The Enemy’s Difficulty, though they try to disguise and make light of it, is come. Shall it be to Ireland an opportunity?—and how?
I would to God that I could make myself heard by every man in Ireland, under forty years of age, while I try to describe some leading points in the position of England and of Ireland now—to show how deeply England needs our country, and how dear an interest Ireland has to fail England at that need.
I am told there is but little of the national spirit alive in Ireland now; and if one were to judge of this by the public journals, and the wretched, helpless, driftless ‘agitations’ which are still kept half alive there—rather, it would seem, from the old habit of agitation, than with any earnest or manful hope or faith in our country’s rights or destinies—there would be some excuse for believing that the heart of Ireland is crushed, and the soul gone out of her.
I do not believe it. Aside and apart from, and lying underneath all these pettifogging parliamentary agitations, there must be still a powerful, intense, burning though smouldering remnant of that profound horror of British rule which has for many an age lain ready to burst forth in a flame upon any appearance of a chance or half a chance.
True, England is a potent and politic nation. True, she has been able, she, a numerous and wealthy nation, with all the vast resources of a great empire, with a huge army and navy, and a yet more huge and conquering commerce, all in her own hands—has hitherto been able, to her immortal honour, to keep down and grind to powder a small and disarmed and divided people, to steal away their trade and manufactures, to make them poor and dependent, to make them pour out their blood and coin their brain in their service, to use all their industry for her own profit, and to turn their soil into a store-farm for her supplies. England may well be proud of this feat.
But whether it be a matter of pride for the English or not, to us it is a burning shame. And I believe there are men in Ireland yet who have manhood enough to feel this gnawing, emaciating disgrace. The British institutions of Famine and Fever have not surely worn down all the spirit of that ancient land. The ‘Exodus’ has not yet drained all the blood out of her veins. And assuming that there is still a vast, though now latent, fund of disaffection to draw upon—trusting that there are yet in Ireland may hundreds of thousands of young men whose cheeks flush with secret passion when they think on their country’s lowly condition, and who statedly curse in their prayers the felonious Union Jack, and the pirate dominion of which it is the sign and symbol, I address myself to them and to them alone.
There is no occasion to attend to the drivellings of those who may suggest—that it would be unmanly to avail ourselves of the embarrassments of our enemy—that England is now chivalrously devoting herself to the cause of Justice, and Constitutional liberty in Europe—that if Ireland indeed love and covet liberty, constitutional England is after all more her friend than despotic Russia, and the like. We all know that we have on the face of the earth no enemy but England. We know that whenever she met disaster it was always a blessing to us and ours; when her flag has been torn and trampled, and when she dared not deny us, she has always relaxed her deadly clutch upon our country—otherwise never. We know that when the Americans had swept her red-coats out of this land, she yielded Irish Independence (for a time) to the mere flash of the Irish Volunteer sword.—Unhappy for us that she did! would she had tasted it then; and many a year’s famine and desolation might have been spared us since. We know that after British fraud and foolish Irish trust and gratitude had disarmed that citizen army, it was for us the French conquered at Gemappes and cleared our enemies and theirs out of Holland. And we know that at Waterloo the British army (half of it Irish, to our shame and sorrow), laid prostrate not only the French Empire, but the Irish nation. Since that disgraceful and disastrous day, I say that Ireland has lain more pitiably and hopelessly low beneath the feet of her foes than ever before. And lastly, we know that within the last forty years, while England’s aristocracy was in high triumph, and firmly seated in its place of pride; while prosperity and success shone brightest upon our ‘sister country,’—while peace, progress, commerce, reform, philanthropy, and other such fine things reached their highest development, and the pirate Union Jack flaunted resistless over all seas—during those same halcyon years Ireland was sinking low and lower, in means and in heart, until the crowning curse of British civilisation came upon her in ’48 and ’49.
There is no need to tell what befell us in those years. I think those who saw and survived will not soon forget, or forgive it.
And, Irishmen, you know well that at this moment you have no government, or law, in that island. You know that if any of you dared to say openly and advisedly, or to write to print, what I am now writing—you would be placed before a mock judge, and a packed jury, and transported literally without law, without trial, without judge or jury. Nothing is so bad as this. Not the famine, not the plague, not pauperism, or cannibalism; nothing is so desperate an evil and disgrace to a country as to live without law. Therefore I deem it right to remind you of it now, and to repeat it, and to taunt you and sting you with the thought of it—you have no law in your land, but are ruled simply by fixed bayonets, the point of them draped with magna charta. Think of this, and then, if you can, excite yourselves with military enthusiasm—against Russia.
But further, you can be at no loss to perceive what degree of respect and consideration you enjoy in the ‘sister country.’ There has never been a time, within my memory, when all public newspapers, public speakers, and organs of opinion in England, talked of Ireland and Irishmen with such bitter contempt as now—when Irish claims and complaints were so completely and coolly ignored. There never was a time, in the history of the world when it was so serious a disadvantage to be an Irishman as it is now—to dwell upon this is not very agreeable; and for that reason I dwell upon it. I entreat all young Irishmen to ponder it well, until ‘the thought thereof doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw his inwards.’
But England, it is said, wants the services of our countrymen now in a war for justice, for national right, for liberty? Is any man, woman or child in Ireland so idiotic as to believe it? From the Bramahpootra to the Mississippi, from Cadiz to Copenhagen, her cause has always been the cause of tyrants and robbers and cotton manufacturers. No considerations of justice, no stipulations of treaty, have ever stood one moment in her way, when the great gospel of legitimate sovereignty and cotton-fabric urged her on.
And her interest, as our countrymen well know, is our ruin. It is her vast manufacturing and commercial system that keeps Ireland a store-farm: it is her proud and prosperous oligarchy that starves and exterminates our peasantry; the success of England is our disaster: the happy ‘Homes of England’ eat us out of house and home in Ireland.
In short the present critical position of Europe cannot but suggest to the minds of thousands of Irishmen, that Ireland’s concern in the matter is comprised in the statement of one single fact, and the solution of a single problem.
The fact is, that our ancient enemy is on the verge of serious difficulties, political, military and financial—the problem to be solved is, how best to make those difficulties critical and fatal to her power.
If there were now in Ireland a national organisation like the Volunteers, or even like the Irish Confederation, the problem might be solved soon and easily. It would soon become disgraceful, or even dangerous, for any young man to enter the enemy’s service, and the fifes and drums of recruiting-sergeants would discourse their eloquent music in vain. I know it is hard to expect such passive, but decisive action now. The people are starving again—they are starving for ever—they are made to starve, for this express purpose amongst others, that they may be always ready to sell themselves, for bread and clothing, to make raw material for the British services. Yet surely, any way of making a living is better than this. If they enter England’s army they will be fighting for famine, that it may pinch the vitals of their children and their children’s children. They will be fighting to make typhus fever, and ejectments, and poor-house gruel, permanent institutions of their country. Yes, they, biting their cartridges on the Danube bank, will be ejecting whole villages on the Shannon, helpless old people and infants of their own kith and kin: on the strength of their victories in Turkey (if they are unhappily victors) juries will be packed in Dublin for generations to come.
Let others talk of the despotism of Russia.—We know that our Russia is England. England stands between us and the rest of Europe. Through her brute mass we can neither be seen nor be heard. So loud and dismal is the wail of our own island, that we cannot hear the groans of Poland. Whether Russia be an oppressor of Poland or not, we care little—we only know Poland was never so oppressed as Ireland. The one main, manifest, infallible conclusion with us, is that in any war, wherever, whenever, England conquers, tyranny and famine and treachery, conquer with her.
How truly the cause of the Allied ‘Powers’ in this particular war now impending, is indeed the cause of tyranny: how the single and absorbing object of England especially, is to maintain the present order of things in Europe,—to keep down the swelling aspirations for republican freedom all over the world, and to make sure that the trade in cotton shall go on peacefully forever under the muzzles of five million muskets;—how truly this war, in short, is a war of capital and title and prerogative, against all poor men, it would need too much space to demonstrate, so fully as I wish to do it, this week. In the next number of the ‘CITIZEN,’ and the next, I shall return to it.
Russia, indeed, is no friend to the people: yet the success of the Russian arms would be salvation for the people now. A war—a good, long, thundering war between the sovereigns of Europe is the agency by which the peoples of Europe are to be set upon their feet:—and it is against the war, not against Russia that our enemy takes up arms; to keep the war beyond the Pruth, beyond the Carpathians, inside the gates of the Bosphorus,—any where far away from where it is wanted, is our enemy’s sole policy.
But if, by the kind favour of Heaven, we see Britain’s flag, and the desecrated tri-colour of Napoleon, trampled and disgraced in the East—then the war will infallibly roll westward, and a new world will be born of its lightnings and thunders.
Every Irishman who enlists in the British forces, will earn indeed his thirteen pence a day; but he will earn the heavy curse of his oppressed country along with it.
JOHN MITCHEL.
New York, 23d March, 1854.