Book: Ridgeway

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The record of England in relation to Ireland, is one of the most
atrocious known to the history of mankind. It is fraught with the
blackest ingratitude, the vilest injustice, and the direst
oppression. Notwithstanding that Ireland first gave her an alphabet,
and taught her how to spell her name--notwithstanding that Irish
missionaries had nurtured her early educational institutions and
reclaimed her from Paganism, she misrepresented their religion and
their learning in high places, stole in upon them while they slept,
and turning upon them like the frozen snake in the fable, robbed them
of their independence, and loaded them with chains. Every year of her
accursed dominion upon their shores has been marked with some new and
overwhelming oppression. She has spit upon their creed, broken their
altars, hunted them down with blood-hounds, robbed them of their
estates, exiled them penniless to foreign shores, banned their
language, murdered their offspring, destroyed their trade and
commerce, ruined their manufactures, plundered their exchequer,
robbed them of their flag, deprived them of their civil rights, and
left them, houseless wanderers, a prey to hunger, cold and rags, upon
their own soil. Of all this she stands convicted before the world;
and for all this she must alone, so sure as there is a God above her.
Ireland still lives, and so do her wrongs. The O'Neills and thousands
of brave scions of the past, are still with her, while the rank and
file of her sons are as bitterly opposed to English usurpation to-day
as they were seven hundred years ago. Besides, at the present hour,
the approaches to their final triumph are made luminous with the
generous countenance of free America, and the glorious conviction
that heaven bends benignly over them; and thus it is that they now
stand shoulder to shoulder in eager anticipation of the coming hour,
when their banners shall yet once more be flung to the winds, as,
with a cry that rends the very earth, they dash down upon their
deadly and relentless foe, and smite her hip and thigh as of yore;
dealing her the last fatal blow that forever seals her infamous doom.

In the order of Providence, a great corrective, or reactionary
principle, attends the misdoings of nations, that, sooner or later,
exerts itself in restoring the equilibrium of justice, and avenging
the infringement of any of those laws, human or divine, constituted
for the welfare and guidance of our race. Whether on the part of
governments or individuals, no act of palpable cruelty or barbarity,
has ever escaped the censure and reprobation of all good and true
peoples since the world became civilized; so that in this connection,
the oppressed or injured party has always had the countenance and
sympathy of humanity, at least. True, that an effective expression of
this sympathy may have often been chilled or embarrassed in
individual cases by political considerations or unworthy interests;
but then the tendency to illustrate it was there, and in this sense
alone, it has often exerted a benign influence. Hungary, Greece,
Poland, &c., have all, in turn, had the sympathy of mankind; and so
have had the oppressed colonies and people of Great Britain. The
cruel treatment, treachery and fraud practiced in the name of justice
and religion upon the Sepoys of India, by England, have awakened the
deepest commiseration in the bosom of all good and true governments,
and aroused, at the same time, the strongest indignation even on the
part of nations not over-scrupulous of chains themselves. In like
manner, the condition of Ireland has, from time to time, commanded
the attention of the world; and, through the cruel expatriation of
her children, made itself felt more widely perhaps than that of any
other nation. When England perjured herself for the hundredth time,
and violated the Treaty of Limerick, she exiled to France a host of
our countrymen, who afterwards met her at Fontenoy, as the Irish
Brigade, and trailed her bloody and broken in the dust. The wrongs of
the past were with them. The cruelties of the Henrys, the murders of
Elizabeth, the confiscations of Cromwell, and the perfidy of William,
so nerved their arm at the period, that their charge upon the English
is mentioned as one of the most memorable and destructive on record.
But if they had more than sufficient grounds for dealing a death blow
to the power of the tyrant then, how must this debt of vengeance have
accumulated since; when, to the wrongs already enumerated are to be
added the atrocities of the Georges, as well as those of their worthy
descendant--that traitress to humanity, whose hands have been just
imbrued in the innocent blood of Allen, O'Brien and Larkin, and who
now holds in thrall, within the gloom of her noisome dungeons, some
of the noblest spirits that have ever breathed the vital air in this
or any age of the world? How, we say, must this debt of vengeance
have been heaped up since; and may we not, under its terrible
pressure, the next time that we have a fair opportunity of meeting
the enemy face to face, anticipate a repetition of that glorious
charge in every individual descent we make upon her ranks, until we
shall have ground her into pulp, and avenged the blood of our
martyrs, which has for ages been crying aloud from the ground, "how
long, Oh! Lord?"

We have said that the misdoings of nations are, in the order of
Providence, attended with a corrective or reactionary principle,
which, sooner or later, exerts itself in restoring the equilibrium of
justice; and in no case has this been made more apparent than in that
of Ireland. When under the frightful pressure of famine, murder and
robbery, her children fled her shores, and sought refuge in the open
arms of free America, the tyrant who had caused their exile, never
fancied, for a moment, that she was laying the foundation stone of
her own ultimate destruction, and gradually forming an Irish Brigade
on this continent, which should, one day, with a terrible rebound,
repay all the cruelties and wrongs to which she had subjected them
from generation to generation. She little fancied, that in each
individual Irishman that she had driven from his native shores to
seek an asylum beyond the seas, she had sent forth an agent of her
own destruction, that would colonize, in common with his exiled
brethren, the whole world with a sense of her infamy, and build up,
on this free continent, an opposition so tremendous to her interests
in every connection, that it should command the attention of every
civilized people under the sun, and shake her institutions and
existence to their very centre. As is invariable in such cases, she
administered the antidote with the poison; and transformed the
victims of her wrongs and cruelties into enemies and soldiers; and
now that, in the aggregate, they assume the proportions of a powerful
and antagonistic nation outside her borders, they only await the hour
when they shall descend upon her to the hoarse music of their ancient
war cry, and, on the banks of the Shannon, and by the Blackwater,
smite her hip and thigh, as of old; but this time without generously
escorting her broken and disabled ranks to the borders of the Pale,
or permitting them, in the hour of defeat, to recruit their exhausted
forces, so that the fight may become more equal.

From the landing of Strongbow, in 1171, at Port Largi, then on
subsequently called also the Harbor of the Sun, near Waterford, down
to the sacking and burning of Magdala, the capital of King Theodoras,
in the present year of grace 1808, the history of English rule and
conquests has been one of bloodshed, perjury and crime. Look where
you may, and you encounter continuous atrocities similar to the
massacres of Elizabeth and Cromwell, or the blowing of the Sepoys of
India from the mouth of the cannon of the invader. Well may the
ensign of England wear an encrimsoned hue; for, from time immemorial,
it has been stooped in the blood of the nations: and that too,
without her people having ever fought a proud or decisive battle
single-handed. Her fame, in this connection, rests solely upon the
influence of her gold and the power of foreign bayonets. Scotland and
Ireland have been the main stay of her armies; her native element,
_per se_, affecting their composition in but a secondary degree. The
muster rolls of the Peninsula, and the supplementary field of Waterloo,
have attested this assertion to the fullest. The fact is, her laurels,
for the most part, have been gathered by Irish hands. Taking advantage
of the proud daring and chivalry of our people, in connection with the
poverty and oppression which she had wrought among them, she shook her
gold in their half-starved faces, as she does to-day, and lured them
into her service whenever she had a point to attain in the field.
Through this channel, and through it alone, the fame of her arms became
established; the true aspirations of her own sons seldom exceeding the
exalted limits of a bread riot, or the sudden exploits incident to some
poaching expedition. As a general thing, the English are traders and
diplomats, rather than soldiers. Their character for bravery has been
won through the lavish use of their subsidizing gold, rather than
through any innate warlike propensities on their part. They have never
fought for a myth, or an abstract, chivalrous idea; but always for some
bread and beef object, however apparently unconnected with the project
said to be had in view. In the exemplification of their Christian
missionary spirit, too, this feature of their character is abundantly
set forth. Wherever they have succeeded in introducing the Gospel
among the heathen, they have subsequently inserted the wedge of civil
discord, to be followed on their part by the sword of conquest. No
more forcible illustration of this can be found than that presented
by India, and other of their dependencies that we could name. In
Ireland, also, the same spirit has been evinced; but under different
circumstances. She was already civilized and Christianized when the
invader first landed upon her shores; but in no way was he enabled to
totally overthrow her independence, except through the instrumentality
of the brand of religious discord, which, for upwards of two hundred
years, he had kept flaming at the foundations of her nationality. It
was the hostility bitterly fomented between the Protestants and the
Catholics of Ireland, from 1782 to the year 1800, that led to the
so-called Union, and from this latter period left her, to the present
hour, at the mercy of one of the most relentless and unprincipled
despotisms that has ever disfigured the annals of the human race.

Edmund Burk was right when he declared in his place in Parliament, if
we remember correctly, that the Penal Laws enacted by England against
Ireland, were characterized by an ingenuity the most fiendish on
record, and an attempt to oppress, degrade and demoralize a people,
without a parallel in the history of even the most barbarious ages.
Within the recollection of persons now living, nine-tenths of the
population were held in a condition of the most abject slavery, and
treated as aliens and enemies at their own doors. Add to this the
fact, that, previous to the granting of Emancipation, scarce a
generation had passed away since their priests were murdered at the
altar, or hunted down with dogs, like wild beasts; their goods and
chattels seized upon by any emissary of the government, and at a
nominal valuation appropriated to his own use; their creed and
language denounced and outlawed; their children deprived of the light
of learning under a penalty the most fearful; and, wherever the
tyrant had the power, their lands confiscated and handed over to
their oppressors. The wonder has long been, that, under such a
terrible regime, Ireland had not sunk into the most hopeless
barbarism, or that England had not absorbed her, until, as Lord Byron
once observed on the subject, they had become one and indivisible, as
"the shark with his prey." No more desperate attempt has ever been
made to blot out a nation, and none has ever failed more signally;
for, notwithstanding this dreadful cannonade of ages, backed up with
the final and murderous assault of the Reformation and the Georges,
Ireland, to-day, is more powerful and united than she has ever been
since the sceptre of the Dane was broken upon her historic shores.
This fact is sustained by evidences teeming upon us from every point
of the compass. A great and mysterious embodiment of her influence,
and a vague and oppressive sense of her unseen presence, hang
ominously over all the councils of her task-masters, and build up
strange dynasties in the disturbed slumbers of even royalty itself.
Nor bolt nor bar can shut out the low mutterings of her approaching
thunder, or exclude her ubiquitous hand from tracing, in letters of
blood, the impending doom of her infamous oppressor upon the wall.
Heaven has decreed it; and thus it is, that, in more than one quarter
of the globe the exiled children of her matchless hills and vales
have multiplied into a positive power, that, inflamed with the
memories of her undeserved sufferings, shall, one day, be
precipitated upon her enemies with the most destructive and
overwhelming effect, and humble them forever in the dust.

To avert this blow has now become a desideratum so great with
England, that all her cunning and genius are brought to bear upon the
subject. So long as Ireland was dependent solely upon her own
resources, and the spirit of revolution confined strictly within her
borders, England felt herself competent to avert the evil day, for an
indefinite period, through the instrumentality of the rope and the
bayonet; but now that beyond the seas, the terrible war cloud of
Fenianism fills the whole west, surcharged with vengeance and the
great, broad lightnings of American freedom, she reels to her very
centre, and begins to loosen her hold, claw by claw, upon her victim,
in the hope that her lacerated and bleeding prey may be satisfied
with a partial release from its sufferings, and still permit her to
hold it in her modified clutch. Here she shall fail, however; for the
people of Ireland know her too well to permit her to breathe the same
atmosphere with them, or preserve the slightest footing on their
soil. They know her to have been a traitor, a perjurer, a robber and
an assassin, throughout the whole of her infamous career. Besides
remembering her at Mullaghmaston and Limerick, they had a taste of
her quality in 1782, when, under the pressure of the Protestant
bayonets of the famous "Volunteers," she, by a solemn act of her
King, Lords and Commons, in Parliament assembled, swept Poyning's
despotic Law from her Statute Books, and relinquished FOREVER all
right and title to interfere in the local affairs of Ireland, only to
perjure herself subsequently, by creating rotten boroughs and
dispensing titles and millions of gold, for the purpose of
controlling those very same affairs, not only more effectually than
ever, but with the further view of diverting all the resources of the
country out of their legitimate channels into her own hands, so that
she should be at once the tyrant, and the purse and conscience keeper
of our race. They remember all this, we say, and now they are about
to call upon her for an account of her stewardship, and make her foot
the bill, and that, too, to the very last farthing.

Of course, we are aware that much of the elevated mind and strength
which invigorate the Irish element on this continent, in this
connection, is to be attributed, unquestionably, to the sublime
lessons of the great American people, and the generous sympathy they
evince invariably in regard to nations deprived of the blessings of
freedom. Time was, we are aware, when the children of Ireland had no
such exalted idea of human liberty as they possess to-day, and when
they would have hailed the return of kingcraft to their shores, on
the restitution of their independence, with every demonstration of
pleasure; but that period has passed away, and forever. Having once
tasted the blessings, and imbibed the idea of American institutions,
they have now cast aside every sentiment of barbarism in this
relation, and stepped out on the broad platform of justice and common
sense; ignoring the mere accident of birth, and paying homage only to
those attributes and characteristics which, in themselves, tend to
the elevation of the human family, and which are not confined to any
peculiar class or people.

When it becomes understood, that ever since the introduction of
printing, and the consequent diffusion of book and newspaper
literature throughout Europe, the history and people of Ireland have
been subjected by the invader to every description of the grossest
misrepresentation, it will create no small degree of surprise, that
the country has survived the assault, or that she presents to-day a
compact individuality, that commands the sympathy and respect of most
of the nations of the earth. Heaven, itself, must have inspired the
vigor, truth and heroism which, through a lapse of seven hundred
years, have battled for the right against the most fearful odds, and
that now arms her, on both sides of the Atlantic, with the mighty
resolve which cannot fail to result in her final redemption from the
chains of the oppressor. Her vitality in this connection has scarcely
a parallel in the history of the past; from the fact, that she has
been subjected to a twofold persecution--that of semi-barbarism, and
that of civilization also. The atrocities of the hybrid freebooters
that invaded her shores in the twelfth century, were not more
revolting than those which characterized her rulers six hundred years
subsequently, when they were engaged in founding educational
institutions, and printing whole cargoes of ten-penny Bibles, for the
purpose of pandering to the whims of the age, and doing honor to the
spirit of the royal Pacha who moulded his creed to his lusts, and
left his rottenness a loathsome legacy to his successors. Yes, the
wonder is, that she has survived all this, and, instead of falling
into the vortex prepared for her, now stands with her uplifted arm,
awaiting the propitious moment, when she can deal a final and
irresistible blow to the ingrate that, in days of yore, she had
warmed into intellectual life on her own hearthstone.

If there had been anything in the climate, soil, people or
geographical position of Ireland, to operate against her prosperity
as a nation, or calculated to retard her progress in any connection
whatever, there might be some misgivings in relation to the causes of
her poverty and degradation; but as the most reliable political
economists, and even those unfriendly to the Irish name and race,
admit that no such drawbacks exist, we look, of course, to the system
of government to which the country has been so long subjected, as the
source of all the evils that have so cruelly and pertinaciously beset
it. McCollough, Wakefield, Foster, and other English writers, bear
the highest testimony to the richness of its soil, the salubrity of
its air, and its other great natural advantages. Its harbors, bays,
lakes and rivers are among the finest in the world, while its
neglected mineral wealth is presumed to be all but inexhaustible. In
addition to this, it is stated by Dr. Forbes--one of the Court
physicians, who had made a tour of the kingdom--that the inhabitants
are of a character the most industrious, and bear up under the
oppressive system which weighs upon them in a manner the most heroic.
It is to opinions from such sources as these we point, with every
degree of confidence, as they cannot be charged with being prejudiced
in our favor; and were we inclined to be more diffuse upon the
subject, we might quote author after author, and all of English
proclivities too, who bear evidence to the suggestive character of
the elements of material wealth which we possess in every relation,
and which, through the disastrous policy pursued towards us from
generation to generation, have been paralyzed and prostituted to an
extent that almost defies comprehension.

Why did England violate a solemn pledge, given in 1782, to the
effect, that she relinquished all claim to interfere in the
management of the local affairs of Ireland, and conceded to the
people of that country the undoubted and inalienable right of
conducting their own internal affairs upon any basis they thought
proper? After having experienced the beneficial results of this
policy upon the sister kingdom for a space of eighteen years, why did
she revoke the act establishing it, and force the hated Union upon a
people, a majority of whom were not free to express an opinion upon
the subject, or to resist a measure thrust upon them through perjury,
intimidation, bribery and fraud? The reason has long been quite
obvious to the world--the manufacturing interests and the trade and
commerce of Ireland have ever been and must ever remain antagonistic
to those of England. This fact has always influenced the legislation
of the latter country, and brought it to bear heavily and unjustly
upon almost every Irish project that has been undertaken for the last
three hundred years. When any particular Irish manufacture was found
to interfere with the interests of a similar one in England,
instantly devices were set on foot by the enemy to crush it, or so
embarrass it that its destruction could not fail to follow. It was
banned and taxed out of the market until it died. In this way, the
silk, glass and woolen manufactures of the country were destroyed;
the latter having so injured the English manufacturers in the time of
William the Third, that they presented a memorial to this dignified
and affectionate son-in-law of James, praying that the manufacture in
Ireland might be suppressed, as it was interfering with the success
of the woolen trade in England; which prayer the king entertained
favorably, and promised to grant. In this way, from the earliest days
of the invasion, the interests of Ireland have been trodden under the
feet of the oppressor; while, in a religious point of view, her
people have been held for generations in the most frightful bondage,
and constrained to contribute to the maintenance of a Church which
nineteen-twentieths of them believed to be heretical, and which had
been thrust upon them in violation of every right, human and divine.

Now, however, it is brightening up on the verge of the horizon, and,
like chickens, England's untold acts of infamy and oppression, in
regard to Ireland, are coming home to roost. In every city and
hamlet, throughout the great Republic of the United States, and in
every town and village in Ireland, as well as throughout the rural
districts, there exists a regiment or detachment of the vast army of
the Irish Republic. No matter how invisible the force may be at any
particular point, yet there it exists, awaiting the signal to pounce
upon the enemy, and avenge the wrongs of ages; each member of it
feeling, within his heart of hearts, that those injuries have reached
him individually, and that, without the opportunity of wiping them
out, even at the expense of the last drop of his heart's blood, the
conquest, when achieved, would be almost worthless in his eyes. It is
with this element that England, at the present juncture, has to deal
at home and abroad; and now that the avalanche, after rolling down
the steep of seven successive centuries, has accumulated in magnitude
and force most tremendously, and sufficiently to overcome every
obstacle that happens to lie in its path, ere long we shall find it
leaping in thunder upon the plain, and overwhelming those who so long
mocked at its approach, and who now so vainly attempt to stay its
resistless course.


* * * * *


RIDGEWAY.

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE

OF THE

FENIAN INVASION OF CANADA.




CHAPTER I.


On a gloomy evening in the early part of May, 1866, and while astute
politicians were struck with the formidable aspect of Fenianism in
both hemispheres, a solitary soldier, in the muddy, red jacket of a
private in the English army, might be seen hastily wending his way
across a bridge which led from one of the most important strongholds
in Canada, to a town of considerable pretensions, that lay directly
opposite, and to which he was now bending his steps. Although the
weather, from the season of the year, might be presumed to be
somewhat genial, yet it was raw and gusty; and as the pedestrian was
without an overcoat, the uncomfortable and antagonistic shrug of his
shoulders, as the chill, fitful blast swept past him, was quite
discernible to any eye that happened to catch his figure at the
period. Soon, however, he left the bridge and river behind him, and,
stepping on terra firma, turned hastily down one of the unpretending
streets of the town, and entered a restaurant, out of the drinking
saloon of which, several narrow passages led to small convivial
apartments, or rather compartments, in which the landlord, or "mine
host" professed to work culinary miracles, of every possible shade,
in the interest of his patrons. The establishment, although not the
most fashionable in the place, was still regarded as respectable, and
was, consequently, the frequent resort of many well-to-do tradesmen,
and others, who, after the cares of the day had been laid by,
generally repaired thither to slake their thirst with a flowing
tankard, or indulge in "a stew," a quiet game of billiards or a
cigar, as the case might be. From the description of the various
pictures which adorned or decorated the bar-room, the nationality of
the proprietor was easily discerned. Just over a goodly and shining
away of handsome mirrors that, inside the counter, reflected a maze
of graceful bottles, cut glass and various ornaments appropriate to
the profession, hung a large map of Ireland, very beautifully gotten
up: while on either side of it, a neat, gilt frame, enclosing a most
excellent likeness of Daniel O'Connell and Robert Emmet,
respectively, harmonized in every relation with the map itself.
Around the walls of the room, and throughout the whole establishment,
kindred prints and paintings were somewhat profusely scattered;
presenting unmistakable evidences, that the proprietor hailed from
the Emerald Isle, and had no inclination, whatever, to disguise the
fact from either his customers or the world.

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