Our respectable contemporary the Irish Times, is saddened by the reflection how un-poetic
Irish patriotism is growing, and what dreadfully prosy things are being done 'under the
sinister flag United Ireland'.
We have degenerated sadly, it seems, from the ideals of Thomas Davis and O'Connell. Quite
as evil things were written of Davis and O'Connell in their day - that is as long as they
were dangerous to England and her Irish Tail.
The Irish people would begin to suspect us, and we would begin to suspect ourselves, if
anything pretty were said of us in that quarter; we deserve West British abuse and are
proud of it. If the Irish Times means that our paper is not so beautiful reading as the
old Nation in the days of Davis it is quite right. The time was and will be, for
cultivating literary graces; but that time is not now. Men who work as we do in daily and
hourly struggles with jailers, spies and constables in the very citadel of our enemies,
have not much leisure to coin handsome phrases. The Irish people fighting for their lives,
don't want toys but weapons. Davis and his co-labourers had to place certain ideals before
our eyes; radiant ideals which flame forever on our horizon as the Jerusalem of our
crusade. Ours is the rough work of reaching that goal by the prosaic process of fighting
every inch of the ground and making all who bar the way feel that we can hit as well as
dream. It may seem a vandalish thing to say, but the man who faces the crowbar brigade,
who boycotts an enemy, or adds one drop of bitterness to Mr Forster's Cup, is at the moment
a more useful citizen than if he were to compose a volume of poems and get them favourably
reviewed in the Irish Times.
If what we write helps to strangle Landlordism and hustle our foreign masters a little
further on the road to ruin, we have not the smallest vanity as to the literary merits of
the operation. We may have our suspicion that it is not the fine literary susceptibilities
of the class Prof. Mahaffy reveres which are touched; but their pockets, their fears and
their dominion. Where the Irish Times does us a real injustice is when it pretends that we
preach any division or distinction between north and south, between Irishman and Irishman.
That is simply the reverse of the truth, as every reader of ours north of the Boyne will
attest. We draw a very wide distinction between the Irishman and the West Britain. We hope
the gulf between them will grow ever wider, until we force every man in Ireland to take
sides - with his country or with his enemies. We believe that we can have no healthy
public life in Ireland till men are forced to declare their convictions and to stand by
them - until the whole chameleon tribe of West Britains, the opprobrium and the curse
both of Ireland and of England, shall be either good citizens of their own country or
take the consequences of openly proclaiming themselves aliens. But if a man be only a true
Irishman - that is, a man whose supreme law is not the good of England but the good of
Ireland - we would as soon think of objecting to the colour of his eyes as to his descent,
his creed, his country, or to any other peculiarity racial, polemical or geographical.
We have not swerved one inch from Thomas Davis' notion of a United Ireland. He dreamed
of a blending of classes as well as creeds in a free Irish nation; but he never proposed
that if a class set itself up against the nation, oppressed it, plundered it and leagued
with its enemies, the nation should lie tamely down instead of bringing that class to its
senses and disarming it. Thomas Davis would not have willingly banished the landlords. He
gave them their last chance.
The Irish Times may remember the passionate ballad in which
he appeals to 'those lords so cruel and proud' to spare and be merciful, but we remember
his burning alternative - 'Or else Oh God, I cried, vouchsafe thy strength to the peasants
hand to drive them forever from out the land'. The landlords were not moved by poetry.
Many 'a pleasant place in the County Tipperary' they rendered desolate when the singing
had no longer power to smite them, God has heard Thomas Davis' prayer.
He has vouchsafed Thomas Davis' hand and the strength is being used precisely in the
direction Thomas Davis prayed for. Ireland is none the less United Ireland because she
is engaged in expelling vipers. By and by others of Thomas Davis' vision will come to
pass. The Irish Times think Irish national poetry pretty till we come to business. We are
coming to business.
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