MARTYRED IRELAND.

161

ships, which were never seen again. The British government thus got rid, for a time, of those who survived or escaped starvation, English law coming to the assistance of famine, and famine to the assistance of English law.

At the end of these five famine years, it was found that there were two millions of Irishmen less-a million and a half having died of hunger and plague, and half a million having emigrated. No other instance is known in history parallel to this, except in the East Indies, where, as a rule, millions starve in the midst of abundance.

If Ireland were independent, she would be armed, and not garrisoned by foreign troops. She would not be exposed to be placed, as has so often been the case, under martial law, all of whose rigors are inflamed by upwards of thirty different Coercion Acts, passed during the present century. Once independent, Ireland would almost entirely cease to emigrate. As it is, the thing promises to be so thoroughly overdone, and real cstate will become of so little value in Ireland, that cupidity can grasp no more.

YES

XXXVI.

VES, exile is the last vicissitude of martyred Ireland. Jean de Paris finely says: "Placed high in rank among the most enlightened nations of Europe, she left, in early times, a luminous track in the history of Christian civilization. Suddenly violence, aided by treason, made her the slave of the stranger. Since then, her virtues became the cause of her misfortunes. Faithful to the creed of her fathers, she is persecuted by an apostate people. Faithful to the loyalist cause, her people were massacred, her plains devastated by the regicide troops of Cromwell, and, still later, her generous blood was shed for the ungrateful Catholic Stuarts. It is no longer possible for a nation to enjoy at the same time, the benefits of oppression, and the advantages of a reputation for liberality. The complaints of her people are heard to-day from one end of

162

ENGLAND ROBS IRISH BREAD.

the earth to the other. Neither the loftiest mountains, nor the murmurs of two oceans, can prevent the cry of anguish arising from trampled nationalities, in reaching ears that sympathize with her sufferings." Lord Macaulay said that Ireland and Poland were universally considered as two sisters in misfortune. Great Britain may in vain throw between Ireland.and us her majestic shadow, and trouble the air with her powerful voice; but the moans of Ireland are heard in every farmhouse, in every home in North America. When England took the liberty of inspecting the dungeons of the late infamous tyrant of Naples, he told her to turn back and see the soil of Ireland, strewed with the bleaching bones of thousands of human creatures who had died of hunger, the victims of artificial famine. When England asks for privileges for Christians in a Mahometan country, for Protestant missionaries and preachers in Rome, the Pope or the Grand Turk can say: 'Go back to Ireland and behold that monstrous intolerancean Anglican clergy richly supported by money extorted from poor Catholic Ireland." When Englishmen blame Austria for not restoring liberal institutions to Hungary, Cæsar can say: "Give back to Ireland her independence, and her parliament;" and yet we learn that the Grand Turk has struck a blow against the supremacy of the hierarchy of his empire; and the Emperor of Austria has restored to Hungary her parliament. No; Ireland does not willingly surrender her harvests to England. England robs them. Having no industry, Ireland must pay her rent to England in produce. Her political, industrial and social life centre in England. Nine-tenths of the landlords of Ireland reside on English soil. In England, the produce of Irish harvests is spent-luxury for England, poverty for Ireland. England is the only market Ireland has. England gives nothing, and takes all; Ireland gives all, and receives nothing. Of course, British cupidity must leave something, in order that starvation may not become universal and complete; and the man who cultivates for the foreigner, the land of his ancestors, has a sort of acknowledged right to—

LEGAL ASSASSINATION.

168

potatoes. To show how universally true all this is, the demonstration is at hand. A horrible famine spreads its black shadow of death over a whole country, through the first failure of the potato crop. No other nation ever existed where a famine was caused by the failure of so inconsiderable an article of human diet.

I thought I would print here a living picture of these five terrible famine years; but I have not the heart to do it. We all know that people died literally by thousands at the roadsides, and in their cabins. Whole families perished. Multitudes remained without burial. The parishes had no funds to pay for coffins. The poor-houses became hospitals, where the dying man lay struggling in the agonies of death by the side of a cold corpse. In the county of Mayo, the most fortunate. victims fed on their asses and horses.

And yet this was not a famine which means, in the proper sense of that term, a calamity sent by the Almighty upon the fruits of the earth. It was all legal assassination-foulest of all murder cruelest of exile by enforced emigration. Would not a coroner's jury of Americans, sitting at an inquest over such dead, be compelled by their oaths as honest men, to render a verdict of wilful murder against the Queen of England?

All remember the horror which struck through the Christian and heathen world after news of the first six months of the famine had been winged to other nations. The peoples of Europe sent alms-the Turks opened their hearts and hands; while ship after ship, freighted generously from the American shores, in sailing into Irish harbors, passed fleets of English vessels carrying away from a dying people the fruits of their own labor. God in heaven! Ireland, with all the sweat of her manly brow; Ireland, crushed so long, and so deeply, by such heartless foreign masters; Ireland, who had given her riches, her labor, her life-such an Ireland as this to be compelled, in the last agonies of hunger, to accept charity from democrats on the one side, and the worshippers of a false prophet on the other!

But all this may be disposed of by statesmanship with a single wave of the hand-" there are reasons of state for all

164

ALIEN

AN ALIEN CHURCH.

this-public economy-to sustain the revenues and rank of the empire to maintain the pomp and splendor of the nation," which, par excellence, claims to be file-leader of civilization! God send the world as little more such civilization as He possibly can! If such be Christian civilization, better, in Heaven's name, to have none.

But no man who professes to be a Christian, not to say a meek and lowly follower of the Man of Nazareth—no man who recognizes the revealed Religion of Jesus Christ as the standard of morality and virtue among men and nations, will pretend to say, that the teachers of the gospel, the "successors of the Apostles," have any right to eat the bread of famine and tears, much less to roll voluptuously along their golden track of this world's splendor, at such terrible cost to so many millions of quivering human hearts.

XXXVII.

HIS brings us to the Established Church of England in Ire

The outrage of forcing an ALIEN CHURCH on an unwilling people! This has always been denounced by enlightened men, and particularly by British statesmen, as one of the grossest acts of oppression of which government can be guilty. In an Article on the Irish Church Establishment, published a year ago-January, 1865-we find an array of facts, the authenticity of which will not be disputed. Sir Robert Peel said, that Catholic Emancipation was granted, "neither as an act of jus

"All persecution directed against the persons or property of men, is on our principle obviously indefensible. For the protection of the persons and property of men being the primary end of government, and religious instruction only a secondary end, to secure the people from heresy, by making their lives, their limbs, or their estates insecure, would be to sacrifice the primary end. . . All civil disabilities on account of religious opinions, are indefensible. For all such disabilities make government less efficient for its main end.”—Macaulay's Review of Gladstone.

SIR ROBERT PEEL'S OPINIONS.

165

tice, nor as an act of favor; but because it could not any longer, on account of the numbers and power of the Catholics in this kingdom, be safely refused!" Sir Robert said, "It was imperatively necessary to avert from the Church, and from the interests of institutions connected with the Church, an imminent and increasing danger."-Instead therefore of being a free concession, it was the unwilling sacrifice of a part of what had been unjustly withheld, in order, if possible, to make safe the unjust withholding of the remainder. When Catholics were told, in the time of Charles James Fox, to be content with the sop thrown to them, his reply was: "I am told that the Catholics have got so much that they ought not to ask for more. My principle is directly the reverse of this. Until men obtain all they have a right to ask for, they have comparatively obtained nothing." "The question, in fact, simply is, whether Irishmen are to be admitted to an equality with Englishmen and ScotchIf so, the Irish Established Church cannot remain as it is."-Much of Ireland's trouble has arisen from "the insane attempt to establish and maintain a Protestant church in the midst of a Catholic people."-It is "an abiding social grievance." "Nobody pretends that this Protestantizes Irish Catholics." "The sword and the Protestant Church entered

men.

Ireland together. . . . ... Ireland was persecuted, impoverished

and embittered for the sake of the Established Church."

An alien Church has been forced on Ireland. "If the fact be at this moment, that the Irish element in America tends in any degree to intensify the animosity of Americans against England, any unpleasant results accruing from this antipathy may well be regarded as in some measure retributive for the wrongs heretofore inflicted by England on her Irish subjects." "Let England deal with Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom, as it does with Australia, with Canada, with the Mauritius, even with Malta, or with India. Why should Ireland be treated worse than the inhabitants of any of these colonies or possessions-worse even than Mahometans or Pagans ?"