Sir Lyon Play fair on Ireland.

Evening Star, Issue 7473, 17 March 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

Sir Lyon Play fair on Ireland.

Speaking at Leeds lately, Sir Lyon Playfair said the Unionist party, as they called themselves, gave the Liberals a nickname. They called them Separatists, and said they were trying to separate the Empire. Why, they were trying to reunite the Empire. They were doingexactly as America had done. Ireland was a nationality, and Scotland was a nationality, and if Scotland asked for Home Rule in the same sense that the States of America asked for it they might depend upon it that no Government would dare to refuse the national demand. In England and America the Anglo-Saxon character absorbed the mixed characters, but it was exactly the reverse in Ireland. The fact was that the Irish Celts, or true people of the soil, had absorbed Anglo-Saxons and Normans and everybody into themselves. The Irish were intensely a nation in all their sentiments and habits, and in the intense love they had for their country. Now we denied to that nation the right to govern their home affuirs as each State in America governed itself. We govern without the consent of the governed. The definition of slavery was that it was government without the consent of the governed, and that was what we had been doing with regard to Ireland for the last 600 or 700 years. The Act of CJnion had been in existence for eighty-seven years, but during all the time there had been no union. It had produced as little content with the Irish people as their government did before the time of the Union. Discontent was not treated now nor was it before that time by removing the source of discontent, but by coercing the discontented. Why should Lord Salisbury, against the teaching of history, expect that coercion should answer now when it had not answered for 600 years ? Mr Balfour made a speech the other day in Manchester. It was a very clever speech, but there was one thing missing from it which he lamented, because Mr Balfour was a personal friend of his own. In that speech there was much sympathy for tne landlords, but there was not one ray of sympathy for the distressed peasants of Ireland. A good deal of Mr Balfour's speech was taken up by comparing the Irish farmer with the American farmer. He said the difference was that the American farmer paid his rent and the Irish farmer did not. But there was another difference which Mr Balfour did not know, and that was that there were very few farmers who paid rent at all in America. Farmers in America are chiefly proprietors of their own land. He believed that if they would pursue a policy of justice to the Irish people, give them the same laws that we enjoyed, and some form of self.government as a people of their distinctive habits might well have, they would enormously strengthen the Empire and take away from it one of tys greatest sources of weakness if, which God forbid, we should ever be brought into oollision with, a foreign nation.