Ireland's Moderation, Chapters I-XII [pp. 94-103]

x88~.] i:RELAKD's MODERAHOAr. 99
This stolid trait of the English is the source of incessant irritation in Ireland, as well as of serious wrongs. The English never
try to understand the Irish. If they should do so, and should
discover the secret ciphers of Irish character, they would make
it an easy task for statesmen to "create a more perfect union,"
even while an~ by re-es~ablishing "Grattan's Parliament on College Green."
VII.
They would see, for instance, that the Irish are a people
whose love of the past has become one of their most distinguishing racial characteristics. The Irish are proud of their old warriors and saints. The ruins of their ancient churches and palaces
are tenderly revered. A round tower; an old Celtic cross; the
swamp where the last of their pagan kings and the abbey where
the last of their Christian kings were buried; the holy wells;
the fairy mounds; the sites of the cells of St. Bridget and St.
Columbkille; the "sentinel hills" where the watchman stood to
give notice of the approach~ of the soldiery when t~e priest was
saying Mass in some secluded glen in the not-soJar.away days
of the penal laws; every memory and every relic of the ancient
times-each and all of them are cherished with a love that no
other race seems capable of feeling, and hardly of comprehend
ing when they see its manifestations.
The desecration of such shrines-or what the Irish people regard as the desecration of them-is a perpetual and galling reminder of the overthrow of their independence as a nation. No
wise ruler would keep alive stich memories. Yet the English do
it in Ireland.
I well remember the shock it gave me, as an American, when,
stopping over at Athlone for dear Goldsmith's sake, I saw, opposite the hotel there, an ancient bell-tower, and was told that it
had been confiscated from the Catholic Church and was now
actually held by the Church of Ireland. To be sure, in my early
boyhood, I had seen in the Scottish Lowlands the ruins of great
abbeys and monasteries, but I had seen there also the remains
of the works of the Romans who did battle under C~sar: and
the Roman legions had not disappeared from the scene more
completely than the Roman Catholics. No sense of an injustice
done to any living men jarred on the enjoyment of the marvellous beauty of fair Melrose or of Dryburgh Abbey, where the
body of Walter Scott lies buried. But in Ireland there is
hardly a relic of ancient Catholicism that does not arouse a