Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/313

Rh unselfish, gentle English nation, that went about the world helping weak countries to be free and civilized and Christian!

Three hundred years ago, when Henry VIII. became a Protestant, he resolved that the Irish should be Protestant, too; and for the next hundred years the reforming process never rested—the chief means being the bullet, the rope, and the slave-ship.

A gentleman from Jamaica told me last year, as a curious fact, that the negroes in that country used a great many Gaelic words. No wonder; about 60,000 Irish boys and girls were sold to the tobacco planters of the West Indies 300 years ago, as Sir William Petty and other English historians of the time relate.

Two hundred years ago—and still the deathless fight, the Irish growing weaker, the English stronger. It had now become "the religious duty" of the Englishman to subdue the Irish "for their own sakes." Cromwell went over and slaughtered every man in the first garrisoned town he captured, Drogheda. "By God's grace," he wrote to the Parliament, "I believe that not one escaped," and he added that, when the officers capitulated and surrendered: "They were knocked on the head, too."

Cromwell "made peace and silence" in Ireland; his troopers ruled the whole country for the first time. Then came an unexampled atrocity in the name of "civilization"; four fifths of the entire island, every acre held by the native Irish, who were Catholics, was confiscated and handed over to Cromwell's disbanded army.

This was the beginning of the Irish Land Question, that Michael Davitt has been hammering at for years, and which he is going to see settled.

A hundred years ago, Ireland was in the most deplorable condition that any civilized nation ever descended to. Six centuries of a violent struggle had wasted her blood, money, and resources; her people were disfranchised—no man voted in Ireland except those of the English colony. For a hundred preceding years the teacher and priest had been hunted felons. There were only four million Irish altogether, and they were nearly all in Ireland, friendless, voiceless, voteless, landless, powerless, disarmed, disorganized, ignorant, forgotten by the world, misreported and misrepresented by their rich and powerful enemy, and held up in English books, newspapers, schools, at home and abroad, as a race of wild, weak, witty, brave, quarrelsome, purposeless incapables.

But in his blood, and mud, and rags, and wretchedness, the Irishman was still unsubdued, still a free man in soul and a foeman in act. The Irishman then was, as he still is, the most intense Nationalist in the world.

Grattan abolished the Poyning's Law; and the Irish Parliament,