SIR CHARLES DUFFY'S "YOUNG IRELAND." - *
[SECOND NOTICE.]
THE account given by Sir Charles Duffy of the trial of O'Con- nell, of the monstrous unfairness with which it was conducted, the virtual packing of the jury, and of the prosecutor's summing- UI) by Chief Justice Pennefather, recalls public attention to those discreditable proceedings at a fortunate moment, as we hope, both for England and Ireland. We see it asserted that the jury which is to try Mr. Parnell and his colleagues is to be struck "under the old system," and not under Lord O'Hagan's Act. But it is altogether incredible, and, we believe, simply impossible under Lord Hagan's Act, that any attempt should be made now to tamper with the constitution of the jury, such as was made, and successfully made, in 1843. All England, no doubt, expects, and we shall be profoundly surprised if Mr. Forster does not more than justify the expectation, that the trial of Mr. Parnell and his colleagues shall be in the largest sense fair and constitutional. If the trial is to succeed at all in doing what is expected from it, it can ouly succeed through the utmost and most scrupulous equity. To secure any good result from the con viction, —if the accused should be convicted,—there must be no possibility of saying that inanceuvres and, tactics such as were the disgrace of the Irish Government in 1843 have been repeated. If a conviction should result from adequate evidence that Trish peasants have been encouraged by political agitators to break their ple■Ige,, and contracts, then a convic- tion may do great good in Ireland. If it resulted from any artifi- cially-contrived combination of circumstances whatever, it would be as useless as was the conviction of O'Connell to intimidate the Repealers. But Mr. Forster can be trusted. If there be anything certain in this world as to our public men, nothing is more certain than that the trial of Mr. Parnell and his colleagues will differ in almost every feature in which it is possible that one public transaction can differ from another, from the chicanery of the O'Connell trial of 1843. Sir Charles Duffy gives us a most powerful and interesting account of that disgraceful proceed- ing, and. certainly it is one well calculated to justify the impres- sion that the most honourable of English Ministers, if he works • Young Ireland : a Fragment of Irish History, 1840.1800. By Sir Charles Gavan . Duffy, R.C.M.G. London : Cassell, Fetter, and Galpin.
through party instruments in Dublin, can hardly secure him- self against the tricks of unscrupulous agents. Sir Robert Peel had the mortification of seeing first his whole Irish administration discredited, and then the conviction which it had procured by such conspicuous malpractices quashed in the House of Lords. Commenting on the debate which followed O'Connell's trial, Sir Charles Daffy concludes with a home-thrust to the English sympathisers :—
"The speech which produced the most profound and lasting im- pression, was that of Sir Thomas Wilde. It was a party speech doubtless, but be spoke with the authority of a man in the front rank of his profession, who had been the official head of the English Bar, and whom' it might be reasonably assumed, a still greater distinction awaited. He spoke not only with the authority, but necessarily with the reserve and caution which such a position imposes. The manner in which the offence had been charged by the Crown was a method, he declared, most unfavourable to public liberty ; and its adoption was lamented in Westminster Hall as a disgrace to the law. The Trial was on a par with the indictment ; when it was discovered that so many Catholic names had been abstracted from the Jury list, it was the clear duty of the Crown to consent that the panel should be quashed. But, on the contrary, they upheld it. Was not that act, he demanded, one of dishonour ? Could any weight be attached to a verdict so obtained ? It was no verdict. Of the Chief Justice's charge he expressed a grave disapproval Mr. O'Connell's defence consisted in this contention : You charge me with uttering certain ex- pressions with a certain intent ; you select certain passages from my speeches ; I call on you to read the whole of the speeches by which those sentences are qualified. And during the defence the time was chiefly occupied with reading passages other than those which the Crown had cited. But not ono word of the matter thus read was referred to in the summing-up of the Judge. The Solicitor-General had got particular passages printed on pieces of paper for his reply, and as he read them the learned Judge said, "Hand them up to me." These passages were read in tbo summing-up to the jury, and the points which were most violent were left to the jury, without a sentence of the qualifying passages. On these premises he WAS prepared to affirm and maintain the cardinal proposition that Mr. O'Connell has not had a fair trial.' The debate was damaging to the Government, but they were strong in sup- porters who were beyond the influence of debate, and a majority of ninety-nine refused to consider the state of Ireland. DI the Lords the Marquis of Normanby raised the same question, but was met by a similar majority. And the noble friends of the Administration were even more secure from being converted by debate than the majority in the Commons, for by virtue of the system of proxies they included in their number Lord Ellenborough, who was in Calcutta, Lord Sal- toun, who was in China, Lord Tweedale, who was in Bombay, and Lord Sidmonth, who might reasonably be considered to be in his grave. These were noble sentiments, it must be confessed, which were de- livered in defence of public liberty by eminent statesmen. And there are enlightened Englishmen who cannot forgive Ireland that she has not felt bound by ties of eternal gratitude to defenders so magnanimous. But alas ! nations cannot live upon noble sentiments, any more than they can lire upon Ivind. Five years later Lord John Russell and Mr. Macaulay were in office, having Sir Thomas Wilde and Mr. Sheil for colleagues, and juries were packed in political cases in Ireland, as we shall see, without scruple or shame, precisely :IS they had been packed under the Tories. And Mr. Disraeli has since been called three times to a commanding political position, but he has not yet found leisure to effect by policy the changes which a revolution would effect by force."
However, Sir Charles Duffy admits elsewhere that more recent statesmen have not allowed their actions to break the promise of their words; and as the statesmen lie alludes to are now re- sponsible for the administration of this Empire, we have good reason to believe that the discreditable strategy which so much stimulated the desire for Repeal in 1843, will appear in the strongest possible contrast to the straightforwardness of the
existing Administration.
Sir Charles Duffy, in treating the heartburnings due to the different sympathies of England and Ireland in relation to foreign policy, exaggerates a good deal, we think, the actual influence of Irish politics on the foreign policy of the Empire. He says :—
"Ho [Sir Robert Peel] declared by his language and policy that the wishes of the Irish people would be disregarded, however unanimous they might become ; and by that coarse he taught many of those who had set their hearts on success, to rely no further on methods which presupposed the consent of England. He did not surmount, he merely postponed, the difficulty. The abortive insurrection of Forty-Eight, and the Fenian conspiracy which followed nearly twenty years later, were stimulated lw a national pride wounded and humbled in 1813. The submission by England in the ' Alabama ' arbitration, nearly a quarter of a century after the Clontarf meeting was suppressed, was another of its remote consequences; for it was in effect a precaution against the wrath of Irishmen in America. But it is probable that the chief of a Con- servative Government could not resist the strong pressure of .his colleagues and supporters. The renowned soldier associated with him in office was impatient of the delay which had already taken place, and looked forward it seems with grim enjoyment to the sport of shelling his fellow-countrymen. To cannonade the mob' was in his opinion the one thing needful."
We remember well the whole details of the 'Alabama' difficulty, and we do not remember once to have heard it even suggested that the consent to that arbitration was a "precaution against the wrath of Irishmen in America." We believe that a strong sense of justice, a strong disgust to the doctrine that whereas all other countries ought to refer their quarrels to reasonable arbitration, we alone should be privileged to laugh at every one's contentions except our own, was the chief cause of the consent of Mr. Gladstone's Government to that somewhat try-- ing ordeal. If there were a second motive, it was a desire to atone to the anti-slavery party in the United States for the pro- Southern taunts of the English aristocracy ; but as for the wrath of the Irish in America, we do not believe that that was a consideration which ever entered the head of a single British statesman. However, no one can deny that this strong diver- gence between the tendency of the English and the Irish foreign policy, is one of the great difficulties of any conceivable solu- tion of the Irish question, including, perhaps, to some extent even absolute separation. A simple repeal of the Union would have left us exposed to constant and powerful protests of the subordinate legislature. And yet it is pretty evident, from the caution with which O'Connell declined the overtures of M. Ledru Rollin and the French Republicans, that even in 18124 there was no little division among the national party itself on the subject of the foreign sympathies of Ireland.
The same divergence of feeling showed itself even more plainly in relation to Sir Robert Peel's educational concessions to Ireland. It was on that occasion more than the party of "Young Ireland" and the writers in The Aration could manage, to keep the peace between the party of Catholic educa- tion and the party of common education. It was essential to the views of the national party to get the Protestants and Catholics to fight shoulder to shoulder as one nation. It was essential to the views of the religious Catholics to guard against the insidious approach of heresy under the tempting exterior of warm national sympathies; and a very serious dif- ference in the party at once arose. And this difference is so serious that, so far as we can see, it will always furnish one very strong reason against reconstituting the Irish Government on any national basis. It will always be easier to secure fair treatment to both Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants while Ireland herself is but one of the constituents of the United Kingdom, than it ever would be to give to Ireland alone, such a Constitution as would secure the Protestants from oppression by the Catholics, and the Catholics from aggression by the Protestants. Indeed, it is interesting to see that the strong national doctrine of the young Irelanders originated rather from a Protestant than a Catholic point of view. Sir Charles Duffy's intense loyalty to his colleague, Thomas Davis, lights up the whole book. And we do not in the least doubt that that loyalty was reciprocated. But Sir Charles Duffy is a Catholic ; Thomas Davis was a Pro- testant. And the one trace of something like jealousy between the two comes out in a memorandum by Davis claiming for himself priority in relation to the national teaching ; and on this Sir Charles Duffy writes that Davis has a just claim to this priority; that he himself had been "a Nationalist of the school of Roger 011oore, who burned with the desire to set up again the Celtic race and the Catholic Church." And, practically, the day soon came when he found that the "truce of God" which he wanted to proclaim between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland would not hold; that other Catholics also burned to set up again the Celtic race and the Catholic. Church, and were not willing to cultivate any Irish nationality which tended to sink the profound difference between Catholics and Protestants.
On this subject, as indeed on all the subjects on which Ireland is now divided, including that of the land-tenure, Sir Charles Duffy's book is full of the most ample and instructive historical teaching. Never did any book appear so opportunely. But, when- ever it had appeared, with so lucid and graphic a style, so large a knowledge of the Irish question, and so statesmanlike a grasp of its conditions, it would have been a book of great mark. We have come round now to a different point on the ascending spiral curve on which the history of English and Irish relations might be traced, and all the old difficulties are meeting us again in a form materially different indeed, but not fundamentally different, from that of thirty-five years ago. it is all the more instruc- tive to read these vivid and eloquent pages, that the personal relations involved are so different, while the political relations are so closely similar.
Previous page
