And the men of Erin's Isle,? Ireland Battling sorrow with a smile, Shall sing 'St Patrick's Morning,'3 void of care; io And thus we pass the day As we journey on the way;?
'Oh! gaily goes the ship when the wind blows fair.'
1855
3. A title shared by a number of traditional Irish folk songs. ANONYMOUS
In 1845 potato blight severely damaged the crop in Ireland. Its return over the next several years caused widespread famine and disease, killing 1.5 million people and leading another million to emigrate. The British government's wholly inadequate response to the famine, which included exporting grain from Ireland while Irish people starved, contributed to the long-standing bitterness against British rule. Some came together in 1858 to advocate the use of force to liberate Ireland; taking their name from a group of legendary Irish warriors, they called themselves the Fenians, or Irish Bepublican Brotherhood, forerunners of the Irish Bepublican Army. Often thwarted by British infiltration of their ranks, the Fenians organized a rebellion in March 1867 that the British easily quelled. The Nation, a newspaper established in 1842 to promote Irish self-government, published the following statement around the time of that uprising.
[Proclamation of an Irish Republic]
The Irish People to the World
We have suffered centuries of outrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who, treating us as foes, usurped our lands, and drew away from our unfortunate country all material riches. The real owners of the soil were removed to make room for cattle, and driven across the ocean to seek the means of living, and the political rights denied to them at home, while our men of thought and action were condemned to loss of life and liberty. But we never lost the memory and hope of a national existence. We appealed in vain to the reason and sense of justice of the dominant powers.
Our mildest remonstrances were met with sneers and contempt. Our appeals to arms were always unsuccessful.
To-day, having no honourable alternative left, we again appeal to force as our last resource. We accept the conditions of appeal, manfully deeming it better to die in the struggle for freedom than to continue an existence of utter serfdom.
All men are born with equal rights, and in associating to protect one another and share public burthens, justice demands that such associations should rest upon a basis which maintains equality instead of destroying it.
We therefore declare that, unable longer to endure the curse of Monarchical
.
ARNOLD: ON THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE / 1619
Government, we aim at founding a Republic based on universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour. The soil of Ireland, at present in the possession of an oligarchy, belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored. We declare, also, in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of Church and State.
We appeal to the Highest Tribunal for evidence of the justness of our cause. History bears testimony to the intensity of our sufferings, and we declare, in the face of our brethren, that we intend no war against the people of England?our war is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields?against the aristocratic leeches who drain alike our fields and theirs.
Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy. Let your hearts be with us. As for you, workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish, but your arms. Remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour. Remember the past, look well to the future, and avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human liberty.
Herewith we proclaim the Irish Republic,
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT.
1867
MATTHEW ARNOLD
The following selection comes from a series of lectures on Celtic literature delivered by Arnold (1822?1888) in his capacity as professor of poetry at Oxford. Historically, the Celts were an ancient people who settled in Europe; their linguistic descendants survived in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Like many of his contemporaries, Arnold thought that national character was determined by 'race'; as the critic Lionel Trilling remarks in his 1949 study of the British writer, 'Arnold was at pains to show that the English are an amalgam of several 'bloods'?German, Norman, Celtic,' each of which carried its own special characteristics and required the balance of the other components that made up English identity. At the end of his lectures, Arnold called on Oxford University to create a professorship of Celtic 'to send .. . a message of peace to Ireland.'
From On the Study of Celtic Literature
And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the Celt been ineffectual in politics. This colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive times fills so large a place on earth's scene, dwindles and dwindles as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see him. For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more, out of the Celt's grasp. 'They went forth to the war,' Ossian says most truly, 'but they always fell.'1
1. A quotation from the poem 'Cath-Loda,' one of the works that the Scottish poet James Macpherson
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1620 / EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal genius, what a great deal of the Celt does one find oneself drawn to put into it! Of an ideal genius one does not want the elements, any of them, to be in a state of weakness; on the contrary, one wants all of them to be in the highest state of power; but with a law of measure, of harmony, presiding over the whole. So the sensibility2 of the Celt, if everything else were not sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and admirable force. For sensibility, the power of quick and strong perception and emotion, is one of the very prime constituents of genius, perhaps its most positive constituent; it is to the soul what good senses are to the body, the
