Vilification of the Celtic Irish - The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)
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"superior race," but also to turn aside and make ridiculous the sympathy of all civilized mankind, if peradventure mankind should be so misguided as to throw away its sympathies upon so abject a race as these starved-out Celts. But, in truth, the calculated care and diligence of the British literary class in defaming all Celts, has had of late years a far more urgent motive than it ever had in the case of the Scottish people, for they are painfully aware that myriads upon myriads of the exterminated Irish, having found refuge here in America, have filled this continent with cursing and bitterness against the English name; and a strong political necessity is upon them to make Americans hate us, and, if possible, despise us, as heartily as they do themselves. As for us, expatriated and exterminated Irish, we have every day occasion to feel that our enemy pursues us into all lands with unrelenting vengeance; and though we take the wings of the morning, we can never escape it—never until Ireland shall become, as Scotland is, a contented province of the British Empire, thoroughly subdued, civilized, emasculated, and "ameliorated " to the very heart's core.
To return from this slight digression, the plan of Sir Robert Peel for a new "Plantation" in Ireland was anxiously revolved in the councils of our enemy. It began to be believed that the peasant class being now almost sufficiently thinned out—and the claim of tenants to some sort of right or title to the land they tilled, having been successfully resisted and defeated;—that the structure of society in Ireland having been well and firmly planted upon a basis of able-bodied pauperism (which the English, however, called "independent labour "), the time was come to effect a transfer of the real estate of the island from Irish to English hands. This grand idea afterwards elaborated itself into the famous "Incumbered Estates Act." ...continue reading »
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