The Irish Race in the Past and the Present Part 51

Our information on this important branch of the subject is unfortunately not extensive; nor is this to be wondered at, since it is only from 1851 that Irish immigration really began to show itself in Australia, and take an active part in the European rush toward that quarter of the world, or, rather, to use the phrase of Holy Writ, "to dwell in the tents of Sem."

When Great Britain sent out her first cargoes of convicts to Australia, it never entered into the ideas of that enlightened power that such an attendant as a minister of religion might be wanted, and, as Mr. Marshall says in his book on "Christian Missions:" "The first ship which bore away its freight of despair, of bruised hearts, and woful memories, and fearful expectations, would have left the sh.o.r.es of England without even a solitary minister of religion, but for the timely remonstrance of a private individual. The civil authorities had deemed their work complete, when they had given the signal to raise the anchor and unloose the sails; the rest was no concern of theirs.

"He adds something more extraordinary and more to our purpose still:

"Among the emigrants to the new continent, soon some of those children of Ireland, whom Providence seems to have dispersed through all the homes of the Saxon race, that they might one day rekindle among them the light of faith, which their own long misfortunes have never been able to quench, were carried as the first fruitful seeds of the ever-blooming tree of the Church."

To these exiles it was necessary to convey the succors of religion. The first Catholic priest who arrived in Australia on his mission of charity, and whom the policy of self-interest, at least, might have prompted the authorities to greet with eager welcome, was treated with derision, and "was directed," as one of his most energetic successors relates, "to produce his permission," or "hold himself in readiness for departure by the next ship." He was alone, and consequently a safe victim; and though, as the latest historian of the colony observes, "his ministrations would have been not less valuable in a social than in a religious point of view," he was seized, put in prison, and finally sent back to England, because his presence was irksome to men who seem to have felt instinctively that his proffered ministry was the keenest rebuke to their own cruelty and profaneness.

This first Catholic priest was the Rev. Mr. Flynn, on whom the Holy See had conferred the t.i.tle of archpriest, with power to administer confirmation. Arrived at Sydney in 1818, he did much good there in a short time. Mr. Marshall has told us how the colonial authorities treated him.

But a circ.u.mstance, not mentioned in this clever author's work on "Missions," shows who and what were those Irish exiles whom the priest had come to serve and direct in his spiritual capacity. When suddenly carried off to prison, he left the Blessed Sacrament in their little church at Sydney. There the faithful frequently a.s.sembled during the two years which followed his departure, as large a number as could muster, to offer up their prayers to G.o.d, and look for consolation in their affliction. The visible priest had been violently s.n.a.t.c.hed away from them; the Archpriest of souls, Christ, remained.

The Rev. W. Ullathorne, now Bishop of Birmingham, England, was afterward made Vicar-General Apostolic of that desolate mission by the Holy See. He informs us, in a letter published among the "Annals of the Propagation of the Faith," how these poor Irish people were treated by their "masters" in Australia.

"It was forbidden them to speak Irish, under pain of fifty strokes of the whip; and the magistrates, who for the most part belonged to the 'Protestant clergy,' sentenced also to the whip and to close confinement those who refused to go hear their sermons, and to a.s.sist at a service which their consciences disavowed."

In 1820 two fresh missionaries replaced Mr. Flynn. They found the little church where their predecessor had left our Lord two years before still in the same state; and soon the insignificant flock, which ever multiplies under persecution, began to increase wonderfully, so that twelve years later, out of the whole population of the colony--one hundred thousand--there were from twenty to thirty thousand Catholics.

Meanwhile, their emanc.i.p.ation in England had secured their rights in the British colonies. There was no longer the threat of the whip hanging over those who refused to hear Protestant sermons; there was no longer fear of their missionary being sent back by the first ship to England. Hence the Holy See immediately established the hierarchy of the Church, on a regular and permanent basis, there, Dr. Polding being the first bishop.

This may be called an era in the history of the Catholic Church.

A hierarchy, independent of the state in heretic and even infidel countries, is a modern thought inspired by the Holy Spirit to the rulers of the flock of Christ to meet modern requirements. By this new system the long list of so-called Protestant countries was at once swept away. For no country can be called Protestant which has its regularly-established bishops of Holy Church, with their authority permanently secured. Their dioceses cover the land, and the land consequently belongs to the Church, however great may be the number of heretics or infidels, and however powerful the organizations antagonistic to Catholicity. The "people of G.o.d" is there, to multiply with the years, and finally absorb all heterogeneous bodies. The Church, as we saw, is a growth; other bodies are crystallized and do not grow; more, they become materially and necessarily disintegrated by the action of time and the friction of surrounding bodies, of spreading roots and living organisms.

This plain, unmistakable, eventual truth was the real cause which brought about the violent explosion of fear and hatred following directly the reestablishing of the Catholic hierarchy in England. The opposing forces felt that their hour was come, and they could not but shiver at their approaching annihilation, small as was the body of the English Catholics at the time. But it is not for us to enter here on these considerations, which would call for long developments, and which belong more fittingly to the general history of the Church than to Irish emigration to Australia.

The few facts glanced at above afford ample grounds for picturing the state of the first Irish exiles who set foot on that broad island of the Antipodes. It was only a repet.i.tion of the scenes witnessed at the same time wherever the Irish strove to propagate the true faith. Later on it will be our pleasure to come back to this field and wonder at the growth of a blooming garden which has replaced the old sterility.

Of the other British colonies wherein a certain number of Irishmen began to settle at the time of the present investigation, no details can yet be furnished. It is easy to suppose, however, without fear of mistake, that the spiritual dest.i.tution and state of more or less open persecution which we have found existing in America and Australia, prevailed also at the Cape Colony, at Natal, in Guiana, Labuan, Ceylon, etc. A very different spectacle is about to be unfolded before our eyes, and we hasten on to behold its wondrous development and splendor--a splendor, however, ushered in by scenes of extreme woe.

CHAPTER XV.

THE "EXODUS" AND ITS EFFECTS.

The stream of Irish emigrants, starting from the one source, separated now and continued flowing to the four quarters of the globe, and, at length, its influence was beginning to be felt in England itself, the last of the lands whither the Irish exiles could think of turning. The poorest, unable to pay their pa.s.sage- money to North America, began to show themselves among the thick populations of the great manufacturing centres of Great Britain.

More than fifty thousand departed annually to settle in other climes and plant Catholicity in regions that, from a religious point of view, were wildernesses.

In 1846 came an awful calamity, to impart to the movement an impetus of which no one could have dreamed, and which went very far to realize what M. de Beaumont had a few years before declared to be an impossibility--the almost sudden transportation of millions of starving Irish. This was the great famine, still so fresh in memory, and now appearing to those who witnessed its effects like that terrible pa.s.sage of the destroying angel in the night.

There is no better mode of accounting for this visitation than that given by T. D. McGee, in his "Irish Settlers in America:"

"The famine (of 1846) is to be thus accounted for: The act of Union in 1800 deprived Ireland of a native legislature. Her aristocracy emigrated to London. Her tariff expired in 1826, and, of course, was not renewed. Her merchants and manufacturers withdrew their capital from trade and invested it in land. The land! the land! was the object of universal, unlimitable compet.i.tion. In the first twenty years of the century, the farmers, if rack-rented, had still the war prices. After the peace, they had the monopoly of the English provision and produce markets. But in 1846 Sir Robert Peel successfully struck at the old laws imposing duties on foreign corn, and let in Baltic wheat and American provisions of every kind, to compete with and undersell the Irish rack-rented farmers.

"High rents had produced hardness of heart in the 'middleman,'

extravagance in the land-owner, and extreme poverty in the peasant. The poor-law commission of 1839 reported that two million three hundred thousand of the agricultural laborers of Ireland were 'paupers;' that those immediately above the lowest rank were ' the worst-clad, worst-fed, and worst-lodged '

peasantry in Europe. True indeed! They were lodged in styes, clothed in rags, and fed on the poorest quality of potato.

"Partial failures of this crop had taken place for a succession of seasons. So regularly did those failures occur, that William Cobbett and other skilful agriculturists had foretold their final destruction years before. Still, the crops of the summer of 1846 looked fair and sound to the eye. The dark-green, crispy leaves, and yellow-and-purple blossoms of the potato-fields, were a cheerful feature in every landscape. By July, however, the terrible fact became but too certain. From every town-land within the four seas tidings came to the capital that the people's food was blasted--utterly, hopelessly blasted.

Incredulity gave way to panic, panic to demands on the Imperial Government to stop the export of grain, to establish public granaries, and to give the peasantry such productive employment as would enable them to purchase food enough to keep soul and body together. By a report of the ordnance-captain, Larcom, it appeared there were grain-crops more than sufficient to support the whole population --a cereal harvest estimated at four hundred millions of dollars, as prices were. But to all remonstrances, pet.i.tions, and proposals, the imperial economists had but one answer: 'They could not interfere with the ordinary currents of trade.' O'Connell's proposal, Lord Georga Bentinck's, O'Brien's, the proposals of the society called 'The Irish Council,' all received the same answer. Fortunes were made and lost in gambling over this sudden trade in human subsistence, and ships laden to the gunwales sailed out of Irish ports, while the charities of the world were coming in.

"In August, authentic cases of death by famine, with the verdict, 'starvation,' were reported. The first authentic case thrilled the country, like an ill wind. From twos and threes they rose to tens, and, in September, such inquests were held, and the same sad verdict repeated, twenty times in a day. Then Ireland, the hospitable among the nations, smitten with famine, deserted by her imperial masters, lifted up her voice, and uttered that cry of awful anguish which shook the ends of the earth.

"The Czar, the Sultan, and the Pope, sent their rubles and their pauls. The Pacha of Egypt, the Shah of Persia, the Emperor of China, the Rajahs of India, conspired to do for Ireland what her so-styled rulers refused to do--to keep her young and old people living in the land. America did more in this work of mercy than all the rest of the world."

The sudden effect of this fearful trial was to increase the total emigration from the British Isles from ninety-three thousand in 1845 to one hundred and thirty thousand in 1846; to three hundred thousand in 1849; to nearly four hundred thousand in 1852. In ten years from 1846, two million eight hundred thousand had fled in horror from the country once so dear to them. From May, 1847, to the close of 1866, the number of pa.s.sengers discharged at New York alone amounted to three million six hundred and fifty-nine thousand!

Those immense fleets of transports, which M. de Beaumont thought necessary, but not to be found, were found. On such a sudden emergency, every kind of tub afloat was thought suitable for the purpose; and, all being sailing-vessels, the voyage was proportionately long, the provision made for such numbers insufficient, and the emigrants, already weakened by privations, were fit subjects for the plague which, under the form of ship- fever, rapidly spread among those receptacles of human misery, so that, when the great caravan arrived in the St. Lawrence, whither that first year all seemed to tend, the following was the picture presented:

"On the 8th of May, 1847, the Urania, from Cork, with several hundred immigrants on board, a large proportion of them sick and dying of the ship-fever, was put into quarantine at Grosse Isle, thirty miles below Quebec. This was the first of the plague- smitten ships of Ireland which that year sailed up the St.

Lawrence. But, before the first week of June, as many as eighty- four ships, of various tonnage, were driven in by an easterly wind; and of that enormous number of vessels there was not one free from the taint of malignant typhus, the offspring of famine and of the foul ship-hold."

The effects of that awful misfortune may be found vividly described in Mr. Maguire's book, from which the above extract is taken, on the long line of march of that desolate army of immigrants, leaving its thousands of victims at Grosse Isle, near Quebec, at Pointe St. Charles, a suburb of Montreal, in Kingston, in Toronto, Upper Canada, and, finally, at Partridge Island, cpposite St. John's, New Brunswick.

America was thus destined to witness some of those scenes so often enacted on the soil of Ireland, to compa.s.sionate the people of the holy isle, to open her friendly bosom for the reception of the unfortunate beings, who in return gave her all they possessed--their faith.

But what M. de Beaumont so emphatically insisted upon, although at first seemingly contradicted by the event, was nevertheless true. England, the mighty mistress of the seas, did not possess ships enough for the purpose of transportation; and her entire navy added to all her merchant-vessels would scarcely have sufficed. Ships had to be built, steamers chiefly, in order to effect the transportation speedily, and diminish the dangers of the pa.s.sage.

Then Providence worked upon the ingenuity of worldly-wise men, and set them planning and studying the question in all its bearings, to devise new schemes of transportation on a scale not dreamed of hitherto. Watt, the Stephensons, Brunel, A. Maury, and others, rose up to perfect the various steam-machines already known and in use; to investigate the currents of the ocean, the different qualities of its waters, its depth and soundings, in order to make the paths of the deep easier and surer to navigators. The ingenuity of ship-builders effected a revolution in naval architecture, and rendered possible the construction of vessels of from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand tons burden. Merchant companies and capitalists arose to embrace the whole world in their mighty speculations, studying the capabilities of all countries for trade, the most desolate as well as the most inviting, the meanest as keenly as the mightiest, linking the whole world in one vast commercial circle, that the European race might be borne on to the mercantile conquest of the universe; and all this came about, doubtless, to effect its deeper and more permanent moral conquest by the despised, doom-trodden, starving, dying Irishman, who laid claim to one arm, one possession only--his faith and the blessing of the Church.

Was not the Irish exodus intimately connected with all those events? Was it not one of the mightiest causes of all those gigantic enterprises?

But where were the funds to be found for such immense undertakings? The treasury of nations is continually drained of vast sums at home, and dare not draw away a part of its metallic basis sufficient for such a purpose. Moreover, it is limited, and needs the precious metals as a solid foundation whereon to rest, or the fabric built upon it will be the fabric of a dream, as was that of Law in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru seem exhausted; the new ones of the Ural Mountains in Northern Asia, of the Atlantic coast of North America, were not adequate to meet the demands of such mighty operations.

Suddenly, in the year 1846, a Swiss captain, transformed into a California settler, while endeavoring to turn a water-fall in his new home to some account, discovers gold-dust in the sand.

As if by magic, the coast of California, hitherto neglected, difficult of access at the time, and consequently ignored by mankind, notwithstanding its wealth in mineral and vegetable productions, becomes at once the cynosure of all eyes, the hope of all hearts, the most renowned of all countries. Thither they flock in crowds prom all parts of Europe and America, and a steady flow of seventy million dollars annually is secured as a basis for the new designs of capitalists and merchants.

Other gold-fields are soon discovered all along the American coast, on the Pacific, from Lower California to Alaska, inviting men to go thither and settle, just opposite to the Asiatic Continent, separated from it only by the broad but easily- navigated Pacific Ocean.

Soon also, far away south in the antipodes, opposite to another portion of Asia, rich gold-fields are opened up in the newly- discovered Continent of Australia, attracting immigration toward another spot, whence the Asiatic nations may also be reached with greater facility and dispatch.

Whoever believes that Providence has something to do with the affairs of men; whoever is wise enough to see that this universe is not the result of chance, and that its destinies are ruled by a superior power, must admit that when events as unexpected as they are unprepared by man come to pa.s.s--events which are so connected together as to reveal the workings of a single mind and a great object at once, foreshadowed if not positively foretold, G.o.d is the designer, and a stronger hand is at work than the combined power of men and devils could successfully oppose. This is a truth which was not unknown to Homer, centuries ago, when he described Jove holding our globe suspended in s.p.a.ce at the end of a chain, and defying all the inferior G.o.ds to move the world in a direction contrary to that given by his mighty arm.

The image, striking and poetical as it is, for a Christian is too material. We speak more correctly when we say that Mind -- the Divine Mind--is the great invincible and invisible Force of which all material forces are but the created agents, and by which all inferior minds must stand or fall, conquer or fail. A man must be blind with that incurable blindness--of will--who cannot see it acting in and on the universe, and even controlling the lower designs of puny intellects. The reverent eye which sees the vastness of the plan, the mult.i.tude of its agents, aiding and seconding it consciously and unconsciously, recognizes it, and the supreme object of its workings, Love, infinite Love.

And we distinguish with grateful surprise all those circ.u.mstances visibly appearing in the great fact which has just been so imperfectly sketched, and which will come home to us still more forcibly when the workings of its lesser details come to be examined. Here, for instance, at the moment of writing these lines (March, 1872) we learn from the morning newspapers of the recent arrival of the j.a.panese emba.s.sy at San Francisco; that its members had been dispatched to this country to study European, or, as we call them, j.a.phetic inst.i.tutions, for the purpose of copying and adapting them to their own wants. The emba.s.sy, detained at Salt Lake City by the snow-blockade on the Pacific Railroad, refused to go back, temporarily, to California, and made up their mind to wait in Utah, until it is possible for them to proceed.

Pacific Railroad, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, j.a.panese emba.s.sy, adoption of European manners by the Mikado and daimios-- who can fail to gather from these words and details the conception of means to an end, and that end the one we now begin to study?

The first circ.u.mstance coming under our review and indicative of a loving design on the part of Providence, a circ.u.mstance not marked sufficiently at the time, is the preservation by the English themselves of the poor remnants of the Irish race, which the first working of the plan had so frightfully decimated and left in danger of being utterly wiped out. Had they disappeared, would j.a.phetism have become a blessing to the Asiatic nations?

The Catholic, looking abroad and casting his mind's eye over the vast European field, to all seeming so rich in every production, yet in reality so sterile morally, peering with awe and horror into the j.a.phetic caldron--for such it is--seething and bubbling to the brim, full of the most deadly poisons and noxious substances, ready at any moment to overflow in infected waves and sweep over the unfortunate countries which look to it so anxiously for blessings, a torrent of black destruction, spreading around naught but desolation and barrenness--the Catholic eye, seeing all this, can find but one answer to our query. The Asiatic races cannot hope to be benefited by the introduction of European manners among them, unless the same great movement carries in its train the holy Catholic Church: and as that introduction must be brought about by English- speaking leaders, the only English-speaking Catholics of numerical significance must be the instruments of the adorable designs of Providence.

That this a.s.sertion may not appear too sweeping, it is only enough to instance the example of India, which England has held long enough to convert, at least in part, had she so desired and been moved by the Spirit of G.o.d, yet to-day India stands in a worse relation toward Protestantism than when Protestantism in the name of Christianity, but in the person of a British trader, settled down in its midst. What good has Hindostan derived?

But, at this very moment, the whole Irish race is at the mercy of the English Government and people. Only let the same kind of vessels continue to be dispatched filled with Irish emigrants, and the whole race must disappear within a short period, or become so reduced in numbers that its operations as a race, on a large scale, will be unproductive of sufficient results.

And it is well to mark that at the time of this outpouring of the race, as long before, and almost constantly since, there were Englishmen rejoicing at the glorious result which death by plague and famine was about to produce. It were easy to quote many a barbarous pa.s.sage from the London Times, expressive of the most satanic joy, not only at the departure of the Irish from the "United Kingdom," but at the prospect of their ultimate, or rather proximate disappearance out of the world altogether.