36.   Il Piccolo della Sera,   March 22, 1907


Fenianism

THE LAST FENIAN

  With the recent death of John O'Leary in Dublin on St.
Patrick's Day, the Irish national holiday, went perhaps the last
actor in the turbid drama of Fenianism, a time-honoured name
derived from the old Irish language (in which the word 'fenians'
means the King's bodyguard) which came to designate the Irish
insurrectionist movement. Anyone who studies the history of the
Irish revolution during the nineteenth century finds himself
faced with a double struggle -- the struggle of the Irish nation
against the English government, and the struggle, perhaps no less
bitter, between the moderate patriots and the so-called party of
physical force. This party under different names: 'White Boys',
'Men of '98', 'United Irishmen', 'Invincibles', 'Fenians', has
always refused to be connected with either the English political
parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and
in this assertion history fully supports them) that any
concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has
granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a
bayonet. The intransigent press never ceases to greet the deeds
of the Nationalist representatives at Westminster with virulent
and ironic comments, and although it recognizes that in view of
England's power armed revolt has  now become an impossible dream,
it has never stopped inculcating in the minds of the coming
generation the dogma of separatism.
  Unlike Robert Emmet's foolish uprising or the impassioned
movement of Young Ireland in '45, the Fenianism of '67 was not
one of the usual flashes of Celtic temperament that lighten the
shadows for a moment and leave behind a darkness blacker than
before. At the time that the movement arose, the population of
the Emerald Isles was more than eight million, while that of
England was no more than seventeen million. Under the leadership
of James Stephens, head of the Fenians, the country was organized
into circles composed of a Sergeant and twenty-five men, a plan
eminently fitted to the Irish character because it reduces to a
minimum the possibility of betrayal. These circles formed a vast
and intricate net, whose threads were in Stephens' hands. At the
same time, the American Fenians were organized in the same way,
and the two movements worked in concert. Among the Fenians there
were many soldiers in the English Army, police spies, prison
guards, and jailers.
  Everything seemed to go well, and the Republic was on the point
of being established (it ùvas even proclaimed openly by
Stephens), when O'Leary and Luby, editors of the party newspaper,
were arrested. The government put a price on Stephens' head, and
announced that it knew all the locations where the Fenians held
their military drills by night. Stephens was arrested and
imprisoned, but succeeded in escaping, thanks to the loyalty of a
Fenian prison guard; and while the English agents and spies were
under cover at every port, watching the departing ships, he left
the capital in a gig, disguised as a bride (according to legend)
with a white crepe veil and orange blossoms. Then he was taken
aboard a little charcoal boat that quickly set sail for France.
O'Leary was tried and condemned to twenty years of forced labour,
but later he was pardoned and exiled from Ireland for fifteen
years.
  And why this disintegration of a movement so well organized?
Simply because in Ireland, just at the right moment, an informer
always appears.

                 *      *       *         *

  After the dispersal of the Fenians, the tradition of the
doctrine of physical force shows up at intervals in violent
crimes. The Invincibles blow up the prison at Clerkenwell, snatch
their friends from the hands of the police at Manchester and kill
the escort, stab to death in broad daylight the English Chief
Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the Under-secretary,
Burke, in Phoenix Park, Dublin.
  After each one of these crimes, when the general indignation
has calmed a little, an English minister proposes to the House
some reform measure for Ireland, and the Fenians and Nationalists
revile each other with the greatest scorn, one side attributing
the measure to the success of parliamentary tactics and the other
attributing it to the persuasive faculty of the knife or the
bomb. And as a backdrop to this sad comedy is the spectacle of a
population which diminishes year by year with mathematical
regularity, of the uninterrupted emigration to the United States
or Europe of Irishmen for whom the economic and intellectual
conditions of their native land are unbearable. And almost as if
to set in relief this depopulation there is a long parade of
churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries, and seminaries to
tend to the spiritual needs of those who have been unable to find
courage or money enough to undertake the voyage from Queenstown
to New York. Ireland, weighed down by multiple duties, has
fulfilled what has hitherto been considered an impossible task --
serving both God and Mammon, letting herself be milked by England
and yet increasing Peter's pence (perhaps in memory of Pope
Adrian IV, who made a gift of the island to the English King
Henry II about 800 years ago, in moment of generosity).
  Now, it is impossible for a desperate and bloody doctrine like
Fenianism to continue its existence in an atmosphere like this,
and in fact, as agrarian crimes and crimes of violence have
become more and more rare, Fenianism too has once more changed
its name and appearance. It is still a separatist doctrine but it
no longer uses dynamite. The new Fenians are joined in a party
which is called Sinn Fein (We Ourselves).l They aim to make
Ireland a bi-lingual Republic, and to this end they have
established a direct steamship service between Ireland and
France. They practise boycotts against English goods; they refuse
to become soldiers or to take the oath of loyalty to the English
crown; they are trying to develop industries throughout the
entire island; and instead of paying out a million and a quarter
annually for the maintenance of eighty representatives in the
English Parliament, they want to inaugurate a consular service in
the principal ports of the world for the purpose of selling their
industrial products without the intervention of England.

                 *      *      *       *

  From many points of view, this last phase of Fenianism is
perhaps the most formidable. Certainly its influence has once
more remodelled the character of the Irish people, and when the
old leader O'Leary returned to his native land after years spent
in study while an exile in Paris, he found himself among a
generation animated by ideals quite different from those of '65.
He was received by his compatriots with marks of honour, and from
time to time appeared in public to preside over some separatist
conference or some banquet. But he was a figure from a world
which had disappeared. He would often be seen walking along the
river, an old man dressed in light-coloured clothes, with a shock
of very white hair hanging down to his shoulders, almost bent in
two from old age and suffering. He would stop in front of the
gloomy shops of the old-book dealers, and having made some
purchase, would return along the river. Aside from this, he had
little reason to be happy. His plots had gone up in smoke, his
friends had died, and in his own native land, very few knew who
he was and what he had done. Now that he is dead, his countrymen
will escort him to his tomb with great pomp. Because the Irish,
even though they break the hearts of those who sacrifice their
lives for their native land, never fail to show great respect for
the dead.
                             JAMES JOYCE