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The only comment I shall make on these words is: they were penned more than half a century after Mr. Pitt’s Union, which was to shower down blessings on the Irish people.

Mr. Goldwin Smith’s first letter was written on the 23rd of November, 1867, the day of the execution of the Fenians Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien. He says–

“There can be no doubt, I apprehend, that the Irish difficulty has entered on a new phase, and that Irish disaffection has, to repeat an expression which I heard used in Ireland, come fairly into a line with the other discontented nationalities of Europe. Active Fenianism probably pervades only the lowest class; passive sympathy, which the success of the movement would at once convert into active co-operation, extends, it is to be feared, a good deal higher.

“England has ruin before her, unless she can hit on a remedy, and overcome any obstacles of class interest or of national pride which would prevent its application, the part of Russia in Poland, or of Austria in Italy–a part cruel, hateful, demoralizing, contrary to all our high principles and professions, and fraught with dangers to our own freedom. Our position will be worse than that of Russia in this respect, that, while her Poland is only a province, our Fenianism is an element pervading every city of the United Kingdom in which Irish abound, and allying itself with kindred misery, discontent, and disorder. Wretchedness, the result of misgovernment, has caused the Irish people to multiply with the recklessness of despair, and now here are their avenging hosts in the midst of us, here is the poison of their disaffection running through every member of our social frame. Not only so, but the same wretchedness has sent millions of emigrants to form an Irish nation in the United States, where the Irish are a great political power, swaying by their votes the councils of the American Republic, and in immediate contact with those Transatlantic possessions of England, the retention of which it is now patriotic to applaud, and will one day be patriotic to have dissuaded.

” … That Ireland is not at this moment, materially speaking, in a particularly suffering state, but, on the contrary, the farmers are rather prosperous, and wages, even when allowance is made for the rise in the price of provisions, considerably higher than they were, only adds to the significance of this widespread disaffection.

“The Fenian movement is not religious, nor radically economical (though no doubt it has in it a socialistic element), but national, and the remedy for it must be one which cures national discontent. This is the great truth which the English people have to lay to heart.”[47]

Mr. Goldwin Smith then dispels the notion that the Irish question is a religious one.

“When Fenianism first appeared, the Orangemen, in accordance with their fixed idea, ascribed it to the priests. They were undeceived, I was told, by seeing a priest run away from the Fenians in fear of his life.”[48]

Neither was it a question of the land.

“The land question, no doubt, lies nearer to the heart of the matter, and it is the great key to Irish history in the past; but I do not believe that even this is fundamental.”

He then states what is “fundamental.”[49]

“The real root of the disaffection which exhibits itself at present in the guise of Fenianism, and which has been suddenly kindled into flame by the arming of the Irish in the American civil war, but which existed before in a nameless and smouldering state, is, as I believe, the want of national institutions, of a national capital, of any objects of national reverence and attachment, and consequently of anything deserving to be called national life. The English Crown and Parliament the Irish have never learnt, nor have they had any chance of learning, to love, or to regard as national, notwithstanding the share which was given them, too late, in the representation. The greatness of England is nothing to them. Her history is nothing, or worse. The success of Irishmen in London consoles the Irish in Ireland no more than the success of Italian adventurers in foreign countries (which was very remarkable) consoled the Italian people. The drawing off of Irish talent, in fact, turns to an additional grievance in their minds. Dublin is a modern Tara, a metropolis from which the glory has departed; and the viceroyalty, though it pleases some of the tradesmen, fails altogether to satisfy the people. ‘In Ireland we can make no appeal to patriotism, we can have no patriotic sentiments in our schoolbooks, no patriotic emblems in our schools, because in Ireland everything patriotic is rebellious.’ These were the words uttered in my hearing, not by a complaining demagogue, but by a desponding statesman. They seemed to me pregnant with fatal truths.