Equally bitter and insolent was their tone towards the Irish
people, accusing them of many inherent vices--denouncing their
ignorance, their laziness, their want of self-reliance. Whatever of
truth or falsehood may have been in those charges, it was not the time
to put them forward. Famine was at the door of the Irish nation, and its
progress was not to be stayed by invectives against our failings, or by
moral lectures upon the improvement of our habits. Food, food was the
single and essential requisite; let us have it at once, or we die;
lecture us afterwards as much as you please. But there was something to
be said on the other side about our habits and failings; and a liberal
English journalist, taking up the subject, turned their own artillery
upon his countrymen, telling them that those vices, of which they
accused the Irish people, were not an essential part of Celtic nature.
Has not the Irish Celt, he asks, achieved distinguished success in every
country of Europe but his own? The state in which he is to be found in
Ireland to-day must be, therefore, accounted for on some other theory
than the inherent good-for-nothingness of his nature. "The sluggish,
well-meaning mind of the English nation," he continues, "so willing to
do its duty, so slow to discover that it has any duty to do, is now
perforce rousing to ask itself the question, after five centuries of
English domination over Ireland, how many millions it is inclined to
pay, not in order to save the social system which has grown up under its
fostering care, but to help that precious child of its parental nurture
to die easy? Any further prolongation of existence for that system no
one now seems to predict, and hardly any one longer ventures to
insinuate that it deserves.
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