The English Tory Ministry of Sir Robert Peel resigned in June, 1846, and the Liberals under Lord John Russell assumed office. The event heralded a tragedy of Irish History. The Repeal agitation was in swing. O’Connell’s retreat from Clontarf and his nullified pledge to obtain Repeal within a given period had rudely set back the movement in 1843. But from the beginning of 1845, the Nation had effected a rally and won a minority of the landed gentry and a moiety of the wealthy mercantile classes’ sympathy to the Repeal side. The Repeal Movement, wrote a leading English journal at the time, ‘is changing its character from the movement of a people to that of a movement of the magnates.’ This was not accurate. The changes was from a movement of the populace solely to a movement of the whole nation. Apart from their opposition to the principle of Repeal the Irish Conservatives had regarded O’Connell’s movement in its first stages with disdain. They had seen him in 1832 at the head of another Repeal movement, which had been dropped when the English Liberals placed the patronage of Ireland in his hands and promised social relief legislation. Therefore they disbelieved he was in earnest in seeking Repeal now. They regarded his new agitation as a manoeuvre to regain the patronage he had lost, and they prophesised that when the Liberals returned to power, O’Connell would drop Repeal once again.
This was not just to O’Connell. He had higher motives than the regaining of his position as a dispenser of place and promotion in Ireland when he initiated the great Repeal agitation. But he scarcely believed at the time he could achieve Repeal. What he did believe was that by demanding Repeal he would force as a compromise some measure of self-government. And that he would have gained, if not Repeal, something akin to what is not called Home Rule had he surrounded himself with lieutenants of honesty and ability is certain. Unfortunately, like the Turk, he would bear no brother near his throne, and from the day of his triumph on Catholic Emancipation he moved through political life surrounded not by the upright and principled but by the fawning and crooked element in the leadership of the people who hailed him chief. At the inception of the Repeal movement of the Forties, O’Connell’s captains were nearly all of the latter type—flatterers, parasites, and place-hunters. The movement languished. The honest and educated nationalism of the country held aloof from active participation in the Repeal Association—and it might have died as discreditably as its precursor had not the sun of Thomas Davis risen upon the land.
The Nation newspaper found the Repeal movement a shadow and it gave it substance. It linked it with what was noble in Irish life and ideals and made it the expression of a nation’s hope. O’Connell at first startled and annoyed by the Nation’s independent tone was quickly carried along on the wave of its enthusiasm. His character was inherently generous, and could he have cut himself clear of the sycophants who formed his entourage and called the upright—who acknowledged his services, his greatness, and his right to leadership, but declined to style him infallible—to be his lieutenants, none can say that an Ireland of eight millions thus inspired and led could not have compelled a national settlement.
1843.
Eighteen hundred and forty-three opened the most hopeful year for Ireland since 1782. It closed in gloom. Carried away by the incense of his flatterers, O’Connell defied the Government to measure its strength against him. The Government accepted the challenge. It could have done nothing else unless it surrendered. O’Connell retreated and his retreat destroyed any hope of speedy Repeal. We can now realise that it destroyed his faith in his own power. But it did not destroy the Repeal movement. The Nation kept it alive, rallied it, and by finding for it new elements of strength restored it by 1846 to potency.
The shadow of the famine lay across the country, but yet the Spring of 1846 was one of hope and promise for Ireland. The gates of Irish Unionism had been forced by Young Ireland, and the citadel itself displayed flags of truce. Scores of men in weight in the land who had formerly stood in the Unionist ranks had crossed over to Repeal. Hundreds were arguing and wavering. A large section of the Irish Unionists embracing peers, landed proprietors and merchants had agreed that a Federal Parliament in Ireland was desirable, and out of the ranks of the ‘Irreconcilables,’ came the proposal of ‘Rotatory Parliaments’—a proposal that the Parliament of these countries should sit alternately in Dublin.
Thus 1846 dawned with Irish Unionism melting in the genial rays of a national sun. The Non Possumus Ministry was visibly dying and a ministry more treacherous but less strong to oppose a nation’s will was in sight. If the nation could be kept firm against the insidious arts of the Whigs, self-government could be won. ‘The placehunter is the most dangerous of Ireland’s enemies,’ Young Ireland had preached insistently with its eye on the venal gang who surrounded the great old man now waning in his intellectual grip. ‘The Repealer who discriminates between the English Tory and the English Whig—the Repealer who solicits or accepts place, pension or dignity from any Union Government betrays Repeal’—thus Young Ireland declaimed in Conciliation Hall to the hearty applause of the ordinary members and the secret rage of O’Connell’s chief lieutenants. The success of Irish agitation against English usurpation in Ireland is necessarily dependant on the incorruptibility of those who lead the agitation. Moral force is not born of speech but of inflexible purpose and incorruptible ability. No Irish leader can ask for himself, for his friend, for his supporter any favour from an English Government without thereby parting with his independence of that Government. Such was the doctrine the Young Irelanders preached in the editorial columns of the Nation and from the platform of Conciliation Hall, while the afflicted placehunters who had for three years palmed themselves off on the country as national leaders were obliged to sit silent and in panic-struck imagination see the fleshpots of Egypt break when their outstretched claws touched the rims.
THE BETRAYAL OF REPEAL.
This was the situation in Ireland in 1846 when the Liberals came back to office. They needed O’Connell’s support—a passive Ireland was essential to them. Lord John Russell privately offered O’Connell the patronage of Ireland and remedial social measures. O’Connell accepted. The placehunting section in Conciliation Hall had triumphed over the national section. The Repeal movement was to continue a sham existence but the Repeal strength was to be used to buttress up the Liberal Government. Sheil and other Repeal deserters and Government placemen who had to face re-election in constituencies with a large Repeal vote were to be helped by that vote. This was the secret compact.
Here I shall not delay to discuss the ethics of O’Connell’s action. The fall of a man so great and a man undoubtedly patriotic is best excused by the examining physicians who after his death eleven months later pronounced that he had suffered for at least two years from softening of the brain. The compact was made, and O’Connell returned to Ireland to carry it out. Richard Lalor Sheil, one time a Repealer and afterwards a Liberal placeman mocking at Repeal as ‘the splendid phantom,’ sat for the Borough of Dungarvan. Urged on by the Young Ireland section in Conciliation Hall, Dungarvan’s electorate had been looked after with the object of replacing Sheil by a Repealer. A Repeal majority of 45 existed in the borough. It was demanded by the electors of Dungarvan and the Young Irelanders in Conciliation Hall that Sheil should be opposed and rejected. O’Connell expressed his willingness to have Sheil opposed, but he manoeuvred and played with the selection of a candidate until the day of the nomination when the unblushing pervert was returned unopposed—a Whig and a placeman for a Repeal borough.
The Dungarvan election of 1846 is the second turning point in the History of the great Repeal movement. The genuine Repealers stood against and confounded. Here for a Repeal constituency—a deserter from Repeal, a placeman, a member of the anti-Repeal Government had been elected. O’Connell’s public explanation was that he could not find a candidate. But it was known that two eligible candidates offered and had been refused. The sincere men saw that O’Connell had fallen into the hands of the Whigs and that the hope of saving Repeal lay in rescuing him from his false advisers.
THE CABAL AGAINST YOUNG IRELAND.
In Conciliation Hall the Young Irelanders condemned the episode of Dungarvan while they refrained from affixing blame to O’Connell. But they insisted that there must be no repetition of Dungarvan, and that no member of the Repeal Association must solicit, procure, or accept place from an Act-of-Union Government and yet retain his membership and his national credit. It was clear that while the platform of Conciliation Hall was thus used to condemn placehunting the hungry army of placehunters entrenched therein could not gain their object. To drive the Young Irelanders out on such an issue was impossible. The country generally would have supported them, and therefore the celebrated ‘moral force’ resolutions were propounded. No word in support of any other force but moral force as the force to win the Repeal of the Union had been spoken by the Young Irelanders. ‘This,’ said Mitchel, ‘is a legal association to secure Repeal of the Union by constitutional means, and it would be my duty as a member of it to report for expulsion any member who advocated other means.’
John Mitchel in 1846 had a firm conviction that the Irish question could and would be solved without bloodshed. Meagher, O’Brien, Duffy—all the men, in fact, whom the betrayal of Repeal and the sale of the country to English Whiggery for place and pension, left ultimately no alternative but armed insurrection—were in 1846 as strongly opposed to the substitution of physical for moral force methods as O’Connell himself. Explicitly they one and all stated this from the public platform and in the public Press. But it was the cue of the placehunters to insist that their opponents in Conciliation Hall were revolutionaries and conspirators, as the only means of carrying the country with them against Young Ireland and permitting them to job in safety. The resolutions introduced at Conciliation Hall in the end of July, 1846, were framed deliberately to prevent any conscientious and intelligent nationalist accepting them. They were not a deprecation of physical force as a substitute for moral force in an Irish agitation, but an abstract condemnation of the right of resort to physical force by an oppressed nation—an implied assertion that Ireland would in no circumstances be justified in resisting England forcibly, even though she had the power to do so—a declaration that the liberties of nations were too dearly purchased at the cost of a drop of blood. No honest man in his senses could have subscribed to such base nonsense, no intelligent Irishman, knowing while he did that Ireland had no sufficient physical force to combat England, could for a moment agree to assure England that physical force resistance to her government was immoral and unjustifiable. It needed small reflection to realise that the adherence to such resolutions by the Irish Repealers meant the death of the Repeal movement. No hostile government will yield to a movement which assures it beforehand that never under any circumstances will it do more, or feel itself justified to do more, than protest. Platonic politics are no politics.
MITCHEL ON THE PLACEHUNTERS.
In this crisis Mitchel stood cool-headed and firm. He could agree, he said, with no abstract proposition that the use of physical force was in itself immoral. But who had spoken of using it, who had designed to use it, to secure their object? Their force was moral and with it he believed they would win and could win Repeal. But the measure of Ireland’s moral force must always be the exact measure of the personal intelligence and independence of Repealers. The placehunter, the corruptionist—cormorants of a people’s resources—were the forces who destroyed and undermined the strength of moral force. They must be driven relentlessly from Irish public life—they must be treated as national enemies, and the English Whig Government must be as indifferent to Irish Repealers as the English Tory one; thus moral force could be made and would be made effective. This is the substance of all Mitchel’s writings and speeches in the effort he and his colleagues made to rescue O’Connell from the harpies—Conciliation Hall from the placehunters.
Wm. Smith O’Brien put the position simply: ‘In order,’ said he, ‘to carry out any nationalist policy successfully Irishmen must not only abstain from soliciting or accepting Government patronage but from being brought under the influence of Government patronage. In the first Repeal agitation (1832-36), able and prominent men,’ said O’Brien, ‘took office under the Whigs, and what had been the result? Office might have not converted their convictions on Repeal, but it had effectively silenced them from expressing those convictions and from any attempt to act upon them.’
O’Brien, who was at the time nearer to O’Connell than to the Nation in his own views, pointed out that the Dungarvan election could have been made to wear the same significance to Repeal as the Clare Election had borne to Emancipation. Emancipation became a pressing question with the Government of this country only when Vesey Fitzgerald, a man of high character, and himself a sympathiser with Catholic claims, was rejected for an Emancipationist pure and simple. Sheil was a man personally respected throughout Ireland; his name was familiar in Europe, and his fame had filled his countrymen with pride. The defeat of such a man because he accepted office from an anti-Repeal Government would have carried the Repeal question to the point the Catholic question reached in 1828. Personally, O’Brien said, he had told his constituents before they elected him that he would never ask or accept for himself or for any one of them a Government place until the government was an Irish Government sitting in Dublin. He was elected on that understanding, and only on that basis could he remain in political life.
THE DRIVING OUT OF YOUNG IRELAND.
Continuation of the debate—which had really run on at Conciliation Hall for six weeks—in which the Young Irelanders insisted that the placehunter must be driven out of Irish life, was telling in Young Ireland’s favour. John O’Connell seized eagerly on an indignant phrase in a speech of Meagher’s, and declared that either he or Meagher must quit the Association. The ruse was palpable, but it could not be countered. Smith O’Brien joined Meagher and the Nation party in leaving the Hall. In their secession the Young Irelanders carried with them nearly all the educated and honest intelligence of the Repeal movement. Had they been able to carry with them also the uneducated honesty the Repeal movement would have been carried by Young Ireland to at least partial success. But this they could not do. The spell of O’Connell’s name—the memory of his great services—the knowledge of his real love for them—lay upon the people as a whole. The Repeal Press, mainly controlled by the placehunters, represented the Young Irelanders as having seceded because O’Connell would not assent to the use of physical force. Ten thousand members joined the Confederation the Young Irelanders established to secure Repeal—the 10,000 were, a few of them, of the aristocratic class, a large number of the mercantile class, and the main body of the intelligent artisan class. But the agricultural class, in its honest devotion to O’Connell, remained steadfastly loyal as a whole to Conciliation Hall, and on the backs of these honest people the placehunters inside that institution climbed to place and pension.
Conciliation Hall was deprived of the support of the educated Nationalists; Young Ireland was deprived of the support of the populace. Thus the Repeal movement, formidable under the Tory Government of January, 1846, was rent in twain under a Liberal Government in July of the same year. Because a few score political rapscallions played their country false, sheltering under a great man’s name, a great movement was wrecked, a people continued to be famished, and the most gallant among Irish gentlemen were driven to a despairing effort at insurrection in Ireland. Famine carcases and chains was the price paid for the gratification of the placehunters of 1846.
To retrieve the situation of July, 1846, there remained a possibility in the General Election of 1847. Young Ireland seized it—Cork and Dungarvan became the pivots of the struggle, and John Francis Maguire made a strenuous fight against the placehunter in politics—a fight which had it succeeded would have changed the course of modern Irish History.