NEW LIGHTS IN IRISH HISTORY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 66, 1 August 1874, Page 13

NEW LIGHTS IN IRISH HISTORY.

To those whose views are darkened by the haze of Exeter Hall, *ud who hate Ireland and Catholicity as a certain notoriety hates holy water, Mr James Anthony Froude's work, " The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vols. 11. and 111., will prove a welcome and seasonable production. We have had occasion, Borne time back, to draw .the attention of our readers to Mr Froude's character as a historian, and to the dual hostility he invariably manifests towards the Irish people and the religion they profess. Had Ireland followed tke example of England, and thrown off the yoke of obedience to the Holy See at the bidding of a sacrilegious and bloodthirsty tyrant, the " Supreme Head" of the Anglican Church ; had she yielded to bribes and menaces, to the logic of the gibbet and the dungeon, and taken part with England in her schism and apostacy, she would be to-day ■pared the indignities and calumnies heaped upon her by British writers and so-called historians — men who dig up out of the past every foul aspersion and groundless imputation to be found in manufactured State papers and lying records, and call this trash and rubbish the materials for history. If Iretand is no longer persecuted by penal laws •he is pretty well abused from platform and in print in England. If the sword is not raised to strike her, the pen is wielded to revile her. /When a man like Mr Froude has the daring to come forward as the of that human monster Henry VIII., we need not wonder if he hold up to admiration the persecuting and exterminating Cromwell, the Attilla of the Irish people, the scourge of their land, the unsparing Vandal and the heartless tyrant ; the strangest mixture of enthusiasm, hypocrisy, and ambition presented to us by history, ancient or modern ; the most extraordinary compound of villainy, baseness, coarse familiarity, ani idle buffoonery to be found in the annals of mankind. It could scarcely be imagined that any man living out of Coomassie or the realm of Dahomey would have the unblushing audacity to suggest, as Mr Froude has done, that the incomplete subjugation of Ireland was owing to the timidity with which English statesmen carried out the abominable penal laws. Mr Froude is not very tender to the memories of those English statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, because they lacked vigor in carrying out the Draconic legislation of that period ; because, in other words, they did not follow up the confiscations, the sacrileges, the murders, the robberies of Cromwell and his fanatical followers, who swept over Ireland like a swarm of Huns, spreading distraction everywhere, and leaving only ruin, misery, and the voice of wailing behind them. The authorities on whom Mr Froude relies for his charges of atrocious cruelties and savage outrages against the Irish peasantry were men of the Lydford Jury stamp, who were said to hang and draw, And tit in judgment after. Mr Froude has a great love for one-sided evidence. The man who could have the world believe that in the Cromwell papers in the Cotton Library end the Rolls House may be read true accusations against tho monks, and a justification for rooting out the whole monastic system, may well ask his credulous readers to place implicit faith ie the official documents of Dublin Castle. Because the Irishpeopl c

would not tamely lie down like whipped epaniels while their liberties were crushed, their religion outraged, their consciences fettered, and their country turned into a garrison ; because they rose from time to tune to defend their property and their lives; because they made chrome efforts to regain their independence, and throw off a galling despotism and an ignominious servitude, therefore, are they stigmatized by the Froudites as cut-throßts and miscreants. Impartial history will show that the worst agrarian crimes committed in Ireland have been owing to the corruption of the tribunals of justice in that country, when there was no law for a Cathoic save the law of extermination, and when a Society was organized la Dublin, called the United Irishmen, whose chief aim was to steadfastly and resolutely oppose the system of corrupt government of the country, which was goading the people on to periodic resistance to their oppressors. The Irish people had unfortunately to recur to a " wild justice" to defend themselves against their persecutors. They were driven into crime by the cruelties practiced on them, and their own powerlessness to obtain redress by legitimate means. But these crimes lack the turpitude and meanness which Mr Froude would attach to them, but which usually characterize the atrocities that year after year were disclosed at an, English assize. When, as Arthur Young wrote nearly a hundred years ago, " the domineering aristocracy of 500,000 Protestants feel the sweets of having 2,000,000 of slaves," it is not to be wondered at if a system of religious separation, fanatical bigotry, and legalized persecution nurtured the rassions of the Irish peasantry, and drove them in despair to take the law into their own hands. But Mr Proude is one of those who call every struggle made by the Irish people in. their self-defence by the odious name of " rebellion," and who see the elements of premeditated and cold-blooded guilt in these excesses into which the Irish people w^ere precipitated by the cruelties to which, they^ were subjected. But while Mr Froude dwells with savage unction over the atrocities of the Irish peasantry, he unscrupulously witholds from his readers the facts that would bear witness to the provocation they had recieved. As a writer in the ' Daily Telegraph' says in an able review of Mr Froude's work : —

Mr Froude does not do anything like full justice to the excesses on the other side — the judicial murders executed by the order or with the connivance of the Government, and the abominable cruelties perpetrated in the latter years of the rebellion and many years afterwards by the organized Orangemen. He has a short way of writing history on these subjects ; he consults the State Paper Office, and believes every official record ; he reads the popular records, and treats them all as Popish fabrications.

And this is the man who is to delineate the Irish character in all historic truthfulness to his prejudiced countrymen ! Ne«d we wonder if Mr Froude finds occassonally a mare's neat among the lying chronicles of Dublin Castle ? For instance, the veracious Mr Froude has made the wonderful discovery that Wolfe Tone was ready to sell country for a small post under Government — one of the basert calumnies ever uttered. And what opinion shall we form of Mr Froude's historic accuracy when he tells us that the immortal Father O'Leary was a spy in the pay of Pitt?— one of the greatest libHs ever penned against the memory of a devoted priest and patriotic Jrishman. This is the writer over whom the ' Daily Telegraph' grows hot and cold. One day it accuses him of garbling history, suppressing important facts, and of " seeing red " when he " comes across Roman Catholics and their priests." It says, in the critique already referred to : —

" Nor can we, without something like revulsion, write that while Mr Froude enters into the details of every atrocious outrage commited by the peasantry, he always excuses where he dose not slur over the retaliatory crimes of the authorities, the troops, and the Protestant settlers."

And yet a few days after it suggests that a more fitting title for Mr Froude's work would bo " Home Rule in the Old9n Time," ani than proceeds to dish up and spice Mr Froude's calumnies for the English palate, and enjoy the confection with evident relish. And then, after sneering at the idea of Irelanc's independence, it winds up a bitter diatribe against some of the greatest names in Irish history by the following non sequitur : — "Hence Home Rule is the worst political abmirdity ever demanded by clever men, and the Irish ought to thank Mr Froude for telling them the truth."

Thus it is th>t the ' Daily Telegraph,' like Mr Froude. "eeea red" when it looks at the Irish character and at Irish subjects. — ' Universe.'