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A Perverse And IllFated People English Perceptio — страница 6 | Referat.ru

A Perverse And IllFated People English Perceptio — страница 6

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appear more an object of fear than desire. The emigration of Irish paupers to England and Scotland, which had been going on for decades, added to English fears, coming after 1847 or so to seem increasingly ominous, like the spread of a moral and physical disease. English workers reacted to the Irish influx with particular fright, and, stirred by Protestant evangelical demagogues, sometimes greeted the Irish with violence. George Poulett Scrope, an economist ostensibly sympathetic to Irish suffering, feared that continuing immigration would “spread through Britain the gangrene of Irish poverty, Irish disaffection, and the deadly paralysis of industry that necessarily attends upon these elements of evil.”36 Further intercourse between the two nations might therefore result only

in the spread of infection.Even the longstanding belief in Irish fertility disappeared for a time, though England remained tied to Ireland for better or for worse. English capitalism and money had not impregnated Hibernia; or, if it had, it may only have helped give birth to a monster:The money which the English government disburses, and the English people pay, is not wholly barren or unproductive. It has its harvests, though not of the plough or the sickle. It has its fields, but not of peaceful fertility and gladdening richness. Its crop is not the golden corn, but the steel blade; it has wrought bayonets for sickles, and firelocks for mattocks.37Though some writers such as John Garwood remained optimistic concerning the ultimate potential of the Anglo-Irish marriage, they were

increasingly the exception rather than the rule after 1850. Disgust at the “unreasonable” behavior of the Irish dampened enthusiasm for a more intimate Union. Instead, the British began to turn to a new discourse that justified British rule on the basis of Irish racial inferiority. A minority of scientists and intellectuals, writing in journals such as the Medical Times, had long maintained a racialist interpretation of Irish difference; but before the famine their ideas were rarely supported in Parliament or the popular press. The experiences of the famine, however, in conjunction with the efforts of newspapers like the Times, served to popularize biological racism as it was applied to the Condition of Ireland Question. By the beginning of the 1850s explicitly or implicitly

racialist literature spread widely through the press and in bookshops, and was received with much acclaim. Many Liberals persisted in criticizing racialism, but for the remainder of the century the public would pay them as little heed as they had to the racialists before the famine. Robert Knox’s work The Races of Men (1850) was the first and most influential of a series of racialist works. Knox triumphantly rejected the Liberal understanding of the Irish question, which he characterized as being based upon “long-received doctrines, stereotyped prejudices, [and] national delusions.”38 Sneering at those who, like John Bright, continued to seek the future moral reformation of Ireland, Knox declared that “the source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of

Ireland.”39 Significantly, he went out of his way to deny the possibility of long-lasting results from “the admixture of race by intermarriage.”40 Celt would always remain Celt, and Saxon would always remain Saxon: “The possible conversion of one race into another I hold to be a statement contradicted by all history.”41 Finally, Knox savaged Liberal ideals of an intimate and fruitful marriage in the Union with the simple statement that “Ireland is not a colony, but merely a country held by force of arms, like India; a country inhabited by another race.”42It is beyond the scope of this article to enter into the manifold repercussions of the emerging racialist conception of Irish difference, which became dominant in the second half of the nineteenth century. In a

sense, the products of Liberal and racialist interpretations of the Irish problem were the same. Idealistic Liberal dreams of an “intimate” marriage between Hibernia and John Bull did not challenge the essentially paternalistic and colonial Anglo-Irish relationship. Indeed, Liberal faith in the improvability of men contributed to a restrictive famine policy intended to teach the Irish to adopt middle-class standards of thrift and morality. It is worth emphasizing in any case that Liberals and racialists agreed on the basic qualities of Saxon and Celt; but while Liberals explained this difference in a gendered discourse of moral inequality, racialists insisted that the ineradicable boundaries of biology would forever separate the two peoples. In both instances, Britain would