Books: Irish Race in the Past and the Present

A >> Aug. J. Thebaud >> Irish Race in the Past and the Present

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These few words of our Preface would not suffice to prepare the
reader for the high importance of this stupendous phenomenon. We
We purpose, therefore, devoting our second chapter to the subject,
as a preparation for the very interesting details we shall furnish
subsequently, as it is proper that, from the very threshold, an
idea may be formed of the edifice, and of the entire proportions
it is destined to assume.

We have so far sketched, as briefly as possible, what the following
pages will develop; and the reader may now begin to understand
what we said at starting, that no other nation in Europe offers so
interesting an object of study and reflection.

Plato has said that the most meritorious spectacle in the eyes of
God was that of "a just man struggling with adversity." What must
it be when a whole nation, during nine long ages, offers to Heaven
the most sublime virtues in the midst of the extremest trials? Are
not the great lessons which such a contest presents worthy of study
and admiration?

We purpose studying them, although we cannot pretend to render
full justice to such a theme. And, returning for a moment to the
considerations with which we started, we can truly say that, in
the whole range of modern history, it would be difficult, if not
impossible, to find a national life to compare with that of poor,
despised Ireland. Neither do we pretend to write the history itself;
our object is more humble: we merely pen some considerations
suggested naturally by the facts which we suppose to be already
known, with the purpose of arriving at a true appreciation of the
character of the people. For it is the people itself we study;
the reader will meet with comparatively few individual names.

We shall find, moreover, that the nation has never varied. Its
history is an unbroken series of the same heroic facts, the same
terrible misfortunes. The actors change continually; the outward
circumstances at every moment present new aspects, so that the
interest never flags; but the spirit of the struggle is ever the
same, and the latest descendants of the first O'Neills and
O'Donnells burn with the same sacred fire, and are inspired by
the same heroic aspirations, as their fathers.

Happily, the gloom is at length lighted up by returning day. The
contest has lost its ferocity, and we are no longer surrounded
by the deadly shade which obscured the sky a hundred years ago.
Then it was hard to believe that the nation could ever rise; her
final success seemed almost an impossibility. We now see that
those who then despaired sinned against Providence, which waited
for its own time to arrive and vindicate its ways. And it is
chiefly on account of the bright hope which begins to dawn that
our subject should possess for all a lively interest, and fill the
Catholic heart with glowing sympathy and ardent thankfulness to God.

CONTENTS

I The Celtic Race

II The World Under The Lead Of European Races.--Mission Of The
Irish Race In The Movement

III The Irish Better Prepared To Receive Christianity Than Other Nations

IV How the Irish received Christianity

V The Christian Irish and the Pagan Danes

VI The Irish Free-Clans and Anglo-Norman Feudalism

VII Ireland separated from Europe.--A Triple Episode

VIII The Irish and the Tudors.--Henry VIII.

IX The Irish and the Tudors.--Elizabeth.--The Undaunted Nobility.--The
Suffering Church

X England prepared for the Reception of Protestantism--Ireland not

XI The Irish and the Stuarts.--Loyalty and Confiscation

XII A Century of Gloom.--The Penal Laws

XIII Resurrection.--Delusive Hopes

XIV Resurrection.--Emigration

XV The "Exodus" and its Effects

XVI Moral Force all-sufficient for the Resurrection of Ireland

CHAPTER I

The Celtic Race.

Nations which preserve, as it were, a perpetual youth, should be
studied from their origin. Never having totally changed, some of
their present features may be recognized at the very cradle of
their existence, and the strangeness of the fact sets out in bolder
relief their actual peculiarities. Hence we consider it to our
purpose to examine the Celtic race first, as we may know it from
ancient records: What it was; what it did; what were its distinctive
features; what its manners and chief characteristics. A strong light
will thus be thrown even on the Irish of our own days. Our words
must necessarily be few on so extensive a subject; but, few as
they are, they will not be unimportant in our investigations.

In all the works of God, side by side with the general order
resulting from seemingly symmetric laws, an astonishing variety
of details everywhere shows itself, producing on the mind of man
the idea of infinity, as effectually as the wonderful aspect of a
seemingly boundless universe. This variety is visible, first in
the heavenly bodies, as they are called; star differing from star,
planet from planet; even the most minute asteroids never showing
themselves to us two alike, but always offering differences in
size, of form, of composition.

This variety is visible to us chiefly on our globe; in the infinite
multiplicity of its animal forms, in the wonderful insect tribes,
and in the brilliant shells floating in the ocean; visible also
in the incredible number of trees, shrubs, herbs, down to the most
minute vegetable organisms, spread with such reckless abundance
on the surface of our dwelling; visible, finally, in the infinity
of different shapes assumed by inorganic matter.

But what is yet more wonderful and seemingly unaccountable is that,
taking every species of being in particular, and looking at any two
individuals of the same species, we would consider it an astonishing
effect of chance, were we to meet with two objects of our study
perfectly alike. The mineralogist notices it, if he finds in the same
group of crystals two altogether similar; the botanist would express
his astonishment if, on comparing two specimens of the same plant,
he found no difference between them. The same may be said of birds,
of reptiles, of mammalia, of the same kind. A close observer will
even easily detect dissimilarities between the double organs of the
same person, between the two eyes of his neighbor, the two hands
of a friend, the two feet of a stranger whom he meets.

It is therefore but consistent with general analogy that in the moral
as well as in the physical faculties of man, the same ever-recurring
variety should appear, in the features of the face, in the shape of
the limbs, in the moving of the muscles, as well as in the activity
of thought, in the mobility of humor, in the combination of passions,
propensities, sympathies, and aversions.

But, at the same time, with all these peculiarities perceptible in
individuals, men, when studied attentively, show themselves in
groups, as it were, distinguished from other groups by peculiarities
of their own, which are generally called characteristics of race;
and although, according to various systems, these characteristics
are made to expand or contract at will, to serve an _a priori_
purpose, and sustain a preconcerted theory, yet there are, with
respect to them, startling facts which no one can gainsay, and
which are worthy of serious attention.

Two of these facts may be stated in the following propositions:

I. At the cradle of a race or nation there must have been a type
imprinted on its progenitor, and passing from him to all his
posterity, which distinguishes it from all others.

II. The character of a race once established, cannot be eradicated
without an almost total disappearance of the people.

The proofs of these propositions would require long details altogether
foreign to our present purpose, as we are not writing on ethnology.
We will take them for granted, as otherwise we may say that the
whole history of man would be unintelligible. If, however, writers
are found who apply to their notion of race all the inflexibility
of physical laws, and who represent history as a rigid system of
facts chained together by a kind of fatality; if a school has
sprung up among historians to do away with the moral responsibility
of individuals and of nations, it is scarcely necessary to tell
the reader that nothing is so far from our mind as to adopt ideas
destructive, in fact, to all morality.

It is our belief that there is no more "necessity" in the leanings
of race with respect to nations, than there is in the corrupt
instincts of our fallen nature with respect to individuals. The
teachings of faith have clearly decided this in the latter case,
and the consequence of this authoritative decision carries with
it the determination of the former.

According to the doctrine of St. Augustine, nations are rewarded
or punished in this world, because there is no future existence
for them; but the fact of rewards and punishments awarded them
shows that their life is not a series of necessary sequences such
as prevail in physics, and that the manifestations or phenomena
of history, past, present, or future, cannot resolve themselves
into the workings of absolute laws.

Race, in our opinion, is only one of those mysterious forces which
play upon the individual from the cradle to the grave, which affect
alike all the members of the same family, and give it a peculiarity
of its own, without, however, interfering in the least with the moral
freedom of the individual; and as in him there is free-will, so also
in the family itself to which he belongs may God find cause for
approval or disapproval. The heart of a Christian ought to be too
full of gratitude and respect for Divine Providence to take any
other view of history.

It would be presumptuous on our part to attempt an explanation of
the object God proposed to himself in originating such a diversity
in human society. We can only say that it appears He did not wish
all mankind to be ever subject to the same rule, the same government
and institutions. His Church alone was to bear the character of
universality. Outside of her, variety was to be the rule in human
affairs as in all things else. A universal despotism was never
to become possible.

This at once explains why the posterity of Japhet is so different
from that of Sem and of Cham.

In each of those great primitive stocks, an all-wise Providence
introduced a large number of sub-races, if we may be allowed to
call them so, out of which are sprung the various nations whose
intermingling forms the web of human history. Our object is to
consider only the Celtic branch. For, whatever may be the various
theories propounded on the subject of the colonization of Ireland,
from whatever part of the globe the primitive inhabitants may be
supposed to have come, one thing is certain, to-day the race is
yet one, in spite of the foreign blood infused into it by so many
men of other stocks. Although the race was at one time on the verge
of extinction by Cromwell, it has finally absorbed all the others;
it has conquered; and, whoever has to deal with true Irishmen, feels
at once that he deals with a primitive people, whose ancestors dwelt
on the island thousands of years ago. Some slight differences may
be observed in the people of the various provinces of the island;
there maybe various dialects in their language, different appearance
in their looks, some slight divergence in their disposition or manners;
it cannot be other wise, since, as we have seen, no two individuals
of the human family can be found perfectly alike. But, in spite
of all this, they remain Celts to this day; they belong undoubtedly,
to that stock formerly wide-spread throughout Europe, and now almost
confined to their island; for the character of the same race in
Wales, Scotland, and Brittany, has not been, and could not be,
kept so pure as in Erin; so that in our age the inhabitants of
those countries have become more and more fused with their British
and Gallic neighbors.

We must, therefore, at the beginning of this investigation, state
briefly what we know of the Celtic race in ancient times, and examine
whether the Irish of to-day do not reproduce its chief characteristics.

We do not propose, however, in the present study, referring to
the physical peculiarities of the Celtic tribes; we do not know
what those were two or three thousand years ago. We must confine
ourselves to moral propensities and to manners, and for this view
of the subject we have sufficient materials whereon to draw.

We first remark in this race an immense power of expansion, when
not checked by truly insurmountable obstacles; a power of expansion
which did not necessitate for its workings an uninhabited and wild
territory, but which could show its energy and make its force felt
in the midst of already thickly-settled regions, and among adverse
and warlike nations.

As far as history can carry us back, the whole of Western Europe,
namely, Gaul, a part of Spain, Northern Italy, and what we call
to-day the British Isles, are found to be peopled by a race
apparently of the same origin, divided into an immense number of
small republics; governed patriarchally in the form of clans,
called by Julius Caesar, "Civitates." The Greeks called them Celts,
"Keltai." They do not appear to have adopted a common name for
themselves, as the idea of what we call nationality would never
seem to have occurred to them. Yet the name of Gaels in the British
Isles, and of Gauls in France and Northern Italy, seems identical.
Not only did they fill the large expanse of territory we have
mentioned, but they multiplied so fast, that they were compelled
to send out armed colonies in every direction, set as they were
in the midst of thickly-peopled regions.

We possess few details of their first invasion of Spain; but Roman
history has made us all acquainted with their valor. It was in the
first days of the Republic that an army of Gauls took possession
of Rome, and the names of Manlius and Camillus are no better known
in history than that of Brenn, called by Livy, Brennus. His celebrated
answer, "Vae victis," will live as long as the world.

Later on, in the second century before Christ, we see another army
of Celts starting from Pannonia, on the Danube, where they had
previously settled, to invade Greece. Another Brenn is at the head
of it. Macedonia and Albania were soon conquered; and, it is said,
some of the peculiarities of the race may still be remarked in many
Albanians. Thessaly could not resist the impetuosity of the invaders;
the Thermopylae were occupied by Gallic battalions, and that
celebrated defile, where three hundred Spartans once detained the
whole army of Xerxes, could offer no obstacle to Celtic bravery.
Hellas, sacred Hellas, came then under the power of the Gauls, and
the Temple of Delphi was already in sight of Brenn and his warriors,
when, according to Greek historians, a violent earthquake, the work
of the offended gods, threw confusion into the Celtic ranks, which
were subsequently easily defeated and destroyed by the Greeks.

A branch of this army of the Delphic Brenn had separated from
the main body on the frontiers of Thrace, taken possession of
Byzantium, the future Constantinople, and, crossing the straits,
established itself in the Heart of Asia Minor, and there founded
the state of Galatia, or Gallo-Greece, which so long bore their
name, and for several centuries influenced the affairs of Asia
and of the whole Orient, where they established a social state
congenial to their tastes and customs. But the Romans soon after
invading Asia Minor, the twelve clannish republics formerly
founded were, according to Strabo, first reduced to three, then
to two, until finally Julius Caesar made Dejotar king of the
whole country.

The Celts could not easily brook such a change of social relations;
but, unable to cope against Roman power, they came, as usual, to
wrangle among themselves. The majority pronounced for another
chieftain, named Bogitar, and succeeded in forming a party in
Rome in his favor. Clodius, in an assembly of the Roman people,
obtained a decree confirmatory of his authority, and he took
possession of Pessinuntum, and of the celebrated Temple of Cybele.

The history of this branch of the Celts, nevertheless, did not
close with the evil fortunes of their last king. According to
Justinus, they swarmed all over Asia. Having lost their autonomy
as a nation, they became, as it were, the Swiss mercenaries of
the whole Orient. Egypt, Syria, Pontus, called them to their defence.
"Such," says Justinus, "was the terror excited by their name, and
the constant success of their undertakings, that no king on his
throne thought himself secure, and no fallen prince imagined himself
able to recover his power, except with the help of the ever-ready
Celts of those countries."

This short sketch suffices to show their power of expansion in
ancient times among thickly-settled populations. When we have
shown, farther on, how to-day they are spreading all over the
world, not looking to wild and desert countries, but to large
centres of population in the English colonies, we shall be able
to convince ourselves that they still present the same characteristic.
If they do not bear arms in their hands, it is owing to altered
circumstances; but their actual expansion bears a close resemblance
to that of ancient times, and the similarity of effect shows
the similarity of character.

We pass now to a new feature in the race, which has not, to our
knowledge, been sufficiently dwelt upon. All their migrations in
old times were across continents; and if, occasionally, they crossed
the Mediterranean Sea, they did so always in foreign vessels.

The Celtic race, as we have seen, occupied the whole of Western
Europe. They had, therefore, numerous harbors on the Atlantic,
and some excellent ones on the Mediterranean. Many passed the
greater portion of their lives on the sea, supporting themselves
by fishing; yet they never thought of constructing and arming
large fleets; they never fought at sea in vessels of their own,
with the single exception of the naval battle between Julius
Caesar and the Veneti, off the coast of Armorica, where, in one
day, the Roman general destroyed the only maritime armament which
the Celts ever possessed.

And even this fact is not an exception to the general rule; for
M. de Penhouet, the greatest antiquarian, perhaps, in Celtic lore
in Brittany, has proved that the Veneti of Western Gaul were not
really Celts, but rather a colony of Carthaginians, the only one
probably remaining, in the time of Caesar, of those once numerous
foreign colonies of the old enemies of Rome.

Still this strange anomaly, an anomaly which is observable in no
other people living on an extensive coast, was not produced by
ignorance of the uses and importance of large fleets. From the
first they held constant intercourse with the great navigators of
antiquity. The Celtic harbors teemed with the craft of hardy seamen,
who came from Phoenicia, Carthage, and finally from Rome. Heeren,
in his researches on the Phoenicians, proves it for that very early
age, and mentions the strange fact that the name of Ireland with
them was the "Holy Isle." For several centuries, the Carthaginians,
in particular, used the harbors of Spain, of Gaul, even of Erin
and Britain, as their own. The Celtic inhabitants of those countries
allowed them to settle peaceably among them, to trade with them,
to use their cities as emporiums, to call them, in fact,
Carthaginian harbors, although that African nation never really
colonized the country, does not appear to have made war on the
inhabitants in order to occupy it, except in a few instances, when
thwarted, probably, in their commercial enterprises; but they always
lived on peaceful terms with the aborigines, whom they benefited by
their trade, and, doubtless, enlightened by the narrative of their
expeditions in distant lands.

Is it not a strikingly strange fact that, under such circumstances,
the Celts should never have thought of possessing vessels of their
own, if not to push the enterprises of an extensive commerce, for
which they never showed the slightest inclination, at least for
the purpose of shipping their colonies abroad, and crossing directly
to Greece from Celtiberia, for instance, or from their Italian colony
of the Veneti, replaced in modern times by maritime Venice? Yet
so it was; and the great classic scholar, Heeren, in his learned
researches on the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, remarks it with
surprise. The chief reason which he assigns for the success of
those southern navigators from Carthage in establishing their colonies
everywhere, is the fact of no people in Spain, Gaul, or the British
Isles, possessing at the time a navy of their own; and, finding it so
surprising, he does not attempt to explain it, as indeed it really
remains without any possible explanation, save the lack of inclination
springing from the natural promptings of the race.

What renders it more surprising still is, that individually they
had no aversion to a seafaring life; not only many of them
subsisted by fishing, but their _curraghs_ covered the sea all
along their extensive coasts. They could pass from island to
island in their small craft. Thus the Celts of Erin frequently
crossed over to Scotland, to the Hebrides, from rock to rock, and
in Christian times they went as far as the Faroe group, even as
far as Iceland, which some of them appear to have attempted to
colonize long before the Norwegian outlaws went there; and some
even say that from Erin came the first Europeans who landed on
frozen Greenland years before the Icelandic Northmen planted
establishments in that dreary country. The Celts, therefore, and
those of Erin chiefly, were a seafaring race.

But to construct a fleet, to provision and arm it, to fill it with
the flower of their youth, and send them over the ocean to plunder
and slay the inhabitants for the purpose of colonizing the countries
they had previously devastated, such was never the character of
the Celts. They never engaged extensively in trade, or what is
often synonymous, piracy. Before becoming christianized, the Celts
of Ireland crossed over the narrow channel which divided them from
Britain, and frequently carried home slaves; they also passed
occasionally to Armorica, and their annals speak of warlike
expeditions to that country; but their efforts at navigation were
always on an extremely limited scale, in spite of the many inducements
offered by their geographical position. The fact is striking when
we compare them in that particular with the Scandinavian free-rovers
of the Northern Ocean.

It is, therefore, very remarkable that, whenever they got on board
a boat, it was always a single and open vessel. They did so in pagan
times, when the largest portion of Western Europe was theirs; they
continued to do so after they became Christians. The race has always
appeared opposed to the operations of an extensive commerce, and
to the spreading of their power by large fleets.

The ancient annals of Ireland speak, indeed, of naval expeditions;
but these expeditions were always undertaken by a few persons in
one, two, or, at most, three boats, as that of the sons of Ua Corra;
and such facts consequently strengthen our view. The only fact
which seems contradictory is supposed to have occurred during
the Danish wars, when Callaghan, King of Cashel, is said to have
been caught in an ambush, and conveyed a captive by the Danes,
first to Dublin, then to Armagh, and finally to Dundalk.

The troops of Kennedy, son of Lorcan, are said to have been
supported by a fleet of fifty sail, commanded by Falvey Finn, a
Kerry chieftain. We need not repeat the story so well known to
all readers of Irish history. But this fact is found only in the
work of Keating, and the best critics accept it merely as an
historical romance, which Keating thought proper to insert in his
history. Still, even supposing the truth of the story, all that we
may conclude from it is that the seafaring Danes, at the end of
their long wars, had taught the Irish to use the sea as a battlefield,
to the extent of undertaking a small expedition in order to
liberate a beloved chieftain.

It is very remarkable, also, that according to the annals of Ireland,
the naval expeditions nearly always bore a religious character, never
one of trade or barter, with the exception of the tale of Brescan,
who was swallowed up with his fifty curraghs, in which he traded
between Ireland and Scotland.

Nearly all the other maritime excursions are voyages undertaken
with a Christian or Godlike object. Thus our holy religion was
carried over to Scotland and the Hebrides by Columbkill and his
brother monks, who evangelized those numerous groups of small
islands. Crossing in their skiffs, and planting the cross on
some far-seen rock or promontory, they perched their monastic
cells on the bold bluffs overlooking the ocean.

No more was the warrior on carnage bent to be seen on the seaboards
of Ulster or the western coast of Albania, as Scotland was then
called; only unarmed men dressed in humble monastic garb trod those
wave-beaten shores. At early morning they left the cove of their
convent; they spread their single sail, and plied their well-worn
oars, crossing from Colombsay to Iona, or from the harbor of Bangor
to the nearest shore of the Isle of Man.