No. XXIX. FEBRUARY, 1832. VOL. III.

IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER.

[We think we need offer no apology to the conductors of "The Christian Examiner, and Church of Ireland Magazine," for adopting from their pages the following valuable treatise on the all-engrossing subject of IRISH EDUCATION. If any apology be required, we plead the excellence of the Article itself, and the vast importance of giving it circulation amongst the Presbyterian community. By abridging a few particulars, we present the substance of the whole to our readers in one Number.-EDIT.]

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.

SIR, I HAVE never been in any company either in England or Scotland, where the state of Ireland was the subject of conversation, that there was not a lamentation uttered over the ignorance and total WANT OF EDUCATION of the Irish. Educate the people, Educate the people, was the reiterated cry-this was the cure for every evil, the healing balsam for the ulcerated wounds of the country. I always did my utmost to assure those that would listen, that the Irish were NOT the ignorant, uninstructed people they were assumed to be-that compared with the French, or indeed any other continental peasantry among whom Popery prevailed, they were as well informed on general subjects, as inquisitive, and as apt; and that not only in the acquisition of reading, writing, and arithmetic, they were more generally supplied than the English peo. ple, but were superior to them as well in the desire for, as in the attainment of, general knowledge. The fact is, that, except in those districts where the Irish tongue is exclusively used, few of the Irish under thirty years of age are incapable of reading and writing, and many of them are expert in casting up sums in commercial arithmetic; and this information is even more extended in our remote

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and country parts, than in the towns-perhaps the youth of Dublin are less subjected to the process of education than those of any other quarter of Ireland. It is not then the quantity, but the quality of the education which forms the evil. The ferocious populace of Tipperary or Kilkenny can almost to a man read or write-and is it not therefore ridiculous for the English press to echo the interested statements of Irish priests, and attribute our disturbances and outrages to want of instruction, and still keep the delusion afloat in the minds of the British public, that the Irish are brutal because they know not the elements of knowledge; that they are depraved because they are ignorant of the mere symbols by which truth or purity can be impressed through the eye upon the heart-away with such miserable sophistry! The Irish people are NOT so ignorant: but their knowledge has been drank, and drank greedily too, unfiltered through the word of God. Instruction they have had, but that instruction taught them to think, but not to submit to control; and the light which has illumined their heads, instead of showing them the darkness of their hearts, has only directed them more clearly in the pathway of blood and destruction. Yes, the passions of my countrymen have been suffered to run riot: the tree of knowledge they have plucked, but the fruit of the tree of life has scarcely ever reached their lips: the schoolmaster, selected and controlled by the priest, has been sent abroad, but the moral influence of the truth, the controlling, purifying, life-giving power of the Gospel has not reached their minds. Time has been given to make a fair experiment upon as acute and intellectual a people as the earth can boast; and during the whole reign of the house of Hanover, the priesthood have had the supplies in their own hands, but when the people demanded a fish, they gave them a serpent! Yet it is to this priesthood that our Government would immediately consign this not untaught but mistaught race-a priesthood whose being's end and aim" must be, for their life and being depend upon it, to keep off Protestantism by keeping off the Bible, and who would, provided they can exclude the dreaded book, still allow the people to follow "all uncleanness with greediness," and as of old, to acquire all knowledge within their reach, but the knowledge of that true philosophy which teaches men to think for themselves, to fear their God, to love their neighbours, to

respect the laws, and to "lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty."*

The Popish priests say that former persecution or pres-. ent poverty is the cause of the demoralization of the Irish peasantry. Persecution never superinduced moral abandonment; it has always rather elevated than degraded a people. It did not degrade the early Christians, nor the Waldenses, nor the French Protestants. But these sufferers passed through their fiery trials with the rod and staff of the word of God for their support: while the Irish papist was excluded from all that might give his mind the true tone and temper of a martyr for conscience sake. If persecution and poverty have been the only causes of the degradation of the Irish people, how widely must they differ from all the persecuted and impoverished people that have ever suffered on the face of the earth!

But what has been the real state of the case? The priests, the schoolmasters, and the chapel clerks who are generally the submissive creatures of the priests, instead of instilling into the minds of the people true self-denying, passion-reining, God-fearing, law-respecting, morality, have not only inculcated but set the example of the practice of political animosities and heart-burning jealousies. Sermons have been made instruments of excitement, instead of homilies of patience; sacraments, not means of grace, but tools for promoting political partialities, or punishing real or suspected refractoriness; and what they term the altars of the living God, have been desecrated into platforms for the display of oratory, which, instead of

* In corroboration of my view, that the Irish have acquired a degree of knowledge that is only conducive to increase their disposition to mischief, I think it well to quote the remarks of a Roman Catholic barrister, (P. Molloy, Esq.) who, in one of the ablest pamphlets that ever has been written on the state of this country, entitled, "On Popular Discontent in Ireland," thus speaks, (p. 12,) "Of late, the people have acquired a degree of knowledge which is totally at variance and inconsistent with their state of poverty." And "they must continute in this incongruous position, destitute and intelligent, and therefore doubly dangerous, unless another system shall be adopted."

James Butler Bryan, Esq. (Barrister at Law) in his recently published "Practical View of Ireland," also says, "It is a most gratifying fact, and one which perhaps may not easily find a parallel amongst an equal num ber of adult paupers in the more advanced population of the sister Island, that out of 1400 adult mendicants in Dublin, who were examined for that purpose, 600 were found capable of reading, and that distinctly.

pouring forth the oil of charity on the turbulence of hu man passion, lashed into surf and fury, like an eastern typhoon, the eddying wave of the public mind, until the storm has burst the wall of the Constitution, and now threatens to sweep every thing before it. These statements I am prepared to make good by proofs, which would require more room for their development than I can here claim. But I hold myself prepared to prove, that under a priesthood professedly Christian, and who claim for their church unhesitating obedience, and for themselves a personal influence which calls upon all to confess that they are as "gods," a people capable of reading and writing have been allowed to grow into manhood, to whom atrocities are familiar which come little short of those we read of as perpetrated by South Sea savages, and who, saving and except that they do not eat the bodies and pickle the heads of their victims, fully come up to the ferocity of their antipodes-the New Zealanders.

But it may be objected that there are outbreakings of crime in England altogether as great as those in Ireland. Undoubtedly-instances there are of revolting, heartsickening depravity. Yet mark the distinction. The evil in England is confined to the perpetrators, and does not extend beyond those whose avarice, anger, or intemperance urge them on to their accursed deeds. In avenging the violated laws, the whole community are willing to take a part, and the uplifted arm of justice is nerved and directed by the moral sense of the people. Not so in unhappy Ireland. Here murder forms a part of a social compact blood cries from the ground, yet no avenger stands forth-no burst of execration follows the deed. Perjury is even counted meritorious, when it is committed to shield the manslayer, the blood-bespotted offender against God and his country. A whole district may be apprised of the intended slaughter of a marked indivi dual; the assassin walks up to his victim, and in the presence of spectators and in the light of day, sends a bullet through his brain; he walks off coolly, as if he had performed a meritorious deed; no hand arrests him, or smites him to the earth, nay, as in the case of Mr. Baker of Tipperary, the infernal yell of exultation echoes over the hills and valleys of a whole barony! Such is the moral state of our population-a population able to read and write-a population among whom the life of God's ra

tional and immortal creatures is held so cheap, that a person may be HIRED to assassinate his neighbour for a few shillings! Two men were lately hired to murder Mr. Milo Burke, a perfectly inoffensive Roman Catholic gentleman, resident near Templemore, in the county of Tipperary. What was his crime? His life was in a lease, and its termination was desirable to certain individuals; the murder was committed, and these individuals procured the lands!! There is not a going judge of assize who is not perfectly aware of the unblushing perjury of the witnesses that come before him: indeed it is scarcely safe to trust any witness, unless his evidence is borne out by strong circumstantial corroboration. Party feuds frustrate the ends of public justice; and to such an extent is this recklessness of truth and bloodshed carried, that, if there were no Protestants in the land, upon whom the aborogines might wreak their bloody propensities, they would still do as they have done since the days of St. Patrick, and ever since history told her disgusting story--cut each others throats.*

Thus it has been for centuries, and thus it is at this hour. At fairs, markets, or hurling grounds, the Darrigs and the Cummins, the Blackfeet and the Whitefeet, waylay each other, with murderous intention: the most trivial provocation will generate a FACTION whose feuds continue on with an animosity as indescribable as it is unmeaning. Because the hen of one peasant pecks his neighbour's pet magpie, a quarrel arises, that ripens into a local warfare; and so the Black Hens and Magpies once disgraced a large county with their abominable riots. Along with this blood-thirsty disposition, there is an almost total want of common and conventional honesty among the people. The property of others, and especially

* Peter Walsh, a Franciscan friar, in his Prospect of Ireland, allows that the priests have done little for the people. "You may perceive," says he, "that the Christian religion [but it was the attempt to teach Christianity without the Bible,] wrought so little on the people towards the abatement of their mortal feuds, that under it their princes were much more fatally engaged in pursuing each other with fire and sword, and horrid slaughter, than their pagan predecessors had been. Not even the great holiness of some of their priests has exempted them from the fatality of the genius of putting their controversies to the bloody decision of battles, though they foresaw that the deaths of many thousands must fellow." What an island of saints!