Two prophetic books shed light on America and Ireland.
My friend Johnny Burtka has released a new episode of ISI’s Project Cosmos series, this time discussing Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The panel is really compelling because it includes our own Yuval Levin, frequent contributor Vincent Muñoz, along with Sarah Gustafson and Sohrab Ahmari.
I’ve found my own understanding of de Tocqueville and his book transformed by reading another book, Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious by de Tocqueville’s traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont. The two men accompanied each other on both trips but produced separate books, both of which were phenomenally successful in France.
But the two books could not be any more different. De Tocqueville’s book looks at the United States as at the beginning of its life, and as a vanguard of the democratic future for Western civilization. He admires the social framework and the way that the entire country is energized in its labors.
De Beaumont’s portrait of Ireland in the 1830s is one of almost unbelieving misery, poverty, and oppression. He is absolutely scandalized by the rule of Protestant Englishman over the Catholic Irish. De Beaumont can sometimes be extreme and almost overstated:
I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the Negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland. . . . In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland.
Or when describing the penal laws which remained from the Elizabethan period until they were successively repealed in the 1830s and 1920s, Beaumont is unsparing:
Ireland possessed the liberty strictly necessary for remaining Catholic, and yet suffered incessantly for its attachment to that faith; its religion was not taken away, but the profession of it entailed a thousand grievances, and this was what the law desired. The law willed that the Irish should suffer incessantly for keeping their ancient religion, and not adopting the new creed; and this suffering was felt not only in religious, but still more severely in civil and political life. In fact, the penal laws struck the citizen more heavily than the Catholic, because the blows directed against the former, though they affected his dearest interests, irritated the passions, whose effervescence was dreaded, much less than an attack on the second. Here was demonstrated in its true aspect the legal system of corruption substituted in the government of Ireland, for the brutal violence which had been hitherto predominant. Here was the system described with equal force and truth by Edmund Burke: “It was a system of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”
The contrast is striking in that both books are prophetic. De Tocqueville sees America rising in power. Beaumont holds out a little hope for liberal reform in Ireland, but predicts that an increase of Irish freedom will result in the rule of Catholic priests, the last class of native Irish with any fitness to lead. But overall, he predicts disaster, not knowing the full breadth of disaster that would come in the following decade.