Part 41

Berkeley’s subsequent career must be briefly told. On his return to London he wrote a great deal on his favorite philosophical subjects. In 1734 he was appointed bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland, and there he spent the next eighteen years of his life. He gave much attention to the social condition of Ireland, attended to his episcopal duties and occasionally occupied his seat in the Irish house of lords. His benevolence to the poor in the dark days of famine and disease was said to be boundless. He certainly won the esteem and gratitude of the Catholics of Ireland by his liberality and his freedom from the spirit of cant and proselytizing, then unhappily widespread in that unfortunate country. His advocacy of tar water as a universal specific for the cure of disease will be remembered as an example of his amiable philanthropic enthusiasms. He publishes a poem in praise of his panacea. He was offered further promotion in the Irish church—even the primacy; but he put these allurements aside and refused. “For doing good to the world,” he declared, “I may upon the whole do as much in a lower station.”

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In 1752 he decided to resign his bishopric and seek retirement at Oxford. The unusual proposal excited the curiosity of the King, George II., who declared, when the application was made to him, that Berkeley might live where he pleased but that he should die a bishop! So he was permitted to retire from his see, still retaining his Episcopal rank.

He did not long enjoy the change. He died in Oxford the 14th of January, 1753, and was buried in the university chapel of Christ Church. His widow survived him thirty-three years, dying in her 86th year. A son and a daughter were living at the time of his death. In his will he provided among other items—“that the expense of my funeral do not exceed £20, and that as much more be given to the poor of the parish where I die.” He left a very small estate. The well-known lines of his poem, in which he sought to depict the prospects of his utopian project, may fitly close this sketch of the amiable and benevolent Irish dean and bishop:

Westward, the course of empire takes its way, The four first acts already past; A fifth shall close the drama with the day, Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

THE RENAMING OF WOLHURST.

The following remarks were made by President Taft in renaming “Wolhurst,” the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Walsh, “Clonmel,” on September 22, 1909:

_Ladies and Gentlemen_:

I think our bounteous and generous and lovely hostess and our host should have called in the clerical profession rather than a politician to baptize this new home, for it is a part of their profession, I think, to make sacred places that we all venerate; but I hope to be able to prove equal to the occasion, because a politician is subject to every sort of exigency. Because I am asked I re-baptize with great pleasure this beautiful estate and call it “_Clonmel_.” “_Clonmel_” is a beautiful place in the County Tipperary. The determined immigrants from Tipperary and from every part of the Emerald Isle have come to the front as they deserved in America. There is no element and no strain in our civilization that has manifested itself to be stronger, more enterprising, more shrewd in business, more tenacious of its principles than the Irishmen, from North and South, who come to this country to make it their own.

I have the greatest pleasure in calling this place after that beautiful town in the golden vale of Tipperary. I consecrate this the estate of “_Clonmel_.” I wish I could connect with it in some way the name of _Walsh_, but as that goes without saying, both in Denver and throughout the country, it is unnecessary.

I congratulate the people of this vicinity that Mr. and Mrs. Walsh are their neighbors. We in Washington feel delighted that they are neighbors of ours. Their generosity and kindly courtesy are known the country over.

HISTORICAL FALSIFICATIONS AGAINST THE IRISH.

BY CAPT. JAMES CONNOLLY, VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY FOR CALIFORNIA.

The beginning of Scotch and English falsification of history against the Irish dates as far back as the end of the eleventh century. Taking full advantage of the civilization and education which the Irish Monks had gratuitously carried to them over seas and spent the best of their lifetime in diffusing amongst them, they used the very power with which the Monks thus endowed them to betray and despoil their benefactors.

“Those brilliant names in the history of European scholarship, who distinguished themselves under Charlemagne, and his son and his grandson, Clemens, Ducil and Scotus Erigena, who all taught in the Court schools, Dungal, who taught in Pavia, Sedalius, who worked in Luttich, Fergual who ruled in Salzburg and Morngal, the teacher of St. Gall, were not altogether without successors,” says Douglas Hyde, in his Literary History of Ireland.

“It is true,” he goes on, “that Ireland’s great mission of instruction and conversion came to a close with the eleventh century, yet for two centuries more, driven by the innate instinct for travel and adventure which was so strong within them that it resembled a second nature, we find Irish monks new foundations on the continent, especially in Germany.” The number of monasteries which Dr. Hyde names as being founded by these Irish monks on the continent during the next half century is simply amazing. “Most of these monks who came from Ireland brought books with them which they presented to the German monasteries.” Says Dr. Hyde again:

“The century which succeeded the Battle of Clontarf, was the most flourishing period of Irish monks in Germany. Once the English had commenced the conquest of Ireland the monasteries ceased to be recruited by men of sanctity and learning but were resorted to by men who sought rather material comfort and a life of worldly freedom. The result was, that towards the end of the thirteenth century most of the Irish establishments in Germany had come to an end, being made over to the Germans, like those of Vienna and Wurzburg, or else altogether losing their monastic character like that of Vuremberg.

“As for the parent monastery of St. James of Ratisbon, its fate was most extraordinary and deserves to be told at greater length. It had, of course, always been from its foundation, inhabited by Irish monks alone, and was known as the monasterium Scotorum, or monastery of Irishmen. But when in process of time the word Scotus became ambiguous, or rather had come to be exclusively applied to what we now call Scotchmen, the Scotch prudently took advantage of it, and claimed that they and not the Irish were the real founders of Ratisbon and its kindred institutions, and that the designation monasterium Scotorum proved it, but the Irish had gradually and unlawfully intruded themselves into these institutions which did not belong to them. Accordingly it came to pass, by the very irony of fate—analogous to that which made English writers of the last century claim Irish books and Irish script as Anglo-Saxon—that the great parent monastery of St. James of Ratisbon was actually given up to the Scotch by Leo X., in 1515, and all the unfortunate Irish monks there living were driven out. The Scotch, however, do not seem to have made much of their new abode, for though the monastery contained some able men during the first century of its occupation by them, it exercised, says Zimmer, no influence worth mentioning upon the general cultivation of the German people of that region and may be considered but a small contribution towards medieval culture in general, for the only share the Scotch monks can really claim in a monument like that of the church of St. James of Ratisbon is the fact of their having collected the gold for its erection from the pockets of the Germans. In comparison with these, how noble appear to us those apostles from Ireland of whom we find so many traces in different parts of the kingdom, of the monks from the beginning of the seventh to the end of the tenth century.”

How well Germany remembers her debt of gratitude to those early Irish monks was most eloquently expressed at the great German Catholic Congress at Dusseldorf, less than a year ago. A pilgrimage of the delegates to Keiserswerth to visit the grave of St. Suitbertus, the first Irish monk who spread the light of faith and learning in that land. During this pilgrimage Cardinal Fischer delivered an eloquent discourse on the brotherhood of nations in faith and spoke feelingly on the debt of Catholic Germany to the missionary monks of Ireland.

The one egregious thing which the reading of English history teaches is the English historian’s palpable inability to be candid and unbiased when he comes to deal with Ireland and the Irish. With the true-born Englishman this innate prejudice against his neighboring island and her people comes to him as a heritage of many ages. It is deep-rooted in his very nature and is nourished and fructified by his inordinate vanity and super-consciousness of his own real or imaginary superiority. The average Englishman believes himself and his little islanders to be divinely endowed with prerogatives and powers to govern the rest of the world in their own way. He goes about it in a supercilious, patronizing sort of fashion as though he were conferring an unspeakable kindness on the governed, even while he is shooting or bayoneting him into submission to his law.

The very fact, unnatural as it is, that the Englishman believes himself right and just in all this inhumanity should seem at least to be some palliation of his offences. But failing utterly to make the thus governed see his treatment of them in any such “kindly light” he governs them the more.

John Bull is, in fact, about the only ruler in the governing business who seems not to have yet learned that a people who are least governed are best governed. He has exploited his monarchical powers on about every continent and ocean of the globe with more or less success. The more heroic and manly was the resistance of a smaller country and weaker people to his invasions the more he misrepresented and traduced them in his press and on his platforms. England’s main purpose in this has even been to lower, even abase the countries and peoples which she has thus assailed, in the estimation of other nations. Nothing can be more offensive to the delicate sensibilities of truth and justice than the false show of benevolent unselfishness with which England has embarked upon her campaigns of conquest. She has ever been conspicuously, unmercifully cruel to her Irish subjects in their protests against her oppression. There is scarcely any limit to the extremes into which an individual or a nation’s vanity may lead them. England’s claiming Irishmen of great distinction in arts, arms, statesmanship, and the like to be real Englishmen is probably the most absurd case in point.

But it was left to the Scotch historian, David Hume, to most falsely and malevolently chronicle the dominant characteristics of the Irish people. He was, of course, writing English history from the then English standard viewpoint, at the time when the American colonists were about to rebel against the intolerable tyranny of George III. The Sons and Daughters of Liberty were, in fact, holding their meetings under the old Liberty tree in Boston at the very time Hume was writing his most false annals of Ireland and the Irish. Hearing of Jerry O’Brien’s capture of the British schooner Margaretta, in Machias Bay, several months before the Battle of Bunker Hill, no doubt intensified Hume’s dislike of the Irish. Nor does that “flavor of the old classical culture of Scotland,” pervading his work extenuate in the least the enormity of his falsehood. Nay, the very fact that he must have known better—he to whom was given as a historian “first rank among English writers,”—makes his offence against intellectual integrity all the more despicable. And yet it has been by just such means as this that England has, throughout the past ten centuries, succeeded in keeping the greater part of the rest of the world more or less ignorant of the real characteristics and acquirements of the Irish.

On page 99, Vol. 1, of Hume’s History of England, writing of the “State of Ireland—1172,” he says: “The Irish from the beginning of time had been buried in the most profound _barbarism_ and _ignorance_....”

Now, with Hume’s wide knowledge of the civilized world, it can scarcely be believed that he wrote in real ignorance of the general status of the Irish people. His classical culture and profound erudition must certainly have enabled him to know the real facts in the case. He could not have so closely surveyed and studied the past history of “the Irish” without knowing that for centuries before the time of which he wrote, Ireland had excelled England in culture “to a very marked degree.” It had, indeed, been the custom for ages for the better class of Englishmen to not only send their sons to Ireland but to go themselves for their education, that they might learn Irish Gaelic, so that by means of it they might study Greek and Latin. “The fame of these early Irish schools,” says Dr. Douglas Hyde in his Literary History of Ireland, page 220, “attracted students in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries from all quarters to Ireland, which had now become a veritable land of schools and scholars.” English, French and German princes flocked to Ireland to reap the benefits of the better educational advantages there than were to be had in their own countries. King Alfred of Northumbria, who was educated in Ireland, had been so pleased with the Irish ways that he ever after “aided and abetted the Irish in England in opposition to Wilfred, who opposed them.”

[Illustration:

HONORABLE JOHN B. O’MEARA,

Of St. Louis.

Ex-Lieutenant-Governor of Missouri, and Vice-President of the Society for Missouri. ]

But the brilliant Irish scholar, Johannas Scotus Erigend, finally went over to England for the sole purpose of establishing at Oxford University the beginning of classical learning on English soil. He was also summoned to France by King Charles the Bold to lay the foundation of the classics in his kingdom. Yet for more than a century after the classics had been established at Oxford, well-born Englishmen continued to send their sons to Ireland, where the older seats of such learning offered more effective advantages for such studies. Nor was it for the study of the Humanities alone that they were sent. The arts of writing, illuminating and music were also taught with the success that is made possible only by centuries of cultured experience.

Speaking of King Edward’s last visit to Ireland at that time, Harper’s Weekly recently said, editorially, after relating in detail the many other ways in which “Ireland was England’s superior in culture” ... “the Harp, which is the National symbol of Ireland, is really the record of centuries of Musical culture.”

Knowing, as King Alfred certainly must have known, that as early as the beginning of the sixth century the heathen classics were taught by learned Irish monks in their schools of theology, it is easily understood how he came to have such admiration for the Irish and Ireland. Their skill in Greek and Latin poetry as well as in Irish appealed to him so that on leaving Ireland he wrote a poem of sixty lines in the Irish bardic manner. In this poem he compliments the five provinces for their several hospitalities and courtesies to himself. It breathes the spirit of thankful gratitude to the whole nation for all it had done for him.

No people buried in barbarism and ignorance “from the beginning of time” could have evoked such a tribute to their culture and hospitality as that, from an English King whom they had educated. (Pardon the hyperbole.)

But it had not yet become the well established custom and purpose of the writers of English history to pervert their chronicles so as to traduce the Irish people all that their subject matter would bear without seeming to be deliberate untruth. There was, in fact, no English historian at all at the time Ireland’s scholars were thus laying the foundations of classical learning over a great part of Europe. The crowds of strangers that were meantime flocking to Ireland to receive the classical educations which could not be had in their own countries were not only warmly welcomed but were entertained and fed every day free of cost. Free books were furnished them and they were given gratuitous instructions by the Irish masters.

In this atmosphere of culture, hospitality and true Christian refinement was fostered that love of learning and of the unselfish characters of the men who imparted it to those strange princes and kings, which they took home with them to their own countries. Englishmen, especially, had long looked upon Ireland as “the land of scholars and the nurse of arms.”

This marvelous educational activity and open-handed generosity of the Irish had, in fact, become the wonder and admiration of the nations whose sons were being most benefited thereby. “This outburst of religious zeal, glorious and enduring as it was,” says Dr. Hyde, “carried with it, like all sudden and powerful movements, an element of danger.” The danger to which he here refers was that of a clash between the civil and religious authorities on some minor points of the administration of justice at home. Such obstacles in the way of human and spiritual amity seem to have never been for long inseparable from the lives of nations. They spring up suddenly. They are balked at for a time, and it often seems as if such barriers were destined to be the stumbling blocks over which kingdoms would fall.

But it was not until the Norman invasion and complete subjugation of England, and Norman laws, customs and ideals had completely dominated that country and the semi-Latin tongue now known as English had taken the place of the Anglo-Saxon spoken till the Normans came, that the real breach of amity between the English and Irish happened.

It was against the aggressive spirit of this Anglo-Norman power that Ireland first rebelled and rebels to this day. The Normans found the conquest of Ireland a far more difficult undertaking. They were, it is true, by their under-handed system of parceling out portions of the conquered sections to the traitor native chiefs, successful in dividing Ireland against herself. Yet during all the centuries of the persecution made possible by the weakness caused by this division, the Normans failed to dominate Ireland. The free Irish spirit outlived those centuries of “warfare and famine and prison.” Throughout the greater part of that beleaguered land Irish princes and Irish laws ruled. The soul of the nation was nurtured and sustained by the continued use of the mother tongue. To the ranks of the native Irish who were rendered disloyal to their country by Norman influences, the religious schism of the Reformation added many more. Cromwell’s disastrous invasion nearly a century later cut still wider gaps in the loyal ranks of the Irish. In addition to those who were starved or persecuted into submission to Cromwellian rule, many more who could not be tortured into such submission fled the country. Those were “the wild geese,” that flew hither and yonder, lighting, like birds of passage, where instinct or destiny led them.

But wherever they found refuge from the iniquitous powers, that thus made them exiles, they remained true to the ideals for which they were banished. In many instances they became in time honored acquisitions to the countries where they found homes, fitting in as leaders in arts, arms and statecraft. All this is, of course, no more than must be expected of men possessing heritages of many centuries of freedom, based on the American elective system of choosing their governing officials. From her very earliest colonial days down to the present, America derived more of her strength from Ireland, numerically as well as otherwise, than from any other single source. However, much of the fact of Irishmen’s numbers and achievements, in the upbuilding of this nation may have been omitted from our histories purposely or knowingly the facts remain. These mistakes the future historian must see corrected. Nor this alone. The Hume spirit and atmosphere must be forever eliminated from our history. It was the Hume falsehoods which half a century or more ago created in the youthful American mind such false impressions of the Irish character. Bancroft had not yet been introduced in the public schools during my early school days, so it was from Hume that as a twelve-year lad I first learned this false lesson of my native land. Nor can we wonder that Bancroft, with all his learning, has signally failed in many instances to give renowned historical characters their due. This fact came home to me quite recently, while canvassing for a petition to a certain congressman, urging him to press the passage of the bill for an appropriation to erect a monument in Washington to Commodore Jack Barry, Father of the American Navy. On presenting the petition the second time to this “representative and influential citizen,” he demurred, saying: “I don’t find much of anything about this Barry, in Bancroft’s History of the United States entitling him to any such honor as you folks are aiming to give him. So I don’t see how I can sign your petition.”

Such mistakes, or intentional omissions, of our country’s history, mischievous as they may otherwise appear, are here recurred to only to show the great need of a true history of the nation. It is no reflection upon the intellectual integrity of Bancroft to infer that he may have, in some ways been influenced by Hume, nay, is it not very probable that he was in dealing with the Irish heroes of our Army and Navy?

But in the light of modern research and scholarly devotion to truth such old world falsehoods and misrepresentations are being doomed to the oblivion that awaits all such evil doing. The causes and ideals for which Irishmen have lived, fought, suffered and died, need no apologist or vindicator, ancient, mediæval or modern, since St. Patrick’s time, at least. These causes have been mainly God, country, truth and freedom. It was Ireland’s devotion to her ideals and her sacrificial tenacity to her causes which, of course, led to England’s merciless, wholesale confiscation of Irish lands and estates, when she had gained sufficient mastery there by her Norman intrigues. During the reign of James I., Irish commerce and about all Irish industries were destroyed in like manner. The Irish schools in which English princes and kings had received their first lessons in classical learning were leveled to the ground, and the schoolmasters forced to teach under hawthornes and hedges. But even this did not, as was intended by the destroyer, quite destroy the love of culture in the Irish heart. Nor did the English soldiers’ desecration of the sanctuaries and the banishment of the priests in the least hinder the continuance of God’s eternal truth. Men died manfully for it. But the truth lived on and became more true because of their martyrdom.