For all practical purposes, and in spite of everything that can be brought against her, Ireland may be justly described as a moral country, even as Scotland is essentially an immoral country and England a middling one. It is true that we live in a time when morality has ceased to matter and virtue is become a reproach. The world has divided itself into two camps—the one scientific, the other artistic. Neither of them professes the smallest concern with morals. We have invented new and most blessedly euphonious names for the old wickednesses. Robbery is called competition; lying, smartness; effrontery, pluck; cowardice, courtesy; avarice, thrift; cunning, wisdom, and so forth.[72] And when it pleases us we can e’en find hard names for the Christian graces. The faith of Ireland, for example, has been discovered to be fanaticism, bigotry, paganism, materialism, idolatry, and I know not what besides; her charity is credited to her for pusillanimity; her patience and long-suffering for indolence and apathy. What wonder, therefore, that the very chastity upon which her national morals are based should at length have been assailed. Hearken to the inspired ex-literary editor of the Daily Mail:
“The crowning achievement of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the thing which is unparalleled elsewhere in the world, is the complete and awful (sic) chastity of the people. There is many a country district where that incident which in England and Scotland is regarded merely as a slight misfortune is unknown and unimagined by the people. I have seen a man, the father of a grown-up family, blanch and hold up his[73] hands at the very name of it, as though even to breath it were a blasphemy. And this, in itself a good thing, has reached such a point that it has become a dreadful evil. It is no longer a virtue, it is a blight.”
And the dear young gentleman goes on to assert that it is the chastity of the Irish people which fills Irish lunatic asylums, and exclaims dithyrambically: “There may be no bastards in Ireland, but a hundred bastards would, in Ireland’s peculiar circumstances, be a more gracious and healthy sign than one lunatic.” Here surely is wisdom of the highest and most delightful type. We have already seen that the increase of lunacy in Ireland has been pronounced, by the committee which sat on the question in Dublin, to be mainly due to excessive drinking and the assimilation of adulterated spirits. The committee may not have been right; for my own part I believe it was decidedly wrong. But it delivered itself of no pronouncement which warrants either the scientific or the[74] ribald to associate Irish lunacy with chastity, rather than with drink or other predispositions. If chastity fills the lunatic asylums how come the Irish priesthood to be at large, or for that matter the women of the English middle classes, and honest women all the world over? And if bastardy be a preventative of lunacy, how comes it that in Scotland you have as many lunatics as you have in Ireland, and about ten times as many bastards? Can it be that of two evils Caledonia, with her customary shrewdness, has chosen both? The suggestion is as ridiculous as it is abominable, and as scandalous as it is malicious. Even in the sense which our Daily Mail young person may be presumed to have in mind, it is the direct opposite of chastity that helps to people lunatic asylums, and never chastity itself, “blight” or no blight. I mention this wholly unprecedented incursion into sophistry only by way of showing what the astute censors of Ireland really can do when they set themselves to the work;[75] and although I have no proof on the subject I should like to wager that the author of it is an Orangeman and of Scotch extraction. It is no compliment to Ireland to say that, in theory at any rate, her morals are entirely sound. In other words, Ireland believes in virtue and goodness, even though she may not always succeed in living up to her tenet, and though, for reasons which need not be discussed, she may be possessed of primal dispositions to the sorriest evil.
And it is the solemn and deplorable fact that there does exist in the Irish blood a tendency toward wickedness of the most ghastly and inhuman character. A case in point is afforded by the frightful doing to death of Mrs. Bridget Cleary at Ballyvadlea in 1895. The following account of this tragedy is abridged from Mr. M’Carthy’s Five Years in Ireland:
“Mrs. Cleary fell ill on Wednesday, the 13th of March, and sent for a doctor and a priest. The priest saw her in the afternoon.[76] She was in bed, and ‘she did not converse with him except as a priest, and her conversation was quite coherent and intelligible.’ The doctor also saw her, thought her illness slight, prescribed for her and left.… On the morning of Thursday the 14th Father Ryan ‘was called to see Mrs. Cleary again, but he told the messenger that having administered the last rites of the Church on the previous day there was no need to see her again so soon.’… William Simpson, a near neighbor of the Clearys, living only 200 yards off, accompanied by his wife, left their own house between nine and ten o’clock on Thursday evening to visit Mrs. Cleary, having heard she was ill. When they arrived close to Cleary’s house they met Mrs. Johanna Burke, accompanied by her little daughter, Katie Burke, and inquired from her how Mrs. Cleary was. Mrs. Burke, herself a first cousin of Mrs. Cleary’s, said, ‘They are giving her herbs, got from Ganey,[77] over the mountain, and nobody will be let in for some time.’ These four people then remained outside the house for some time, waiting to be let in. Simpson heard cries inside, and a voice shouting, ‘Take it, you b?, you old faggot, or we will burn you!’ The shutters of the windows were closed and the door locked. After some time the door was opened and from within shouts were heard: ‘Away she go! Away she go!’ As Simpson afterward learned, the door had been opened to permit the fairies to leave the house, and the adjuration was addressed to those ‘supernatural’ beings.
“In the confusion Simpson, his wife, Mrs. Burke, and her little daughter, worked their way into the house.… Simpson saw four men—John Dunne, described as an old man, Patrick Kennedy, James Kennedy, and William Kennedy, all young men, ‘big black-haired Tipperary peasants,’ brothers of Mrs. Burke and first cousins of Mrs. Cleary, ‘holding Bridget Cleary down on the bed.[78] She was on her back, and had a night-dress on her. Her husband, Michael Cleary, was standing by the bedside.’
“Cleary called for a liquid, and said, ‘Throw it on her.’ Mary Kennedy, an old woman, mother of Mrs. Burke, and of all the other Kennedys present, brought the liquid. Michael Kennedy held the saucepan. The liquid was dashed over Bridget Cleary several times. Her father, Patrick Boland, was present. William Ahearne, described as a delicate youth of sixteen, was holding a candle. Bridget Cleary was struggling, vainly, alas! on the bed, crying out, ‘Leave me alone.’ Simpson then saw her husband give her some liquid with a spoon; she was held down by force by the men for ten minutes afterward, and one of the men kept his hand on her mouth. The men at each side of the bed kept her body swinging about the whole time, and shouting, ‘Away with you! Come back, Bridget Boland, in the name of[79] God!’ She screamed horribly. They cried out, ‘Come home, Bridget Boland.’ From these proceedings Simpson gathered that ‘they thought Bridget Cleary was a witch,’ or had a witch in her, whom they ‘endeavored to hunt out of the house by torturing her body.’
“Some time afterward she was lifted out of the bed by the men, or rather demons, and carried to the kitchen fire by John Dunne, Patrick, William, and James Kennedy. Simpson saw red marks on her forehead, and some one present said they had to ‘use the red poker on her to make her take the medicine.’ The four men named held poor Bridget Cleary, in her night-dress, over the fire; and Simpson ‘could see her body resting on the bars of the grate where the fire was burning.’ While this was being done, we learn that the Rosary was said. Her husband put her some questions at the fire. He said if she did not answer her name[80] three times they would burn her. She, poor thing, repeated her name three times after her father and her husband!
“‘Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?’
“‘I am Bridget Boland, daughter of Patrick Boland, in the name of God.’
“Simpson said they showed feverish anxiety to get her answers before twelve o’clock.
“They were all speaking and saying, Do you think it is her that is there? And the answer would be ‘Yes,’ and they were all delighted.
“After she had answered the questions they put her back into bed, and ‘the women put a clean chemise on her,’ which Johanna Burke ‘aired for her.’ She was then asked to identify each person in the room, and did so successfully. The Kennedys left the house at one o’clock ‘to attend the wake of Cleary’s father,’ who was lying dead that night at Killenaule! Dunn............