{London,] 24 February 1881 

My dear Jenny, 

Well may the illustrious Regnard recommend his factum to your 
‘charity’.!°? This Jacobin defending English respectable Protestant- 

* mode of operation 

ism and English vulgar Liberalism with the historical appareid of 
that same vulgar Liberalism is indeed an object of deepest charity. 
But to his ‘facts’. 

1) The 30,000 protestants’ massacre of 1641. The Irish Catholics 
are here in the same position as the Gommune de Paris. The Ver- 
saillais massacred 30,000 Communards and called that the horrors of 
the Commune. The English protestants under Cromwell massacred 
at least 30,000 Irish and, to cover their brutality, invented the tale that 
this was to avenge 30,000 protestants murdered by the Irish Catho- 
lics. 

The facts are these. 

Ulster having been taken from its Irish owners who at that time 
1600-1610 held the land in common, and handed over to Scotch prot- 
estant military colonists, these colonists did not feel safe in their pos- 
sessions in the troublous times after 1640. The puritan English Gov- 
ernment officials in Dublin spread the rumour that a Scotch Army of 
Covenanters !°° was to land in Ulster and exterminate all Irish and 
Catholics. Sir W. Parsons, one of the two Chief Justices of Ireland, 
said that in a 12-month there would not be a Catholic left in Ireland. 
It was under these menaces, repeated in the English Parliament, that 
the Irish of Ulster rose on 23rd October 1641. But no massacre took 
place. All contemporaneous sources ascribe to the Irish merely the in- 
tention of a general massacre, and even the two protestant Chief Jus- 
tices (proclam. 8th February 1642) declare that ‘the chief part of 
their plot, and amongst them a general massacre, had been disappoint- 
ed.’ The English and Scotch however, 4th May 1642, threw Irish 
women naked into the river (Newry) and massacred Irishmen. (Pren- 
dergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, 1865.) 

2) L’Irlande la Vendée de l’Angleterre.'°* Ireland was Catholic, 
Protestant England Republican, therefore Ireland— English Ven- 
dée. There is however this little difference that the French Revolution 
intended to give the land to the people, the English Commonwealth 
intended, in Ireland, to take the land from the people. 

The whole Protestant reformation, as is well known to most stu- 
dents of history save Regnard, apart from its dogmatical squabbles 
and quibbles, was a vast plan for a confiscation of land. First the land 
was taken from the Church. Then the Catholics, in countries where 
Protestantism was in power, were declared rebels and their land con- 
fiscated. 

Now in Ireland the case was peculiar. 

‘For the English,’ says Prendergast, ‘seem to have thought that god made a mistake 
in giving such a fine country as Ireland to the Irish; and for nearly 700 years they have 
been trying to remedy it.’ 

The whole agrarian history of Ireland is a series of confiscations of 
Irish land to be handed over to English settlers. These settlers, in 
a very few generations, under the charm of Celtic society, turned 
more Irish than the aborigines. ‘Then a new confiscation and new col- 
onization took place, and so in infinitum. 

In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland except the newly Scotchi- 
fied North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so, that when 
the British (puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for 
the reduction of Ireland, it resolved that the money for this arma- 
ment should be raised upon the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in 
Ireland. And the ‘adventurers’ !°* who advanced the money should 
also appoint the officers of that army. The land was to be divided 
amongst those adventurers so that 1,000 acres should be given them, 
if in Ulster for £ 200.- advanced, in Connaught for £ 300, in Mun- 
ster for £ 450, in Leinster for £ 600. And if the people rose against this 
beneficent plan they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in 
a National Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of 
the Long Parliament, and combat a possible Vendée with these 
means. 

The Abolition of the Penal Laws !°’! Why the greater part of them 
were repealed, not in 1793 but in 1778, when England was threat- 
ened by the rise of the American Republic, and the second repeal, 
1793, was when the French Republic arose threatening and England 
required all the soldiers she could get to fight it! 

The Grant to Maynooth by Pitt.'! This pittance was soon re- 
pealed by the Tories and only renewed by Sir R. Peel in 1845. But 
not a word about the other cadeau que faisait a ’Irlande ce grand homme 
(c’est la premiére fois qu’il trouve grdce devant les yeux dun Facobin),* 
that other ‘dotation’ not only ‘considérable’ but actually lavish — the 
3 Million £ by which the Union of Ireland with England '°° was 
bought. The parliamentary documents will show that the one item of 
the purchase money of rotten and nomination boroughs alone cost no 
less a sum than £ 1,245,000 (O’Connell, Memoir on Ireland addressed to 
the Queen). 

* present this great man gave to Ireland (it is the first time that grace has been bes- 
towed upon him in the eyes of the Jacobins) 

Lord Derby instituted le systéme des écoles nationales.''° Very true 
but why did he? Consult Fitzgibbon, Jreland in 1868, the work of a 
staunch Protestant and Tory, or else the official Report of Commis- 
sioners on Education in Ireland, 1826. The Irish, neglected by the 
English government, had taken the education of their children into 
their own hands. At the time when English fathers and mothers in- 
sisted upon their right to send their children to the factory to earn 
money instead of to the school to learn, at that time in Ireland the 
peasants vied with each other in forming schools of their own. The 
school-master was an ambulant teacher, spending a couple of months 
at each village. A cottage was found for him, each child paid him 2d. 
a week and a few sods of turf in winter. The schools were kept, on fine 
days in summer, in the fields, near a hedge, and then known by the 
name of hedge-schools. There were also ambulant scholars, who with 
their books under the arm, wandered from school to school, receiving 
lodging and food from the peasants without difficulty. In 1812 there 
were 4,600 such hedge-schools in Ireland and that year’s report of the 
Commissioners says that such education 

was ‘leading to evil rather than good’, ‘that such education the people are actually ob- 
taining for themselves, and though we consider it practicable to correct it, to check its pro- 
gress appears impossible: it may be improved but it cannot be impeded’. 

So then, these truly national schools did not suit English purposes. 
To suppress them, the sham national schools were established. They 
are so little secular that the reading-book consists of extracts both 
from the Catholic and Protestant Bibles, agreed upon by the Catho- 
lic and Protestant Archbishops of Dublin. Compare with these Irish 
peasants the English who howl at compulsory school attendance to 
this day!