GENERAL BUTLER ON IRELAND.
FOR some time the Irish have been in want of a national hero. Indeed, since the death of O'Connell no single personage has filled a large space in the Irish imagination. The Home-rulers, and the other Irish politicians who are not Home-rulers—mainly because their rivals are so—jostle one another on the political stage, and leave no room for any principal figure. This is tiresome and disappointing, but is there any chance of Irishmen making a better show in the New World There are almost as many men and women of Irish blood in the United States as there are in Ireland ; they amass money and win advancement, they do not yield to the native Americans in the capacity for working "rings," nor in the arts of "log-rolling," "gerrymandering," "ballot-stuffing,"
and all the other political inventions of the Union. Yet it would be difficult to name any Irishman who has won a high position in American public life, as a dozen born Germans have done. There are one or two good soldiers of Irish birth in the United States' Army—notably, General Sheridan—and some able lawyers, such as Mr. Charles O'Conor, of New York; but in the political world we can only think of Congressman John Morrissey, the ex-prizefighter, and Mr. Peter Sweeney, once the Chancellor of the Exchequer of Tammany Hall, under the Premiership of Tweed. In the local government of New York both parties used to be led by Irishmen, and the names of Sheriff O'Brien and Collector Murphy were familiar to us in the scandalous controversies of five years ago. But since the success of the reform movement, the Irish element in New York appears to have subsided to the lower levels of adminis- tration, and the fact that the party battles have been fought by such men of character as Mr. Tilden on the one side and General Dix on the other has been hailed as a sign of returning health by honest men of all opinions. On the whole, there- fore, the Irish in America, though they have achieved material success abundantly, and though their votes are a considerable political weight, are not able to boast of Irish influence in the public affairs of their adopted country. The fact is they want a leader in the United States, as they do at home, a man who will dwarf and discipline subordinates and shoulder down opposition. This want has struck no less acute a man than General Butler, who has lately been out of political employment. His frequent and violent changes of political opinion have left Mr. Butler without party friends ; the Democrats detest him as they detest no other of their op- ponents, and the Republicans had got weary of his audacious cynicism even before the burden of his unpopularity over weighted them, and procured their overthrow in the contest for Massachusetts. Any other man would be content to with- draw, at least for a while, from the scene of his defeat, but General Butler is as dauntless as he is shameless. It little matters to him what steed he bestrides, so that he can ride into power, and as the Irish vote is plunging about masterless and unguided, it is really a stroke of genius in General Butler to think of placing himself in the saddle. This is, however, plainly his object ; his address to the Irish at the O'Connell Centenary in Boston was undisguisedly a bid for power, for the leadership of the Irish in America, for the allegiance of the people whose countryman, to the amazement of everybody, he made himself out to be. We have no means of judging whether Butler's bold stroke is likely to be successful. But if the Irish care to take the astute Yankee lawyer with his motley record as a chief and champion, they are welcome to him. We do not suppose that New England will enter a protest if General Butler elects to be called an Irishman rather than an
American. We perceive, however, that the Boston Pilot, the ablest Roman Catholic newspaper in America, bluntly refuses
to accept Butler's pretensions, and comprehensively dismisses his boasts, his praises, and his prophecies as " dangerous blatherskite."
But all the Irish Americans are not as unappreciative of General Butler's eloquent vision of the future of the Irish race as the Boston newspaper. The audience assembled at the O'Connell banquet cheered rapturously when the " not very remote son of Ireland," as Butler declared himself to be, rapidly sketched the history of the Irish exodus, and as bril- liantly pictured the coming glories of the Irish race. It is not easy to decide whether General Butler's view of the past or of the future of the Irish people is the more astonishing ; the one certainly has as little relation to actual facts as the other has to possibilities. " As a not very remote son of Ireland,"
says Mr. Butler, " I look forward to the time when Ireland shall govern New England, and New England govern the United States." It is unnecessary here to discuss the question whether New England is likely to govern the United States, though there are few Americans who, willingly or unwillingly, are not convinced that " westward the course of empire takes its way." But in New England itself are the Irish immigrants on the way to become dominant ? It is true that the Irish are numerous and increasing in numbers all along the Atlantic seaboard ; that, as General Butler says, New York con- tains the largest urban population of Irishmen in the world ; and Boston, the very centre of Yankee intel- ligence and "grit," has more Irish inhabitants than any city in Ireland, except Dublin. It is also true that the thorough- bred Yankees are dwindling, and it seems not improbable that the descendants of the Puritans will soon be an insignificant minority in the States where Puritanism ruled supreme, and where it impressed its image on the life of the people and the form of the government. But it is remarkable that if the genuine Yankees are dying out, the immigrants of every country are taking the Yankee stamp, and in the second generation become as completely sons of the soil as if their ancestors had landed in the 'Mayflower.' Moreover, as we have pointed out, the Irish element has acquired no commanding position in the politics of the United States, and as long as it remains at a low level of intellectual and moral culture, it will continue to be led and governed by a minority that stands on higher ground. The comparison of numbers does not settle the matter, even if we accept the doctrine, which is at least doubtful, that New England will ultimately prove stronger than the West, where the dominant element, so far as it is neither native nor naturalised in character, is German, not Irish.
But this magnificent vision of the future supremacy of Ireland in America is pictured by General Butler as at once a reward and a retribution. It is the proper punishment due to those "bigots and vagrants," the Puritans; it is the merited com- pensation of the Irish martyrs for conscience' sake. It was time to correct erroneous impressions about the history of the early settlement of America, and General Butler establishes a new read-. ing of the most misconstrued chapters of history. The Puritans were not persecuted in Europe ; they migrated to America from Holland not because the Dutch laws were illiberal, but because they were too liberal; not because they were not permitted to worship after their own fashion, but because Holland " allowed their young men and maidens to stray into other churches where God was not worshipped according to the views they held. And we have had some of that even up to this day." Unluckily a different explanation has been foisted on the world, and even " your sweet woman-poet"—an ingenious reminder of the fact that the father of Felicia Hemans was an Irishman—"has said that our fathers sought and there they found 'freedom to worship God." "Oh no! that is exactly what they didn't seek," says General Butler. " They sought for freedom to worship God as they desired, and for the right to prevent anybody else from worshipping God in any other way. And they whipped the Quakers and drove out the -r Baptists, and made the Episcopalians take back-seats, be- cause they felt that they were going straight to hell-fire and eternal damnation." But "turn the page, and look upon the tale" of the Irish exodus, compared with which the vagrancy of the bigots in the 'Mayflower' was a con-
temptibly trivial event. What was the motive-power here? The common explanation is that the Irish were starving in their own country, and that they fled to a land where a living was to be made by any one who could work. But this, as General Butler explains, is quite an erroneous history of the matter. The Irish did, in fact, what the Puritans are wrongly supposed to have done—they exiled themselves for conscience' sake. " You and your fathers—stop a minute, we and our fathers — held that ideal Irish opinion of freedom and of equality of right, of that power which belonged to every man to carve out his own fortune in his own way, that Emmett dreamed of ;" and so forth. And to get scope for this faith and liberty for the exercise of the Catholic religion—which it is gratifying to know General Butler admires as much as he abhors scepticism—the Irish abandoned their homes and colonised the New World. Among these exiles for conscience' sake, General Butler enumerates many families of Irish descent who have become conspicuous in America—the Jacksons, the Johnsons, the Polks, and others—but he forgets to mention that all these were North-of-Ireland Protestants of the sturdiest Saxon type, as little kin to the Celtic and Catholic Ireland of General Butler's eulo- gium as Swift himself. It appears, too, that before 1798 Ireland had "a happy, prosperous, and industrious" people of 8,000,000 souls, who were reduced by the exterminating policy of the landlords and the British Government to half that number." The process of reduction must have been remark- ably rapid, for in 1801 the population was under five millions and a half, so that in the two years following the rebellion of 1798 the Government and the landlords must have " exter-
minated " to some purpose. Such, however, is General Butler's version of the history of the Irish people ; it may afford a measure of the value of his prophecy of their coming domination in New England, and in the Union, and to the ends of the earth. If the Irish in Boston put faith in anything that he says about either the past or the future, they deserve to have him as a compatriot and a champion.
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