Ireland Remembers
Curran, Constantine P.
July IO, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 271 IRELAND REMEMBERS
By CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN I N CENTENARIES it is the last step that counts. When t h e Roman Catholic Relief Bill was passed in 1829 the era...
...The Irish reaction to the first was the establish-ment of the Irish Volunteers which brought the new breath of liberty into Irish life, and to the second the foundation of the Society of United Irishmen...
...It is a true instinct which has passed over earlier dates and earlier deserving names to identify O'Con- nell with the triumph of Catholic liberty...
...Before that date they could neither say Mass nor establish a school...
...to Montalembert "not merely the man of one nation but the man of all Christendom...
...the name of Maistre still shines conspicuously but neither his witty and weighty genius nor Bonald, wedded to the ancien r6gime, carried inspiration for youth fired by the revo- lutionary passion for liberty...
...He had forces ranged against him, entrenched and unscrupulous beyond what is possible in modern politics...
...He had in truth what was well said of another Irish advocate, a deep-sea mind and if its stormy and tumultuous manifestations, its gross turbu- lence, shocked the sensibilities of delicate critics, the strong movement below drew to him whole peoples...
...Events outside Ireland which alone make the abrupt changes of Irish politics intelligible were to make such pronouncements quickly obsolescent...
...The critical dates marking the upward curve are I778 and I793, that is to say, the dates of the American War of Independence and of the French Revolution...
...The forty-shilling freeholders, the stalwart body of tenantry whose courage and self-sacrifice ensured the triumph of O'Connell's tactics, lost their franchise and status, so that the new representation rested on a narrow, unpopular basis...
...Since I have been restored to my former faith I have enjoyed peace and trust it will remain with me...
...il agite, il se doute que l'6t-ernit4 conspire contre lui...
...July IO, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 271 IRELAND REMEMBERS By CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN I N CENTENARIES it is the last step that counts...
...He shouted slaves, said T. M. Kettle, into the status of manhood...
...Nothing is as notable as the consensus of foreign contemporary estimates of O'Connell...
...These are dead issues, and the celebrations assumed accord- ingly a purely religious character...
...It is because he was not merely the man of one nation that the Irish celebration of the centenary has an international interest...
...To whom would they look beyond their immediate circle of aging counselors but to O'Connell, the champion of democracy, who had welded a nation together in the name of Catholic liberty and carried it to triumph in 1829 ? Confronted by the infidel liberalism of I83 o, events in Ireland became the catechism for Catholic publicists...
...O'Connell was like some great natural force, a volcano, a river in spate, fire and lava, flood and mud...
...life may add that the author, respected as one of the most sohd and tncmve of hwng Imsh winters, challenges certain rather generally accepted verdicts, but does so only as the evident progress of htstomcal research has really rendered such rereading of the records mewtable.--The Edztors...
...If one seeks the reason it will be found in the new factor which O'Connell imported into Catholic political life...
...As late as 176o an Irish Lord Chancelor could state that the "law did not presume a Papist to exist in the kingdom nor could they so much as breathe there without the connivance of the government...
...This instinct frees O'Connell from domestic criticism and sets him in a place in world history...
...to Plus VII he is the "hero of Christianity...
...To establish a Catholic and popular party in politics was not merely a possi- bility but a duty...
...But another young idealist of our own day, writing of Grattan and O'Connell, has justly contrasted their different settings and purpose, the aspect of the eighteenth-century parliamentary chamber, powdered, rapiered and courtly with that other roaring multitude of disin-herited peasants met upon some windy hill...
...The progressive forces in politics were formally ranged against it...
...The Irish model was later followed by Windthorst in Germany, and elsewhere in Austria and in the Italy of our own day every Catholic demo- cratic movement in politics owes its origin to the sub- sequent development of Irish politics, and can trace its beginnings to O'Connell...
...These events coincided with the passage of the Relief Act of I778 which permitted Catholics to hold land if not in freehold at least on long leases, and with the Act of 1793 when Pitt, driven by the urgent necessi- ties of the French wars, forced upon the Irish oli-garchic Parliament a measure removing most of the remaining Catholic disabilities in regard to land, and conferring a widely extended right to vote for mem-bers of Parliament...
...Montalembert when still a youth heard him and was shocked by a harsh declamatory looseness, the speech of the dema- gogue and not of his ideal orator...
...nor yet his personality which, remarkable as it was, had not the unique character which rivets the world's atten-tion upon a Saint Francis or a Napoleon or a Lincoln...
...A stream of continental travelers visited the Irish shores and for the first time books were numerously published on Irish contemporary politics...
...O'Connell whom the Times reviled as "scum condensed of Irish bog, ruffian, coward, demagogue," has himself been assailed for vituperation...
...The beginning of the nineteenth century saw Catholicism at its lowest ebb...
...The dark-est period in which Irish Catholics were shackled in their minds and estates may be said to have ended in The centenary of Catholic Emancipation has focused attention upon Ireland, and we have already pubhshed one or two papers on the theme...
...This great bulk of a man, exuberant in personality, prodigal in resource, shrewd and resolute, seemed to be an Atlas supporting the Irish and Catholic cause, the athlete of Christ...
...Montalembert, Lacordaire and the brilliant and unhappy Lamennais set to work in avowed imitation...
...He came through these storm-and- stress years into his soul's peace, but with a heightened and solidly grounded passion for liberty...
...What is this element of novel greatness which so powerfully impressed him or his contemporaries and remains the permanent basis of his fame...
...He cer-tainly mixed wit, eloquence and vulgar invective be- yond the measure of even the eighteenth century which had read Junius and witnessed classic encounters in the Parliaments of both countries...
...Local and temporary considerations may qualify but not diminish the real greatness of his achievement...
...He was fitly commemorated in the imposing open-air ceremonials which joined great multitudes in public worship of Christ the King...
...272 THE COMMONWEAL July Io, x929 No Irish and few continental estimates of O'Connell's personality are unqualified in eulogy...
...Most serious of all, the newly won representation was to the English legis- until fifty years more had passed...
...The Church had brilliant apologists...
...Lacordaire was then a man of twenty-eight, Monta- lembert thirty...
...He knew how to reconcile the new-born ideas of liberty and the rights of man with his Catholic faith, and he carried this reconciliation into Catholic action...
...the aristocratic frame of society was dissolving with which the Church appeared to be so identified that the ruin of one seemed necessarily to involve catastrophe to the other...
...the move- ment of the philosophers had apparently triumphed in the fields of speculation and action...
...To be the conspirator with eternity against despotism, here is the final tribute from a saint to O'ConneU...
...Not cer-tainly the fact of his success, for Catholic representa- tion m Parliament was obviously inevitable...
...That is to say that the centre of political gravity was shifted from its natural base...
...The last step was now only a matter of time...
...I have suffered enough from doing so...
...When t h e Roman Catholic Relief Bill was passed in 1829 the era of the penal laws had long passed its nadir...
...But it is not un-fitting to his memory that the religious functions should have displayed the outer aspect of his cam-paigns...
...He buried himself in Godwin and Tom Paine...
...In later years he referred to the book of one such philosophe: "I know the book and will never again look at it...
...There is a fine phrase in the funeral oration on O'Connell which Lacordaire preached in Notre Dame...
...For a few years his Catholic faith was shaken...
...A lesser though brilliant talent like Richard Lalor Sheil might have taken advantage of the new current of ideas in England and on the wave of the reform move- ment which culminated in I832 might have steered a Catholic relief bill through the English Parliament in the same generation...
...As an abrupt epitome the epithets may stand...
...He had in twenty years so inextricably identified himself with the fortunes of his race and religion that O'Connell was no less than Ireland...
...He was a hundred-handed Briareus and in each hand a weapon...
...Gurran's present artzcle ts chtefly a revaluation of Daniel O'Gonnell and a dtscusszon of the pohtzcal czrcumstances under whzch he hved...
...To Balzac he is "the incarnation of a nation" whom he equals with Napoleon in government and Cuvier in science...
...He is vindicating the orator and the function of elo- quence: "Tant qu'il reste une ~me juste avec des l~vres hardies, le despotisme est inquiet...
...John Mitchell, the political rival of his declining years, has written of his royal and vulgar soul...
...To state this is not to detract from O'Connell...
...Spain, Germany and Poland had men of like calibre and ideals...
...On the narrow Irish stage there were concentrated against his cause all the interlocked interests that a vanished age of privilege could consolidate in the allied establishment of Church and state, law and administration...
...This was the legal and logical expression of a policy and code devised not so nmch to establish the supremacy of one religion over another, though that was a principal motive, as to ensure the permanent possession of confiscated land and all sources of wealth in the hands of a foreign oligarchy...
...In the Ireland which has just celebrated his centenary there need be no echo from his life's controversies...
...against this formidable unity he had had only his eloquence to fire the enthusiasm of an enslaved people, a power- ful, supple intelligence, great energy, enormous vital-ity...
...When the moment of forced concentration and withdrawal had passed a new expansion began with the political bankruptcy of I83o--the year of the foundation of L'Avenir...
...O'Connell perfected, if he did not invent, the familiar machinery of popular political action, the convention, the monster meeting, the great pro-cession...
...lature and not to the Irish Parliament, which was de-stroyed thirty years before...
...This was his memorable contribution to the Catho- lic world--that he again yoked democracy with the Church...
...It was delayed by the events which accompanied the Union, the character of the king, the successful issue of the French war, and though the delay was no doubt shortened by the energizing spirit which was O'Connell, the ultimate success of the cause he championed was already secure...
...This movement was toward liberty at a moment in history when liberty and the Catholic Church seemed dug in opposite trenches...
...the fulcrum of politi- cal action, its lever and point of application, were all displaced and their restoration did not begin 175o...
...As a boy O'Con- nell had seen the French Revolution in action, and as a young law student in London, after a moment of reaction, he had enthusiastically shared the radical- ism of the English reformers...
...The Relief Bill of I829 would Mve taken its place in history as the last of the series of such reforms...
...When success came it was accompanied by many grave drawbacks...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 10
