is illustrated throughout by lively personal details of a kind to give us the very form and colour of the events it treats of,—we may give the account of the high-handed action of Sir Robert Peel's Government in striking off from the Commission of the Peace gentlemen who had attended meetings at which the repeal of the Union was either advocated or discussed, and of the conse- quences of that extraordinary piece of administrative outrage :- " But the Government could not long retain the support of the Irish squires without some show of intrepidity, and at length they made their first move. The magistracy are appointed and superseded by the authority of the Lord Chancellor, and the office of Irish Chan- cellor was at that time filled by Sir Edward Sudgen, an eminent English equity lawyer, who was reputed to be imperfectly acquainted with constitutional law, and who was curiously ignorant of the Irish character and Irish affairs. That be should be an Englishman was almost a matter of course : since the Revolution of 1688 there had been nineteen Chancellors in Ireland, of whom twelve had been Eng- lishmen, one a Scot, and one a \Vest Indian. There was a story current that, shortly after his arrival from London to assume the office of Chancellor, a barrister practising in his court, who had recently lost an election, and had had the additional misfortune of disfiguring his face by accident in hunting, appeared in court tattooed with black plaster. Who is that disabled man ?' the Chancellor inquired of one of his officers. The beaten candidate for Youghal, Sir.' Great God,' murmured the Chancellor, what savages !' The story was, perhaps, the invention of some of the juniors in the Fonr Courts, who occu- pied their leisure with gossip and chaff, but to those who knew the man it did not sound improbable. Five weeks after Peel's declara- tion, the Chancellor suddenly called upon Lord Ffrench, as a magis- trate of the county Galway, to state whether he had consented, as was reported, to take the chair at a Repeal meeting about to be held at Caltra, in that county ? The Irish Peer answered with spirit and sense. It was not true that he had consented to take the chair at Caltra. But he volunteered the information that it was his intention to attend the Caltra meeting, and that he had consented to take the chair at Athlone, both meetings being for the legal and constitu- tional purpose of petitioning Parliament to repeal the Act of Union.' The Chancellor rejoined that Lord Ffrench in connecting himself with a political movement respecting which the Executive Govern- ment had so recently declared the hostility of the Crown, and which collected bodies of the people so multitudinous that they had an inevitable tendency to a breach of the peace, disentitled himself to hold the commission of a magistrate, and that he would accordingly order him to be superseded. Ireland had grown accustomed to strange freaks of authority, but they were generally blows levelled at the humble and ignorant. This was a stroke beyond all modern prece- dent. Lord Ffrench's offence was that he had not accepted as law the mere dictum of a party leader in office, a dictum uttered in the House of Commons, of whose proceedings there is no authorised, and even no legal, report ; and that lie proposed to attend a meeting for a constitutional purpose, not larger than had been repeatedly held in England in modern times for kindred purposes. When the day arrived, Lord Ffrench attended the Caltra meeting accompanied by his two sons, and these gentlemen were immediately removed from the roll of magistrates. A supersedeas was also issued against O'Connell and his eldest son, and a little later against Sir Michael Dillon Bellew, Colonel Butler, a scion of the House of Ormonde, and Member of Parliament for Kilkenny ; Caleb Powell, Member for Limerick ; Count Nugent, of a family ennobled for political and mili- tary services in Austria ; Edmund Burke Roche, known in later times as Lord Fermoy, Member for the great county of Cork ; Sir Valentine Blake, Member for Galway; Sir Benjamin Norris, Mayor of Waterford, and other gentlemen, four-and-twenty in all, for having attended Repeal meetings or joined the Repeal Association ; and, in one crown- ing ease, against Mr. Clanchy (who had not made up his mind on the subject of Repeal), for having attended a public dinner to the Mem- bers for his county, where 'Repeal of the Union' was among the toasts proposed. This stroke of executive authority produced results which any one acquainted with the temper and character of the Irish people might have foreseen. It excited indignation and resistance, not only among Repeaters, but among men who had hitherto held cautiously or contemptuously aloof from O'Connell. It was regarded as a summons to all parties in the country to submit unconditionally to the will of the English Minister. The right of meeting to petition Parliament lay at the basis of the Constitution. In the language of the Statute which fixes the succession of the Crown, it was one of the true, ancient, and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this realm ;' but it was proposed to deny to magistrates this right. The gentry who performed the duties of justice of the peace without salary or emolument, were to be treated as puppets of an English lawyer who held office for a few months in Ireland. They were for- bidden even to attend a public entertainment where the list of toasts was not sanctioned by the Minister of the hour. The Aration, in language which subsequent events render remarkable, reminded the Irish gentry that this attempt to impose upon them the opinions of an English Minister as a guide for their conduct might land them in unexpected places. Peel himself' (said John Dillon, who was the writer on the occasion) is day by day stealing towards Free-trade principles, and some day the gentry of Ireland may awaken to find him declare for the abolition of the Corn Laws, with an injunction to all magistrates to refrain from petitioning in their favour, on pain of dismissal.' "
We shall return to this book, which is full of timely and instructive history, on a future occasion.
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