TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE IRREPRESSIBLE FENIANS.
ANOTHER flash in the pan I Will nothing weary out the indomitable perseverance in failure, the pertinacity in false starts, the constancy in effervescence, the- patience in impatience, of the Fenian Brotherhood ? The whole race seems to have gas on the brain and gunpowder in the blood, and to exhale its fever from year to year in flashes of delirium as wild and fitful as the outbursts of a volcano or the periodic ebullitions of a hot mud-spring. Yet, if we come to consider it, inconvenient as it is for the world, vexatious for us, and iniquitously unjust to the poor Canadians, who are made to suffer exactly on the principle on which the man acted who revenged himself on an enemy by picking the pocket of his second cousin, this inflammable temperament which will lavish itself on providing the world with small alarms and irritating disasters on a petty scale, is neither so exceptional nor so hopeless a phenomenon as it seems. Almost every race that has had a keen national sentiment and national vanity, and no national satisfaction for it, has at some time or other gone off in just so futile a series of detonating explosions, to the nervous disgust of a pre-occupied world, which never can endure distracting political demonstrations which are mere signs of temper without practical importance. Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, have all in turn alarmed Europe by demonstrations apparently as ill-considered and futile,—as much like the mere summer lightning which indicates the disturbed condition of the elements, without even pretending to give a full vent to the agitation,—as any of these Fenian fiascos; and in their case Englishmen can always be philosophical, and moralize on the rationale of phenomena so distressing. But in the case of the Fenian outrages, it is more difficult,—especially when we consider that our ancestors carefully provided so many of the elements in the composition of this human gunpowder, and we, though we are repudiating their policy, have none the less to suffer from its pernicious fruits.
We ought seriously, then, to be more patient than we are of these fatuous and wasteful igneous displays of political vindictiveness,—we do not mean, of course, in the sense of fail- ing to put down with relentless completeness these outbursts of passion, or in the sense of devoting less care and fore- thought to discovering and providing against them,—but only in the sense of regarding them without any of that fretful surprise which they always seem to excite afresh in this country whenever they recur. They are strictly speaking natural results of the policy of the past, and it is just as silly to complain and groan over them, as it is to chafe at the necessity of pay- ing the interest of the National Debt, or of hiring police to watch and disarm the young thieves and vagabonds whom we had refused to educate. In matters of this kind we quietly take the consequences of our own acts, and don't fall into a pet every day when we pay our heavy taxes or discover some new nest of vice and crime. But in the case of these more showy political phenomena,—these quasi-rebellions in Ireland, outrages in England, invasions of Canada,—we are apt to think of what happens as if it were entirely gratuitous and causeless, and attributable to a sort of temper preter- naturally anarchical and destructive. Of course, if we look at the acts as if they were free and deliberate acts, nothing could be more wickedly wanton, both because they sacrifice life and peace for no purpose, and because they really tend to prolong the evil for which they affect to find a remedy. But then that is just the mistake of our point of view. These violent and miserable breaches of order are no more free and deliberate acts than an attack of brain-fever is a free and deliberate act, —or, to suggest a better analogy, than the virulent scoffings at Ireland and everything Irish in our most characteristically English newspapers,—the pictures in Punch, for instance, which always make a gorilla or a baboon of the typical Irish- man, are free and deliberate acts. All nations, whether politically active or politically suppressed, have a fund of wasteful and destructive energy in them which comes out in one form or another, though races with a comparatively satisfactory national life are apt to let this waste steam evaporate in words (which are not unfrequently, by the way, quite as disastrous in result as actions), while races without any satisfying national life express themselves in sterile conspiracies and gusts of spit-fire violence. The same vicious energy which England has hitherto wasted, and still too often wastes, in impotent anger against Ireland,—in simply swearing, as it were, at the Irish for being so impracticable,—the Irish waste in impracticable and reckless attempts to injure England at their own risk and peril. Both kinds of waste are equally futile, though one is more fatal than the other. Yet there is a sort of perverse grandeur, too, in this life-long willingness of exiled Irishmen to throw-' their own lives as well as their property away in the in- sanest of insane enterprises, only to express once more the undying resolve never to abandon the vendetta between their country and England. If our contemptuous bitterness towards. Ireland is less destructive, as of course it is, it is also quite with- outrisk. We hazard nothingwhen we heap contumely on Ireland. But these wretched Fenians know perfectly well that theyhazard everything for an enterprise of the most hopeless character, and for which they themselves will suffer most, thougla numberless persons whom they would willingly admit to be perfectly innocent must suffer more or less with them. It seems to us quite clear that patriotic vindictiveness of this- sort, however perverse and calamitous, indicates a sort of reserve force in the race, which, if we could only find the secret of turning it from destructive into conservative channels, would make the Irish nation one of the most powerful in the world. If soldiers can admire achievements like the useless Balaklava charge, politicians ought to find somewhere at the bottom of their hearts a feeling of respect for the un- wearied and unweariable energy which can still subscribe, and organize, and risk life and liberty and property, though failure and disgrace have followed failure and disgrace for generations, solely for the sake of once more expressing the determination never to give up the feud or abandon the hope of revenge. Passion of that kind is very bad, and what is more, if Irishmen could only judge England by its present actions, it would be mon- strously unjust; but it is force of a sort, and of a disinterested sort ; and therefore if once it could be directed by anything approaching to calm wisdom, it ought to give distinction and nobility to the race which is capable of cherishing it so long and bitterly.
Such seem to us a few of the reasons why the anger and impatience with which we hear of these cruel and utterly un- just assaults of the Fenians on the tranquillity of the British Empire in all parts of the world, are inappropriate emotions. We ought to understand that the Irish character is as yet as certain to give out this cry of hereditary passion, as the Eng- lish character is certain to receive it with something of insolent contempt when it is heard. "Natural selection "is much talked of in these days, and if ever a political characteristic were carefully produced by "natural selection," this smouldering resentment of the Irish towards our rule has been so produced. We have trained up a whole race to a habit of vigilant hatred towards British law and rule, and are angered to find the habit con- tinuing after the causes for it have been gradually removed. We might just as well complain of the ferocity which lingers in bloodhounds when the practice of using them for the pur- suit and destruction of human beings has been discontinued. These miserable plots, and insurrections, and invasions are just as little of voluntary iniquities, as the fraud and violence of the children of the dangerous classes, or the cunning of the Jews at the time they were the hereditary victims of every nation in Christendom. We ought to look on them somewhat as we look on such calamities as periodic floods or famines,—calamities to be alleviated by forethought and contended against by all the strength of a vigorous executive, but not to be offended at as if they were contrary to nature. Of course, we do not in the least mean that Fenians when caught ought not to be sternly punished. We should absolutely object to admitting any influence to the representations of the United States in extenuation of punishment, should any such representations be made to us after this raid as were made on the last occasion. There are cases in which men, however much we may be disposed to extenuate their personal guilt, must, for the sake of order, be punished with reference to the mischief they do and the necessity there is for deterring others from the same crime, and without any reference to the excuses which may be really applicable to their individual case. We hold that these reiterated Fenian crimes are of this description, and that they must in future be severely and even relentlessly punished. But that is no reason at all why we should fall into moods of feeble irritability and causeless rage, over political phenomena which are no more surprising than the ripening of any harvest of which we have sown the seed.
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