Sir C. G. Duffy on Australia and Ireland.

Otago Witness, Issue 1765, 19 September 1885, Page 18

Sir C. G. Duffy on Australia and Ireland.

Sir Charles Gayan Duffy, in a communication to Lord Carnarvon, the new Viceroy of Ireland, in advocacy of local self-government for Ireland, says : —

Addressing an ex-Minister of the Colonies, I can confidently appeal to your own knowledge and experience on the significant lessons which Colonial history furnishes to guide a statesman in dealing with the affairs of Ireland at present. Between 40 and 50 years ago, when I came to this city a young student and journalist; the great Colonies were more disturbed than Ireland in 1880. Lower Canada was organising insurrection under Catholic gentlemen of Tfrenoh descent, and. Upper Canada was in arms under a Presbyterian. Australia was then only a great pastoral settlement, but bitter discontent and angry menaces were heard in all its centres of population, provoked by the shameful practice of discharging the criminals of England like a deluge of filth on that young country. A few years later the Cape Colony boycotted the Governor and the local executive in the same quarrel more effectually than the device has been ever employed in Ireland. It was the same in the smaller settlements. There was confusion throughout the Colonial possessions of the Empire in both hemispheres. But Sir Robert Feel set the example of .granting to the 'Cqloiries the control of their own affairs, and now ' Melbourne or Montreal is more exuberantly loyal to the Empire than London or Edinburgh. The New South Wales expedition to the Soudan the other day was received with a roar of exultation throughout England; but 1 fear that remarkable transaction, however warmly it was applauded, was imperfectly understood. The true moral it teaches is this — thsft it is safe and wise to be . just. The acting Prime Minister of the Colony who despatched that expedition is an Australian Catholic, of Irish descent. If his native country were governed as Ireland has been governed, he has the stuff in him to be a leader of revolt. But it is permitted to govern itself, and we see the result. The policy of the expedition was sharply questioned in the Colony ; but it was successfully vindicated at a great public meeting, where the chair was occupied by the Chief Justice of New South Wales, the son of an Irish Catholic, and where the principal speaker was himself a Catholic, born in this island. In Victoria, where the policy and conduct of the Soudanese expedition may perhaps have mitigated popular enthusiasm with that enterprise, the risk of war with Eussia called out a demonstration as energetic as the . one in the Mother Colony. ,V reccnl telegram announces that the [rish population of Victoria undertook to raise a regiment of a thousand men for the defence of the territory where they found liberty and prosperity. Their spokesman was a young Irish Catholic, who has been a Minister of State at Melbourne at an age when his father was a prisoner of State in Dublin, for the crime of insisting that Ireland should possess the complete autonomy which his children now enjoy in the new country. These are some of the natural consequences of fairplay in Australia. Is there any reason to doubt that a like cause here would produce like effects? Nothing that the blackest pessimist predicts on the danger of entrusting Ireland with the management of her own affairs is more offensive or alarming than the vaticinations of Colonial officials half a century ago on the perils of entrusting colonists with political power. Human nature has the same spiritual warf and woof in the Old World as in the New, and what has made Irish Catholics contented and loyal on the banks of the Parramatta and Yarra Yarra would make them contented and loyal on the banks of the Liffey or the Shannon. What was the subtle device, what was the mighty magic which wrought the change in their sentiments beyond the Atlantic and Pacific? Fair play, I repeat — simply, fair play."