SECTION IV.

UNFOUNDED OBJECTIONS

Against the employment of the Irish language answered, and shewn to be of baneful tendency in every sense; as it is not only essential to the effectual instruction of the people, but its neglect is injurious, as well to the progress of the English language as to that of general information.

THE preceding pages may be said to involve an answer to every objection against the employment of the Irish language in the business of education or instruction, wherever it happens to be daily spoken; but as the objections themselves furnish occasion for adducing a curious, if not instructive variety of collateral proof, they are here noticed. The same objections were indeed answered in a memorial on behalf of the Native Irish in 1815; but that has been for some time out of print. Of course I often employ the same language, but with many additional facts.

I. Such measures would give too much encouragement to the language itself, for the sooner it is destroyed or abolished, so much the better.

This is an ancient objection, and it is still heard on both sides of the channel, though within these fourteen years a great change has taken place, and all who have paid attention to the subject see through its fallacy. To expect that any language will decline by denouncing it is vain. Nay, only neglecting to teach the people to read it, though at the same time enforcing the reading of another as the only channel of instruction to

the poor, and as the only road to preferment or indulgence, is an attempt, the merits of which can very easily be put to the proof and examined by the result. The following cases not only include a reply to the objection, but furnish so many powerful arguments for immediate, and cordial, and general attention, as well to the language as to the circumstances of the Native Irish people.

ENGLISH.-The argumentum ad hominem is not without its value, and may be employed here with some force. It is but fair, and may not be unseasonable, to remind the Englishman of this day, as well as the Anglo-Hibernian, that when Ireland was invaded in the twelfth century, English was not the language of authority and command, but French. When Henry II. himself was returning from Ireland in 1172, and passing through Pembroke, a Welshman accosted him. The Cambrian, supposing that a King of England must understand English, addressed Henry in that language, calling him gode olde Kynge.' Understanding nothing of this salutation, his Majesty said to his esquire, in French, What does this man mean?' and the esquire, who had been so situated as to converse with the Native English, had to act as interpreter. Thus the fifth King of England after the Conquest did not seem to know the signification of the word King in the English tongue. His son and successor, Richard, probably knew as little, at least it is certain that he could not hold a conversation in English; though, sitting upon the throne of England, he is said to have made amends for this deficiency, by speaking and writing well the two languages of Gaul, both north and south, the language of oui and the language of oc !* The English tongue, therefore, such as it was in these days, was indeed spoken by men in that army; but all the chiefs were Norman French. English was spoken by soldiers in the streets and markets within the pale; but French was the language in the castles and houses of the Barons. Thus the men of English race, upon Irish ground, occupied only a middle state between the Normans and the Irish. Their language, indeed, at that period was, in fact, proscribed, and in their own country despis

*Brompton, p. 1079. Thierry's Norman Conquest, vol. iii. p. 180.

ed, while in Ireland it held but an intermediate rank between that of the new government and the ancient dialect of the aborigines. Taught as the English or Anglo-Saxons had been, by this time, for a century, and were to be for two hundred years longer, that the edicts or dicta of the reigning power cannot wrest from a people the use of their mother-tongue; was it not strange that they could not perceive that the Native Irish were certain to act by their vernacular tongue, just as they themselves had done by theirs? Yet is it not a little remarkable, that the evil under which the Native Irish have laboured for so many ages, and up to the present hour, is the precise evil under which England groaned for three hundred years, from the time of the Norman invasion? This last territorial conquest in the west of Europe is never to be forgotten, as having introduced a species of policy into this country which has checked the diffusion of knowledge perhaps more than any one circumstance which can be mentioned. It was a sort of crusade on the colloquial dialect of the subdued party, and it certainly had its effects. It checked the diffusion of knowledge among the Native English, it sank the lower orders into darkness, and restricted all useful and scientific information to a privileged class. But did this experiment of three hundred years duration root out, diminish, or abolish the English tongue? No such thing. Long after the Conquest the preaching of the Normans was not at all understood by the audience ;* and though the court, the law, and the nobility used French, the Native English never, as Robert of Gloucester informs us, abandoned their vernacular tongue. In the first part of the reign of Edward III. Norman-French had reached its highest ascendency in England. Boys in the schools were instructed in the French idiom, after this, in some instances, came Latin, and there was no regular instruction of youth in English. The children of the nobles were even sent abroad to secure correctness of pronunciation. Yet what signified all this unnatural procedure? Rolle, or, as he is sometimes named, Richard Hampole, who died in 1348-9, intimates, that the generality of the laity understood no language except the English, and the English versifier of the romance of Arthur and

* Hist. Ingulf. p. 115.

Merlin asserts, that he knew even many nobles who were ignorant of French. A change of fashion was now at hand. In 1362 the act passed which recited that the French language was so unknown in England, that the parties to law-suits had no knowledge or understanding of what was said for or against them, because the counsel spoke French. It therefore ordered that all causes should in future be pleaded, discussed, and adjudged in English.* After this English immediately so superseded its competitor, that by the year 1385 the teaching of French in all the schools had been discontinued, and English substituted. "How hard a matter it is," says old Brerewood, "utterly to abolish a vulgar language in a populous country, may well appear by the vain attempt of our Norman Conqueror, who, although he compelled the English to teach their young children in the schools nothing but French, and set down all the laws of the land in French, (which custom continued till Edward the Third, his days, who disannulled it), purposing thereby to have conquered the language together with the land, and to have made all French; yet all was labour lost, and obtained no other effect than the mingling of a few French words with the English. And even such also was the success of the Franks among the Gauls, and of the Goths among the Italians and Spaniards." Brerewood here may be said to underrate the influence of the Norman-French; but still it is certain that it can by no means be charged with the greater part of that difference which exists between the Anglo-Saxon and the modern tongue.

After passing through such an ordeal as this, it might have been supposed, that of all the nations on the face of the earth, the English would have been the last to have pursued measures which they themselves had shown to be abortive, and which had been also followed by such injurious and barbarizing consequences to their own ancestors.

Independently, however, of this instance, the following cases will fully settle this objection, and they are the more worthy of notice when the coincidence of dates is observed.

* 36 Edward 3, c. 15.

Turner's Hist. of England, 4to, vol. ii. p. 574.

Brerewood's Inquiries touching the diversity of Languages, &c. London, 1674, p. 27.

Abroad and at home, in Germany, in Wales, in the Highlands of Scotland, and the Isle of Man, as well as in Ireland, there seems to have been (unconsciously) a unity of design which, in all the attempts, proved abortive, and evinced, at the same time, what to some may appear strange, that if any colloquial dialect is to decline, and the language spoken in its vicinity is to gain the ascendency, the most direct and effectual process is that of teaching to read the colloquial dialect itself.

WENDEN. For about thirty years, viz. from 1678 to 1708, an attempt was made to destroy the Wenden language, which is a dialect of the Slavonian, spoken by a tribe of people called Die Wendens, living in the circles of Upper and Lower Lusatia, Silesia, &c. In a Latin letter to J. Chamberlayne, Esq. from the Rev. Dr Jablonski, first chaplain to the King of Prussia, dated Berlin, 5th May, 1714, there is the following distinct account of this business:- 66 - Worthy Sir, I thought it would not be unacceptable to you, or the Rev. Mr Richardson, if I should write you a short account of some things here, which seem to be parallel to your Irish affairs. There are to this very day some considerable remains of the ancient Venedi (called by us the Die Wendens), who formerly inhabited the banks of the Vistula, but now live along the Oder and the Sprea; their country runs through both the Lusatias, 'into Misnia on the one hand, and Silesia on the other. Part of them are subject to the Emperor and the Elector of Saxony, and part to the Elector of Brandenburgh."—" This people being originally Sarmatians, speak the Slavonian tongue, and most tenaciously keep up the use of it to this day, notwithstanding that they have so many ages lived in the midst of Germans. Some of them having passed the Elbe in the days of Charles the Great, settled in the country of Lunenburg; but their language, by reason of the small numbers of those that spoke it, as we may imagine, having lost ground by little and little, was at last quite disused within the memory of our fathers, nay of some now alive. Some while since several attempts were made to bring our Wendens likewise into a disuse of it; and to that end there was a German school set up at every church; to most of their congregations were sent German pastors ignorant of the Slavonian tongue; and no books