118 TWO SONNETS. BY FAYETTE ROBINSON. In REVOLUTIONS. THRONES fall around us, and the people cry The people's voice, like the old wizard charms, ASTROLOGY. of fate, THE fearful hours of silence and of night, O'er that great scroll in silence wont to pore. Well might they deem what did not change was true, And in the changeless stars read all they knew. CRIMES OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IN IRELAND. ADDRESSED TO IRISHMEN IN THE UNITED STATES. BY C. CHAUNCEY BURR. I HAVE been looking into Ireland. With thoughts that swell my heart and burn my brain, I have been looking over into Ireland. And what I have seen is something beside an Englishman's, or an English-American's vision. Something besides bogs and cabins, through which squalid misery crawls over pallets of straw. I see the most beautiful and uniform climate of western Europe, with more than twenty-nine millions of imperial acres of richest soil-twenty millions of which are capable of the highest cultivation. I see the most western land of commercial Europe, which seems as if designed by the Almighty for the great depot of trade for the Eastern world. A land endowed by nature with almost every thing that superinduces national prosperity and greatness. Then over the dim ages of this nation's wrongs my eye has rested upon that everlasting page of history when, during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, Ireland was the chief seat of civilization and learning for Europe. When the noble and the lower ranks of England were sent to Ireland for their education. When the Irish scholars were sought after and placed at the head of the principal institutions of learning in Europe. When Charlemagne looked to Ireland for his first teachers in the Italian schools--and even France drew her largest intellectual resources from Irish learning. When Ireland opened her powerful arms and became the friendly refuge of the English, as they fled away before the furious Franks and Saxons, when they spread a common destruction over ancient Britain and Gaul. When it was reserved for Irish valor to save again the conquered English from the terrible Roman, as the shout of his victories and desolations were heard over western Europe. When Irishmen were the chief missionaries of Christianity for Europe-who, with a piety and zeal equalled only by the first heralds of the cross, coursed their way over the British Isles, into Switzerland and Germany, and rested not till they had penetrated the Lombard dominions, and planted the standard of the cross among the peaks of the Apennines. These old, bright days of Ireland have come up before me, and the question presses hard, "Does the world owe nothing to this country? Has England no debt of gratitude to pay? She found her Burkes and Sheridans there. There the world has found her finest orators, poets, wits, heroes, and apostles of freedom-her Currans, her Grattans, her Fitzgeralds, her Moores, her Taylors, her Swifts, her Goldsmiths, her Emmetts, and Cumberlands. There America found her Montgomery, whose brave soul was struck out fighting for our freedom and Quebec. Does America owe nothing to Ireland? And why is it that this once glorious nation, this birth-place of genius and chivalry, this land of genial clime and fruitful fields, this natural depot of commerce for the whole eastern world, is now a beggar?" England must answer that question. Let her answer it now, while she hears that cry of want that goes up to God, and sees that nation's arms stretched out as if to clutch the thunders of terrible retribution that hang like pillars of fire in her sky. A rough, truth-speaking old Englishman, Samuel Johnson, said to an Irish gentleman, not long before the detested Union, "Beware that you have no union with us, for we should unite only to rob you-we should have robbed the Scotch if they had any thing for us to rob them of.” England did rob Ireland. She did not, in the government of Ireland, merely adopt a course of doubtful expediency, merely try experiments in government, but she deliberately, calmly, with the shameless malice of the devil, set herself to work to ruin Ireland. She began by crippling her commerce, by breaking up her manufactories-stopping her spindles and looms-forbidding, by heavy penalties, the manufacture of glass and iron, and crushing nearly every branch of mechanical industry, that she might drive all the raw material out of the country into her own manufactories at home. She violently seized the ancient estates, ejected the rightful owners from the soil, and with but one rule of war and extermination massacred the people into submission, and held them to a forced obedience. Then, by a ferocious system of penal laws she sealed all the other acts of her crimes, and reduced the great mass of the Irish population to the condition of slaves. It was declared a crime punishable with banishment and death for an Irish Catholic father to teach his own children to read or write. There was what was called the law of discovery, by which the English Protestants might possess themselves of nearly every Irish Catholic's property in the country. There was a law which rewarded the Catholic child for apostasy to its parent, which paid the Irish wife for infidelity to her husband, and allowed the robbing of an Irish gentleman of his horse on the highway. All rights of Irish property were destroyed, and every personal disability enacted. This was the first measure of English law and English Christianity to her ancient friend and protector. And so, for six hundred years and more, the history of British legislation in Ireland was only the history of a bloody, treacherous, God-andman defying robber. The surface of government only varied by here and there some insulting and hypocritical scheme for relief, while beneath was only the same dead, immovable stagnation of misery, with no sign of any life but in the terrible muscular heaving beneath the British load. And what is still the policy of the British government in Ireland? Only disenfranchisement, spoliation, and endless ruin. Her system of entails, absenteeism, sub-letting, tithes, and the whole admi nistration of the disgusting and horrible nickname she calls Justice, would depopulate the kingdom of God, and turn paradise into a desert or a pandemonium. And this is all that Ireland has ever to hope for until the British hoof is lifted from her soil-only famine and ruin. Her mind, her heart, nay, even her muscle, is worn out and wasted in the service of this great taskmaster of nations. Look, Irishmen of the United States, to the once blessed spot where you were born! Look, how the demon-hand of England has scattered blight and death upon the virgin purity of your shamrock-how it has sowed your fruitful fields with tears and blood,-sent you away from your homes into endless exile, and left only the memory of groans to follow you to your graves in the land of strangers! Look, and behold the famine-wasted forms of your kindred, as they bend down, broken-hearted, to pray over their dead wives and babes, with their visages upturned in the sun, stained with the green grass and roots they plucked from the highway ditches in the last fruitless effort to preserve life? Look upon this picture, and forget not that while your kindred starve, more than one-half of all their miteearnings still goes to provide venison and champagne for the horseracing, fox-hunting, foreign lords and parsons who have already smitten the land with a curse, and branded the nation with a shame-who sit down, bloated and full, to their "beef and port," while the death-agonies of Ireland fill the air, and their name goes hissing round the world for a reproach upon man, and a libel upon the providence of God. Can you see this, and hear this, and not speak out with some voice that shall convince the world that the chivalry and patriotism of Irishmen cannot be corroded and rotted out of your veins by the poison of British blood, or by breathing in your youth the tainted air of British rule? The time has come when further forbearance by the freemen of this country, whether Irish or American, is a crime. The time has come when the dignity of man should be vindicated from the canting reproach of this lazar-house government of England. Do you hope that England will some day get weary of her crimes, and give back to Ireland her freedom? It is a vain hope. The history of the world, civilized and barbarous, tells you there is no hope of that. The ambition of England can be glutted only by the contagion of her own lust. Ask Hindostan what hope there is from England. Ask Affghanistan. Ask China, who must be murdered because she would not consent to be poisoned by British opium. Ask Holland, with her war of 1672. Ask France, how England refused to give up Malta to the Knights of Jerusalem, as she had solemnly promised to do, and which caused a terrible war in which millions of human lives were sacrificed, and many empires overthrown. Ask Denmark. Ask the Spanish galleons which she captured, loaded with treasure, without even the declaration of war. Ask India, Australia, and Africa. Ask massacred and plundered Naples. Ask the whole history of modern Europe; and it tells you that the bloodiest wars have been owing to the grossest breaches of national faith on her part. Ask America, and let the heroes of the Revolution lie unquestioned in their graves, while the history of our western posts, after the peace of '83, answers, that England is encroaching, crafty, treacherous, and faithless to the last degree of a VOL. II.-16 L devil's depravity; and that her most sacred treaties mean only that she will keep them just so long as it is for her own advantage, and no longer. Even the stipulations of the Irish Union, which were effected by the force of the bayonet, by bribery and fraud, were broken in less than ten years after they received the British seal. England, and England alone, has ruined Ireland. And do you still hope for a remedy? What remedy? Why, such remedies as those already given by Elizabeth, the Stuarts, the Straffords, the Cromwells, and Dutch Williams-extermination and death. It is true that about eight years ago she made a great show of relief for Ireland, by enacting what was called the poor law. And this was only adding the damning sin of hypocrisy to the catalogue of her crimes. England knew that this poor law was no remedy for Ireland. She had tried it at home, and it failed: it unavoidably lowered the price of wages of the industrious poor, while it pampered only indolence, and was alike ruinous to the industry and morality of the mass. So she was obliged to "root it out," and imported its stinking crops across St. George's Channel, as a means of pacifying, for a while, the suffering Irish peasantry with a trick, a vain show of relief. What was the amount of this poor law? Why simply to feed a nation upon charity-to dole out a slave's allowance to a whole nation of hard-working freemen. In one word, to stay the tide of beggary by pensioning it with public charity. Well, what next did she propose? Why, talked about constructing railroads, God only knows where, or for what lasting purpose, over Ireland, and so employ the people on public works. A proposition to build a railroad from Dublin Castle to the moon, as a means of relieving Ireland, would not have been more ridiculous. The only effect of such plan would be to give a temporary and unhealthy stimulus to the price of wagesto sink ultimately all the capital invested, and leave the people worse off than it found them. England does not hope to save Ireland by railroads. As well might their lordships attempt to plough up the bogs and ditches with their noses -an operation, by the way, which would not very much shock the moral sense of mankind. No, there is but one remedy for Ireland, and that is entire and eternal independence of England. Revolution is Ireland's only hope. But that is impossible. No, it is not, though. I will rather say that it is possible, nay, that it is very easy of accomplishment. Revolution is not half so difficult as to sustain life under the present English load. All the horrors of the bloodiest revolution would be infinitely less terrible-would be, in every sense, a less evil-than the present miseries of Ireland. The Irish peasantry, well armed, can do it all themselves. And if they could not, there is help enough in America. There are brave and patriotic hearts enough here, who wait, with impatience, to pay Ireland the debt we owe for her Montgomery. Let Ireland but strike the first blow, and one-fifth of the civilized world will somehow give her a hand. Has England forgotten that France and Spain made war upon her immediately on the revolt of the American colonies? She has ill-wishers enough even now to repeat for her the same lesson again. Canada is uneasy. Her Indian colonies are already beginning to real |