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THE IRISH RACE IN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
by Rev. Aug. J. Thebaud, S.J.
PREFACE
COUNT JOSEPH DE MAISTRE, in his "Principe Generateur des ConstitutionsPolitiques" (Par. LXI.), says: "All nations manifest a particularand distinctive character, which deserves to be attentively considered."
This thought of the great Catholic writer requires some development.
It is not by a succession of periods of progress and decay onlyThat nations manifest their life and individuality. Taking anyone of them at any period of its existence, and comparing it withothers, peculiarities immediately show themselves which give it aparticular physiognomy whereby it may be at once distinguishedfrom any other; so that, in those agglomerations of men which wecall nations or races, we see the variety everywhere observablein Nature, the variety by which God manifests the infinite activityof his creative power.
When we take two extreme types of the human species—the Ashanteeof Guinea, for instance, and any individual of one of the greatcivilized communities of Europe-the phenomenon of which we speakstrikes us at once. But it may be remarked also, in comparingnations which have lived for ages in contiguity, and held constantintercourse one with the other from the time they began theirnational life, whose only boundary-line has been a mountain-chainor the banks of a broad river. They have each striking peculiaritieswhich individualize and stamp them with a character of their own.
How different are the peoples divided by the Rhine or by thePyrenees! How unlike those which the Straits of Dover run between!And in Asia, what have the conterminous Chinese and Hindoos incommon beyond the general characteristics of the human specieswhich belong to all the children of Adam?
But what we must chiefly insist upon in the investigation we areNow undertaking is, that the life of each is manifested by aspecial physiognomy deeply imprinted in their whole history,which we here call character. What each of them is their historyshows; and there is no better means of judging of them than byreviewing the various events which compose their life.
For the various events which go to form what is called thehistory of a nation are its individual actions, the spontaneousenergy of its life; and, as a man shows what he is by his acts,so does a nation or a race by the facts of its history.
When we compare the vast despotisms of Asia, crystallized intoforms which have scarcely changed since the first settlement ofman in those immense plains, with the active and ever-movingsmaller groups of Europeans settled in the west of the Old Worldsince the dispersion of mankind, we see at a glance how thecharacters of both may be read in their respective annals. And,coming down gradually to less extreme cases, we recognize thesame phenomenon manifested even in contiguous tribes, springinglong ago, perhaps, from the same stock, but which have beenformed into distinct nations by distinct ancestors, although theyacknowledge a common origin. The antagonism in their character isimmediately brought out by what historians or annalists have tosay of them.
Are not the cruelty and rapacity of the old Scandinavian raceStill visible in their descendants? And the spirit of organizationdisplayed by them from the beginning in the se