Reflections and Comments 1865 1895 by Edwin Lawrence Godkin

E >> Edwin Lawrence Godkin >> Reflections and Comments 1865 1895

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER

Mr. Froude announced that his object in coming to America was to
enlighten the American public as to the true nature of Irish
discontent, in such manner that American opinion, acting on Irish
opinion, would reconcile the Irish to the English connection, and
turn their attention to practical remedies for whatever was wrong
in their condition--American opinion being now, in Irish eyes,
the court of last resort in all political controversies. It is
casting no reflection on the historical or literary value of his
lectures to say that Mr. Froude, in proposing to himself any such
undertaking, fell into error as to the kind of audience he was
likely to command, and as to the nature of the impression he was
likely to make. The class of persons who listen to him is one of
great intelligence and respectability, but it is a class to which
the Irish are not in the habit of listening, and which has
already formed as unfavorable opinions about the political
character of the Irish as Mr. Froude could wish. He will be
surrounded during his whole tour by a public to whose utterances
the Irish pay no more attention than to the preachings of Mr.
Newdegate or Mr. Whalley, and who have long ago reached, from
their observation of the influence of the Irish immigration on
American politics, the very conclusions for which Mr. Froude
proposes to furnish historical justification. In short, he is
addressing people who have either already made up their minds, or
whose minds have no value for the purpose of his mission.

On the other hand, he will not reach at all the political class
which panders to Irish hatred of England, and, if he does reach
it, he will produce no effect on it. Not one speech the less will
be uttered, or article the less written, in encouragement of
Fenianism in consequence of anything he may say. Indeed, the idea
that the Bankses will be more careful in their Congressional
reports, or the Coxes or Mortons in their political harangues,
either after or before election, in consequence of Mr. Froude's
demonstration of the groundlessness of Fenian complaints, is one
which to "the men inside politics" must be very amusing.

We think, however, we can safely go a little further than this,
and say that however much light he may throw on the troubled
waters of Irish history, his deductions will not find a ready
acceptance among thinking Americans. The men who will heartily
agree with him in believing that the Irish have, on the whole,
only received their due, are not, as a rule, fair exponents of
the national temper or of the tendencies of the national mind.
Those who listened on Friday night last to his picturesque
account of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian attempts to pacify
Ireland, must have felt in their bones that--in spite of the
cheers which greeted some of his own more eloquent and some of
his bolder passages, and in particular his dauntless way of
dealing with the Drogheda Massacre--his political philosophy was
not one which the average American could be got to carry home
with him and ponder and embrace. Mr. Froude, it must in justice
to him be said, by no means throws all the responsibility of
Irish misery on Ireland. He deals out a considerable share of
this responsibility to England, but then his mode of apportioning
it is one which is completely opposed to most of the fundamental
notions of American politics. For instance, his whole treatment
of Irish history is permeated by an idea which, whatever marks it
may have left on American practice in dealing with the Indians,
has no place now in American political philosophy--we mean what
is called in English politics "the imperial idea"--the idea, that
is, that a strong, bold, and courageous race has a sort of
"natural right" to invade the territory of weak, semi-civilized,
and distracted races, and undertake the task of governing them by
such methods as seem best, and at such cost of life as may be
necessary. This idea is a necessary product of English history;
it is not likely to disappear in England as long as she possesses
such a school for soldiers and statesmen as is furnished by
India. Indeed, she could not stay in India without some such
theory to support her troops, but it is not one which will find a
ready acceptance here. American opinion has, within the last
twenty years, run into the very opposite extreme, and now
maintains with some tenacity the right even of barbarous
communities to be let alone and allowed to work out their own
salvation or damnation in their own way. There is little or no
faith left in this country in the value of superimposed
civilization, or of "superior minds," or of higher organization,
while there is a deep suspicion of, or we might say there is deep
hostility toward, all claims to rule based on alleged superiority
of race or creed or class. We doubt if Mr. Froude could have hit
on a more unpalatable mode, or a mode more likely to clash with
the prevailing tendencies of American opinion, of defending
English rule in Ireland than the argument that, Englishmen being
stronger and wiser than Irishmen, Irishmen ought to submit to
have themselves governed on English ideas whether they like it or
not. He has produced this argument already in England, and it has
elicited there a considerable amount of indignant protest. We are
forced to say of it here that it is likely to do great mischief,
over and above the total defeat of Mr. Froude's object in coming
to this country. The Irish in America are more likely to be
exasperated by it than the Irish at home, and we feel sure that
no native American will ever venture to use it to an Irish
audience.

There is one other point to which Mr. Froude's attention ought to
be called, as likely seriously to diminish the political weight
of his exposition of the causes of Irish discontent. The sole
justification of a conquest, even of a conquest achieved over
barbarians by a civilized people, is that it supplies good
government--that is, protection for life and property. Unless it
does this, no picture, however dark, of the discords and disorder
and savagery of the conquered can set the conqueror right at the
bar of civilized opinion. Therefore, the shocking and carefully
darkened pictures of the social and political degradation of the
native Irish in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries with which Mr. Froude is furnishing us, are available
for English vindication only on the supposition that the
invasion, even if it destroyed liberty, brought with it law and
order. But according to Mr. Froude's eloquent confession, it
brought nothing of the kind.

Queen Elizabeth made the first serious attempt to subjugate
Ireland, but she did it, Mr. Froude tells us, with only a handful
of English soldiers--who acted as auxiliaries to Irish clans
engaged on the queen's instigation in mutual massacre. After
three years of this sort of thing, the whole southern portion of
the island was reduced, to use Mr. Froude's words, "to a smoking
wilderness," men, women, and children having been remorselessly
slaughtered; but no attempt whatever was then made to establish
either courts or police, or any civil rule of any kind. Society
was left in a worse condition than before. Why was this? Because,
says Mr. Froude, the English Constitution made no provision for
the maintenance of a standing army for any such purpose.

The second attempt was made by Cromwell. He slaughtered the
garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford, and scattered the armies of
the various Irish factions, but he made no more attempt to police
the island than Elizabeth. The only mode of establishing order
resorted to by the Commonwealth was the wholesale confiscation of
the land, and its distribution among the officers and soldiers of
the army, the natives of all ages and sexes being driven into
Connaught. The "policing" was then left to be done by the new
settlers, each man with the strong hand, on his own account. The
third attempt was made by William III., who also followed the
Cromwellian plan, and left the island to be governed during the
following century by the military adventurers who had entered
into possession of the soil.

The excuse for not endeavoring to set up an honest and efficient
government remained the same in all three cases; the absence of
an army, or occupation elsewhere. In other words, the conquest
from first to last wanted the only justification which any
conquest can have. England found the Irish much in the same stage
of social and political progress in which Caesar found the Gauls,
destitute of nearly all the elements of political organization;
but instead of founding a political system, and maintaining it,
she interfered for century after century only to subjugate and
lay waste, and set the natives by the ears. Mr. Froude's answer
to this is, that if the Irish had been better men they could
easily have driven the English out, which is perhaps a good
reason for not bestowing much pity on the Irish, but it is not a
good reason for telling the Irish they ought not to hate England.
No pity can be made welcome which is ostentatiously mingled with
contempt. It is quite true, to our minds, that during the last
fifty years England has supplied the Irish with a better
government than the Irish could provide for themselves within the
next century at least.

There is no doubt of the substantial value of the English connection
to Ireland _now_; but there is just as little that in the past
history of this connection there is reason enough for Irish
suspicion and dislike. The tenacity of the Irish memory, too, is one
of the great political defects and misfortunes of the race.
Inability to forget past "wrongs" in the light of present
prosperity, is a sure sign of the absence of the political sense;
and that the Irish are wanting in the political sense no candid man
can deny. That they are really still, to a considerable extent, in
the tribal stage of progress, there is little doubt. But they are
surrounded by ideas, and institutions, and influences which make it
useless to try to raise them out of that stage by the "imperial"
method of government, or, in other words, by trying to persuade them
that they have richly deserved all their misfortunes, and that the
best thing they can do is to let a superior race mould their
destinies. If it were possible for Englishmen to be a little more
patient with their weaknesses, to yield a little more to the
childish vanities and aspirations which form the nearest approach
they have yet made to a feeling of nationality, and take upon
themselves in word as well as in deed their share of the horrible
burdens of Irish history, it would do more toward winning them Irish
confidence than anything Americans are ever likely to say.

MR. HORACE GREELEY

There has been something almost tragic about the close of Mr.
Greeley's career. After a life of, on the whole, remarkable success
and prosperity, he fell finally under the weight of accumulated
misfortunes. Nobody who heard him declare that "he accepted the
Cincinnati Convention and its consequences," but must be struck by
the illustration of what is called "the irony of fate," which nearly
everything that occurred afterwards affords. His nomination, from
whatever point of view we look at it, was undoubtedly a high honor.
The manner in which it was received down to the Baltimore Convention
was very flattering. Whether it was a proper thing to "beat Grant"
or not, that so large and so shrewd a body of his countrymen should
have thought Mr. Greeley the man to do it was a great compliment. It
found him, too, in possession of all the influence which the
successful pursuit of his own calling could give a man--the most
powerful editor in the Union, surrounded by friends and admirers,
feared or courted by nearly everybody in public life, and in the
full enjoyment of widespread popular confidence in his integrity. In
six short months he was well-nigh undone. He had endured a
humiliating defeat, which seemed to him to indicate the loss of what
was his dearest possession, the affection of the American people; he
had lost the weight in public affairs which he had built up by
thirty years of labor; he saw his property and, as he thought, that
of his friends diminished by the attempt to give him a prize which
he had in his own estimation fairly earned, and, though last not
least, he found his home invaded by death, and one of the strongest
of the ties which bind a man to this earth broken. It would not be
wonderful if, under these circumstances, the coldest and toughest of
men should lie down and die. But Mr. Greeley was neither cold nor
tough. He was keenly sensitive both to praise and blame. The
applause of even paltry men gladdened him, and their censure stung
him. Moreover, he had that intense longing for reputation as a man
of action by which men of the closet are so often torn. In spite of
all that his writing brought him in reputation, he writhed under the
popular belief that he could do nothing but write, and he spent the
flower of his years trying to convince the public that it was
mistaken about him. It was to this we owed whatever was ostentatious
in his devotion to farming, and in his interest in the manufacturing
industry of the country. It was to this, too, that he owed his keen
and lifelong desire for office, and, in part at least, his activity
in getting offices for other people.

Office-seekers have become in the United States so ridiculous and so
contemptible a class, that a man can hardly seek a place in the
public service without incurring a certain amount of odium; and
perhaps nothing did more damage to Mr. Greeley's reputation than his
anxiety to be put in places of trust or dignity. And yet it is
doubtful if many men seek office with more respectable motives than
his. For pecuniary emolument he cared nothing; but he did pine all
his life long for some conspicuous recognition of his capacity for
the conduct of affairs, and he never got it. The men who have
nominations to bestow either never had confidence enough in his
judgment or ability to offer him anything which he would have
thought worthy of his expectations when there was the least chance
of their choice receiving a popular ratification. They disliked him,
as politicians are apt to dislike an editor in the political arena,
as a man who, in having a newspaper at his back, is sure not to play
their game fairly. The consequence was that he was constantly
irritated by finding how purely professional his influence was, or,
in other words, what a mortifying disproportion existed between his
editorial and his personal power. The first revelation the public
had of the bitterness of his disappointment on this score was caused
by the publication of the famous Seward letter, and the surprise it
caused was perhaps the highest compliment Mr. Greeley ever received.
It showed with what success he had prevented his private griefs from
affecting his public action, and people are always ready to forgive
ambition as an "infirmity of noble minds," even when they do not
feel disposed to reward it.

Unfortunately for Mr. Greeley, however, he never could persuade
himself that the public was of the same mind as the politicians
regarding his personal capacity. He persisted to the last in
believing himself the victim of their envy, hatred, and malice, and
looking with unabated hope to some opportunity of obtaining a
verdict on his merits as a man of action, in which his widespread
popularity and his long and laborious teachings would fairly tell.
The result of the Cincinnati Convention, which his friends and
emissaries from this city went out to prepare, but which perhaps
neither he nor they in the beginning ventured to hope for, seemed to
promise him at last the crown and consummation of a life's longings,
and he received it with almost childlike joy. The election was,
therefore, a crushing blow. It was not, perhaps, the failure to get
the presidency that was hardest to bear--for this might have been
accompanied by such a declaration of his fitness for the presidency
as would have sweetened the remainder of his years--it was the
contemptuous greatness of his opponent's majority which was killing.
It dissipated the illusion of half a lifetime on the one point on
which illusions are dearest--a man's exact place in the estimation
of his countrymen. Very few--even of those whose fame rests on the
most solid foundation of achievement--ever ask to have this
ascertained by a positive test without dread or misgiving, or face
the test without a strain, which the nerves of old men are often ill
fitted to bear. That Mr. Greeley's nerves were unequal to the shock
of failure we now know. But it needed no intimate acquaintance with
him to see that the card in which he announced, two days after the
election, that he would thereafter be a simple editor, would seek
office no more, and would confine himself to the production of a
candid and judicial-minded paper, must have been written in
bitterness of spirit for which this world had no balm.

In addition to the deceptions caused by his editorial influence, Mr.
Greeley had others to contend with, more subtle, but not less
potent. The position of the editor of a leading daily paper is
one which, in our time, is hardly possible for the calmest and
most candid man to fill without having his judgment of himself
perverted by flattery. Our age is intensely commercial; it is not
the dry-goods man or the grain merchant only who has goods for sale,
but the poet, the orator, the scholar, the philosopher, and the
politician. We are all, in a measure, seeking a market for our
wares. What we desire, therefore, above all things, is a good
advertising medium, or, in other words, a good means of making known
to all the world where our store is and what we have to sell. This
means the editor of a daily paper can furnish to anybody he pleases.
He is consequently the object of unceasing adulation from a crowd of
those who shrink from fighting the slow and doubtful battle of life
in the open field, and crave the kindly shelter of editorial
plaudits, "puffs," and "mentions." He finds this adulation offered
freely, and by all classes and conditions, without the least
reference to his character or talents or antecedents. What wonder if
it turns the heads of unworthy men, and begets in them some of the
vices of despots--their unscrupulousness, their cruelty, and their
impudence. What wonder, too, if it should have thrown off his
balance a man like Mr. Greeley, whose head was not strong, whose
education was imperfect, and whose self-confidence had been
fortified by a brave and successful struggle with adversity.

Of his many private virtues, of his kind-heartedness, his
generosity, his sympathy with all forms of suffering and anxiety, we
do not need to speak. His career, too, has little in it to point any
moral that is not already trite and familiar. The only lesson we can
gather from it with any clearness is the uncertainty of this world,
and all that it contains, and the folly of seeking the presidency.
Nobody can hope to follow in his footsteps. He began life as a kind
of editor of which he was one of the last specimens, and which will
shortly be totally extinct--the editor who fought as the man-at-arms
of the party. This kind of work Mr. Greeley did with extraordinary
earnestness and vehemence and success--so much success that a modern
newspaper finally grew up around him, in spite of him, almost to his
surprise, and often to his embarrassment. The changed condition of
journalism, the substitution of the critical for the party views of
things, he never wholly accepted, and his frequent personal
appearance in his columns, under the signature of "H. G." hurling
defiance at his enemies or exposing their baseness, showed how
stifling he found the changed atmosphere. He was fast falling behind
his age when he died. New men, and new issues, and new processes,
which he either did not understand at all or only understood
imperfectly, crowded upon him. If the dazzling prize of the
presidency had not been held before his eyes, we should probably
have witnessed his gradual but certain retirement into well-won
repose. Those who opposed him most earnestly must now regret
sincerely that in his last hours he should have known the bitterness
of believing, what was really not true, that the labors of his life,
which were largely devoted to good causes, had not met the
appreciation they merited at the hands of his countrymen. It is for
his own sake, as well as that of the public, greatly to be regretted
that he should not have lived until the smoke of the late conflict
had cleared away.

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN

Mr. Froude's attempt to secure from the American public a
favorable judgment on the dealings of England with Ireland has
had one good result--though we fear only one--in leading to a
little closer examination of the real state of American opinion
about Irish grievances than it has yet received. He will go back
to England with the knowledge--which he evidently did not possess
when he came here--that the great body of intelligent Americans
care very little about the history of "the six hundred years of
wrong," and know even less than they care, and could not be
induced, except by a land-grant, or a bounty, or a drawback, to
acquaint themselves with it; that those of them who have ever
tried to form an opinion on the Anglo-Irish controversy have
hardly ever got farther than a loose notion that England had most
likely behaved like a bully all through, but that her victim was
beyond all question an obstreperous and irreclaimable ruffian,
whose ill-treatment must be severely condemned by the moralist,
but over whom no sensible man can be expected to weep or
sympathize.

The agencies which have helped to form the popular idea of the
English political character are well known; those which have helped
to deprive the Irish of American sympathy--and which, if Mr. Froude
had judiciously confined himself to describing the efforts made by
England to promote Irish well-being _now_, would probably have made
his lectures very successful--are more obscure. We ourselves pointed
out one of the most prominent, and probably most powerful--the
conduct of the Irish servant-girl in the American kitchen. To this
must of course be added the specimen of "home rule" to which the
country has been treated in this city; but we doubt if this latter
has really exercised as much influence on American opinion as some
writers try to make out. A community which has produced Butler,
Banks, Parker, Bullock, Tweed, Tom Fields, Oakey Hall, Fernando
Wood, Barnard, and scores of others whom we might name, as the
results of good Protestant and Anglo-Saxon breeding, cannot really
be greatly shocked by the bad workings of Celtic blood and Catholic
theology in the persons of Peter B. Sweeny, Billy McMullen, Jimmy
O'Brien, Reddy the Blacksmith, or Judge McCunn. It is in the kitchen
that the Irish iron has entered into the American soul; and it is in
the kitchen that a great triumph was prepared for Mr. Froude, had he
been a judicious man. The memory of burned steaks, of hard-boiled
potatoes, of smoked milk, would have done for him what no state
papers, or records, or correspondence of the illustrious dead can
ever do; it had prepared the American mind to believe the very worst
he could say of Irish turbulence and disorder. Not one of his
auditors but could find in his own experience of Irish cooking
circumstances which would probably have led him to accept without
question the execution of Silken Thomas, the massacre of Drogheda,
or even the Penal Laws, as perfectly justifiable exercises of
authority, and would certainly have made it easy for him to believe
that English rule in Ireland at the present day is beneficent beyond
example.

Nevertheless, we are constrained to say that in our opinion a
great deal of the odium which surrounds Bridget, and which has
excited so much prejudice, not only against her countrymen, but
against her ancestors, in American eyes, has a very insufficient
foundation in reason. There are three characters in which she is
the object of public suspicion and dislike--(1) as a cook; (2) as a
party to a contract; (3) as a member of a household. The charges
made against her in all of these have been summed up in a recent
attack on her in the _Atlantic Monthly_, as "a lack of every quality
which makes service endurable to the employer, or a wholesome life
for the servant."

And the same article charges her with "proving herself, in
obedience, fidelity, care, and accuracy, the inferior of every
kind of servant known to modern society." Of course, there is
hardly a family in the country which has not had, in its own
experience, illustrations of the extravagance of these charges.
There is probably nobody who has long kept servants, who has not
had Irish servants who were obedient, faithful, careful, and even
accurate in a remarkable degree. But then it must be admitted that
this indictment is a tolerably fair rendering, if not of the actual
facts of the case, at least of the impression the facts have left
on the mind of the average employer. This impression, however, needs
correction, as a few not very recondite considerations will show.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16