The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-06-14
THE IRREPREssrBLE FEN1ANs.

failure, the pertlnaclty in false starts, the
constancy in effervescence. the patience in
impatience, of the Fenian Brotherhood? The
whole race seems to have gas on the brain
and gunpowder in the blood, and to exhale
its fever from year to year in flashes of de-
lirium as wild and ftful as the outbursts of a
volcano or the periodic ebullitions of hot
mud-spring. Yet, if we come to consider it,
inconvenient as it is for the world vexatious
for us, and iniquitously unjust to the poor
Canadians, who are made to suffer exactly on
the principle on which the man acted who
revenged himself on an enemy by picking
the pocket of his second cousin, this inflam-
mable temperament which will lavish itself
on providing the world with small alarms and
irritating disasters on petty scale, is neither
SO exceptional nor so hopeless phenomenon
as it seems. Almost every race that has had a
keen national sentiment and national vanity
and no national satisfaction for it, has at
some time or other gone off in Just so futile
a series of detonating explosions, to the ner-
vous disgust of preoccupied world, which
never can endure distracting political demon
strations which are mere signs of temper
without practical importance. Frenchmen,
Spaniards, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, have
all in turn alarmed Europe by demonstra-
tions apparently as ill-considered and futile
as much like the mere summer lightning
which indicates the disturbed condition of
the elements, without even pretending to
give full vent to the agitation-as any of
these Fenian fascos; and in their case Eng
lishmen can always be philosophical, and
moralize on the rationale of phenomena so
distressing. But in the case of the Fenian
outrages it is more difficult especially when
we consider that our ancestors carefully pro-
vided so many of the elements in the compo-
sition of this human gunpowder, and we,
though we are repudiating their policy, have
none the less to suffer from its pernicious
fruits.
We ought seriously, then, to be more pa
tient than we are of these fatuous and waste
full igneous displays of political vindictive-
ness-we do not mean, of course, in the
sense of failing to put down with relentless
completeness these outbursts of passion, or
in the sense of devoting less care and fore
thought to discovering and providing against
them-but only in the sense of regarding
them without any of that fretful surprise
which they always seem to excite afresh in
this country whenever they occur. They are,
strictly speaking, natural results of the
policy of the past, and it is just as silly to
complain and groan over them as it is to
chafe at the necessity of paying the interest
of the national debt, or of hiring police to
watch and disarm the young THE YES and vaga-
bonds whom we had refused to educate. In
matters of this kind we quietly take the
consequences of our own acts, and don't
fall into a pet every day when we
pay our heavy taxes or discover
some new nest of vice and crime. But in the
case of these more showy political phe-
nomena-these quasi-rebellions in ireland,
outrages in England, invasions of Canada
we are apt to think of what happens as if it
were entirely gratuitous and causeless and
attributable to sort of temper preterRaturally
anarchical and destructive. OF course if we
look at the acts as if they were free and de-
liberate acts, nothing could be more wickedly
wanton, both because they sacrifice life and
peace for no purpose, and because they really
tend to prolong the evil for which they affect
to find a remedy. But then that is Just the
mistake of our point of view. These violent
and miserable breaches of order are no more
free and deliberate acts than an attack of
brain-fever is free and deliberate actor,
to suggest better analogy, than the virulent
scoffings at Ireland and everything Irish in
our most Enthusiastically English newspa-
pers-the pictures in Punch, for instance,
which always make gorilla or baboon of
the typical Irishman, are free, deliberate acts.
All nations, whether politically active or poll
tically suppressed, have a fund of wasteful
and destructive energy in them which comes
out in one form or another, though races with
a comparatively satisfactory national life are
apt to let this waste steam evaporate in words
(Which are not unfrequently, by the way,
| quite as disastrous in result as actions),
while races without any satisfying national
life express themselves in sterile conspiracies
and gusts of spit-fire violence. The same
vicious energy which England has hithorto
wasted, and still too often wastes, in impotent
anger against Ireland-in simply swearing, as
it were, at the Irish for being so impracti-
cable-the Irish waste in impracticable and
reckless attempts to injure England at their
own risk and peril. Both kinds of waste are
equally futile, though one is more fatal than
the other. Yet there is sort of
perverse grandeur, too, in this lifelong
willingness of exiled Irishmen to throw
their own lives as we'll as their property away
in the insanest of insane enterprises, only to
express once more the undying resolve never
- abandon the vendetta between their coun-
try aAd England. If our contemptuous bit
terness te~vards Ireland is less destructive, as
OF course IL 10, it is also quite without risk
We hazard nothing when we heap contumely
on Ireland. But thes. wretched Fenians
know perfectly well that they hazard every.
thing for an enterprise of the most laneIeSs
character, and for which they themselves viii
suffer most, though numberless persona
whom they would willingly admit to be per
fectly innocent must suffer more or less with
them. 1t seems to us quite clear that pa
triotic vindictiveness of this sort, howeve
perverse and calamitous, indicates a sort OF
reserve force in the race, which, if we could
only find the secret of turning it from destruc
tive into conservative channels, would max,
the Irish nation one of the most powerful il
the world. If soldiers can admire achieve
ments like the useless Baaklava charge
politicians ought to find somewhere at th,
bottom of their hearts a feeling of respect 70
the unwearied and unwearlaoie euergy which