DO THE ENGLISH HATE THE IRISH?
of their companions, ceased to be Irishmen. He accuses us, too, of adopting a condescending manner towards Americans also, which appears to have been a great crime in his eyes. Well, there is no doubt that a certain profound self-satisfaction in the English and Scotch peoples—especially, perhaps, in the Scotch—is one of the certain marks of British limitation, and, perhaps, also of the efficiency in a small field which is apt to result from that limitation. But if the proof of our hatred of the Irish is to consist in conduct which has also rendered us in- tolerable to the Americans, the proof does not go very far, for it is certain that we have never shown any indomitable aver- sion to our cousins across the Atlantic, for whose many great qualities few peoples probably have evinced a higher apprecia- tion than ourselves. But the truth is that Mr. Godkin in- geniously infers the English hatred of Irishmen from what he has recently observed of the Irish hatred of Englishmen ; and in the latter matter, no doubt, he is standing on firmer ground. Only we must be permitted to say, that to argue to the depth of David's hatred of Saul from the knowledge only of Baurs hatred of David, is not surely a logical process, and yet, so far as we can see, this is positively the whole sum of Mr. Godkin's evidence. "I confess I have until recently under-estimated the strength and permanence of Irish hatred of England which the English hatred of Irishmen has at last produced," says Mr. Godkin, and produces no witness at all to testify to that imputed cause of this effect. That the hatred of England is cultivated by the American branch of the Irish race "as a sort of reli- gion," we can well believe. The history of the last two or three years shows it to be so. But to what branch of the English race can Mr. Godkin point as cultivating the reciprocal form of this sort of religion ? He himself gives us no hint, and appears to be quite content with the assertion, which he does not pretend to justify, that when we make much of an Irishman, we drop his Irish character, and transform him for the nonce into an Englishman ; and with the bold assumption that "it is absurd to compare even Dr. Johnson's feeling towards the Scotchman with the ordinary Englishman's feeling towards what he con- siders the typical Irishman." Certainly, it is absurd, for Dr. Johnson's feeling towards the Scotchman was one of real dislike and contempt ; while the typical English feeling for the Irishman is one rather of bewilderment than of either hatred or contempt,—genuine inability to understand him, genuine desire to do him justice, genuine admiration for his liveliness, genuine fear for his fitfulness, and genuine despair at his ineradicable hostility. Mr. Godkin relies much for his evidence on Punch's caricatures of Irishmen. But first of all, you can never judge of the true feeling of a nation from the comic organ of any class, much less, perhaps, its middle-class ; and next, there is nothing at all to prove that even the readers of Punch approve the sort of caricatures of Irishmen they find there. It is almost as hard lines to assume the general concur- rence of the readers of any paper in one of its smaller and least important characteristics, as it would be to assume on the strength of our general respect for the United States, that we approve and admire the policy of the United States towards the unfortunate Indian Tribes whom they have dealt with so ruthlessly.
Now, let us consider a 'little seriously what the evidence of Mr. Godkin's unargued axiom that most Englishmen hate and despise Irishmen, really is. Mr. Godkin admits that we are quite willing and even eager to avail ourselves of Irish- men's great qualities, whenever we can. "They are often favourites in society," he Bays. "They attain high rank at the Bar and on the Bench, and in the Civil Service and in the Army. In fact, I doubt whether it may not be said that they get more than their fair share of such rewards as English society bestows on social and professional talent. This is all true, but it does not conflict with my story. Irishmen suc- ceed in England, not as Irishmen, but as Englishmen. That is to say, an Irishman who shows the kind of qualities which Englishmen love and honour undergoes an unconscious trans- formation in their minds." That is a very calm assumption, and one that is not easy to prove. Moreover, when we come to a later part of Mr. Godkin's essay, we find him making an assumption almost the very converse of this, in order to enforce another accusation. "There is no part of the world to-day," he says, "in which an Irishman, no matter how well affected he may be to the English Government, or how English he may. be by blood and education, does not find that his -calling or thinking of himself as an Englishman is treated as a sort of usurpation ; that he is regarded as belonging.to an inferior class of British subject, like the Maltese, and though entitled to the protection of the Flag, as having no right to be
proud of it." Surely we are very hardly treated by Mr. God- kin,—much, indeed, as we are by Irishmen in general. Here we are first reproached with making much of able Irishmen, only forgetting or ignoring that they are Irishmen, and assuming them to be English ; and then we are told that if any able Irishman assumes to be an Englishman, he is immediately snubbed and put down, by being told he is only an Irishman. Are the two statements consistent with each other ? Is it not obvious that in the heat of his displeasure with Eng- lishmen, Mr. Godkin has got hold of two opposite accusations, which neutralise each other ? If we represent able Irishmen as Englishmen, we cannot habitually find fault with great Irish- men for claiming to be exactly what we always describe them as being. And in point of fact, Mr. Godkin seems to us to speak chiefly from prejudice, and not on the evidence of facts at all. Who ever heard of our claiming Burke, or Grattan, or O'Connell, or Shiel, or Goldsmith, or Moore, or even Lord Dufferin, as an Englishman ? Do we not habitually dwell, and dwell with admiration, on the notes of their Irish genius and vivacity ? It seems to us equally false to say that we try to merge great Irish qualities in English qualities, and to say that when an Irishman claims the traditional glories of the Empire as his own, we are in the least disposed to grudge them to him. We know too well how much we have owed to our Wellesleys and Lawrences, to have any doubts about the genuinely Irish origin of a great portion of our national fame. But this is the sort of accusation which Irishmen. seem to think self- demonstrative, while to us it appears to have absolutely no foundation whatever.
But now as to the great mass of the English people. Is there, or is there not, the slightest evidence of a widely- diffused dislike of the Irish people amongst the English
and Scotch constituencies We appeal to the evidence of facts. Mr. Godkin is not ashamed to echo the idle Tory legend that "Irish arguments and appeals produce, for practical purposes, no effect on the English mind until they are enforced by that dreadful form of social war known in English legislation as Irish crime and outrage.'" What is Mr. Godkin's reason for this wild and utterly baseless assertion,—which if more or less true up to the time of the Irish famine, when none of the greater statesmen had given their minds earnestly to the popular side of the Irish problem, has not had even a shadow of truth in it for the last twenty years ? Why, of course, that the Irish Church was abolished because of the Clerkenwell outrage, and that the Irish Land Acts were due partly to the same outbreak, partly to the outbreak of 1880. Englishmen who know any- thing of the matter know that Mr. Gladstone took up the Irish Church question before the Clerkenwell outrage ; that he had lost his election for the University of Oxford in 1865, because it was known that he recognised the glaring injustice of the Irish Establishment, and that it was Mr. Gladstone's profession of faith, and not any number of outrages, which carried the English Liberals with him, when he turned the attention of the country to the pressing need for a policy of justice to Ireland. That Irish ' outrage ' has helped the English to realise how guilty they were towards Ireland, no one will deny. It WU, no doubt, in great measure, the violence of English mobs which helped the English Whigs to realise how guilty the Government of this country had been towards the masses of the English people before the Reform. Bill, just as it was the violence of the French peasantry which helped the Girondiats to realise how guilty the French Govern- ment had been towards the masses of the French people, at the time of the Great Revolution. But there is absolutely no pretence for saying that the general election of 1868 was not a loud and most deliberate response of the English people to Mr. Gladstone's plea for justice to Ireland, nor for denying that it proved, with the sort of proof that we can very seldom obtain, that the great majority of the English people, far from entertaining that hatred for Irishmen which Mr. Godkin im- putes in us, and makes the source and origin of the Irish hatred for Englishmen, wish, with all their hearts, to make amends for the sins of their fathers, and to show the Irishp eo le that there is no compensation in the world, consistent With the unity and prosperity of the United Kingdom, which they are not eagerly desirous to make them.
Mr. Godkin's paper, ably as it is written, seems to us to be the outcome of pure and vehement prepossession ; and to be, in, a fact, as complete misrepresentation of the actual political condition of the minds of English Constituencies, as an accom- plished man, and one of singularly lucid intellect on all
subjects on which his prejudices do not run away with him, ever penned, by way of adding to the confusion of words without knowledge.
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