A SHORT SUMMARY OF IRISH HIS TORY:

Otago Witness, Issue 1892, 15 May 1890, Page 31

A SHORT SUMMARY OF IRISH HIS TORY :

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE LAST TWO CENTURIES. (By an English Peotbstant Pahson.) Compiled for the Otaoo Witness Chiefly from S. Gregg's " History for English Readers," Compared with over 40 Recognised Authorities. It is not the purpose of thiß compilation to discuss the question of Home Rule, or to seek to determine whether the plan by which Mr Gladstone proposes to grant Ireland self-government is the best that could be devised. It may be that the plan lacks the elements of permanency beoause it would exolude Ireland from participation in Imperial affairs while yet requiring her to contribute to Imperial funds. Some, on the other, band will deem it too sweeping, and that Mr Chamberlain's mild scheme of enlarged and aggregated parochalism would be safer. All students of Ireland's past ought to be agreed that the solution of her difficulties is not to be found in coercion. None san be less fitted to Bolve these difficulties than those who, rejecting Mr Gladstone's measure, offer in its place nothing better than a system of intensified restrictive government, which increases the race-hatred which has been so long indulged in by Englishmen, and which, unless the Irish people had been well advieed, would have led to increased resentment on the part of that people. But many ask, " Have we not during the last 20 years been attempting to treat the Irish people an equals and brothers, and have they not been sullen and discontented, repaying earnest sympathy with ingratitude, and manifesting dissatisfaction with all the generous attempts that have been made ? " To this it it has been replied, " We have not treated them aB equals, even while trying to remedy many of their grievances. We have not, as Englishmen, given them the same ungrudging trußt and affection that we have extended to our neighbours in Scotland and Waleß. We have treated them as aliens, or as people who knew not their own needs, and who could not be trusted with the remedies they demanded, lest with the use of the remedy there should come a national strength that would be injurious to ourselves. Further, a just restitution ought Dot to be regarded as a concession, and we ought not to expect effusive gratitude from a people to whom we ate rendering a tardy and incomplete justice. A complete reparation for centuriea of wrong doing will alone entitle us to the confidence and respect of the Irish race ; and while we are withholding from them some of their rights, we cannot expect them to abound either with gratitude to the English for the small benefits bestowed, or with respect for the character of the national legislature that haa bo long overshadowed and darkened the life of their nation,

Statesmen of all parties have acknowledged these wrongs. Mr Chaplin, a representative of high Toryism, said in the House of Commons : " The truth is that the English Parliament and the English people are mainly responsible for those conditions of the country wbich have driven the people to the land, and the land alone, for their support. It wa3 not always bo ; there were other industries in Ireland in former days which flourished, and flourished to a considerable extent, until they first aroused, and were afterwards suppressed, by the selfish fears and commercial jealoußy of England — England who was alarmed at a rivalry and competition that Bhe dreaded at the hands and from the resources of the Irish people." . . . "Itis in the history of those cruel laws that the secret lies of that fatal competition for the land in which— and it may well be a just retribution upon us— the Bource of all the troubles and all the difficulties that you have to deal with will be found." Mr Goldwin Smith, representative of those Dissentient Liberals who have taken upon themselves the name of Unionists, says of Irish history : " Its annals are the weary annals of aggression on the one one side and of rebellion on the other ; of aggression sometimes more, sometimes less cruel and systematic ; of rebellion sometimes more, sometimes less viulent and extensive, but of aggression and of rebellion without end."

Mr Chambarlain said only four years ago : ** I do not beliave that the majority of Englishmen have the slightest conception of the system under which thiß free nation attempts to rule the Bister country. It is a system which is founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers, encamped permanently in a hostile country. It ia a system as completely centralised and bureaucratio as that under which Russia governs Poland, or aB that which existed in Venice under Austrian rule. An Irishman cannot afc this moment lift a finger in any parochial, municipal, or educational affair without being confronted, interfered with, controlled by an English official appointed by a foreign Government, and without the shadow of a Bhade of representative authority. I say the time has come to reform altogether the absurd and irritating anachronism known aa

Dublin Castle, and to Bweep away altogether its chief boards, and to substitute for them a genuine Irißh administration for purely Irish business."

This is not the excited language of an Irish agitator, but the language of a man who haa been a Privy Councillor of the Queen, who has served in distinguished offices of State, and spoken, not years ago, but in 1885 : And again ( "It ia difficult for Englishmen to realise how little influence the people of Ireland have in the management of even the smallest of their local affairs, and how constantly the alien race looms before their eyes as an omnipresent and controlling power. The Oaßtle is in Ireland synonymous with the Government, It is known as this and constantly felt in every department of administration, local and central, and it is little wonder that the Irish people should regard the Castle as the embodiment of a foreign supremacy, and that the representatives of the Castle are to them foreign in race, or in sympathy, or in both. And if the object of the Government were to paralyse local effort, to annihilate local responsibility and daily to give emphasis to the fact that the whole country iB under the dominion of an alien race, no system could be devised more likely to secure that object than the one now in force in Ireland." That was the language published later in 1885 by the same statesman. Ia it a wonder in the face I of this that there should be distrust, that there should be alienation from the law and no faith in the Administration, becauaethe people have no voice in it, and their asient is not asked to the chr ice of administrators ? Mr Bright said : "We have had a union with Ulster, but there has baen no union with the whole people of Ireland The union of Great Britain and Ireland in the future must not be one of force and law, but of love, and sympathy, and trust, a union whioh shall give to the world a splendid example of the power and glory of freedom and mutual confidence." The trueßt unionism is not the antiquated and compulsory binding of an unwilling people to a Btronger neighbour, but the voluntary agreement of the peoples of the contiguous countries, and the consolidation of an empire by the common consent of its various parts, and they are the wisest unionists who aim at a union of hearts and interests, and not of force and injustice. It is for the people of England to say with Mr Bright : " Let us make a new union ; written on no parchment ; hound with no oath ; its conditions, justice on the part of England, forgiveness on the part of Ireland." It should be remembered by those who deem Ireland ungrateful for recent favours that the present reign has been the most disastrous since that of Elizabeth, aa the following statistics for the years 1849-86 will show : — Died of famine ... " ... 1,225,000 Persons evicted ... ... 3,668,000 Number of emigrants ... ... 4,186,000 Evictions were most numerous immediately after the famine, and at other timea of distress, the landlords availing themselves of the periods of greatest calamity to enforce their "rightß." The number of persons evicted is equal to 75 per cent, of the actual population. No country, either in Europe or elsewhere, has suffered such wholesale extermination. That the, evioted were not indolent or worthless persons ' is shown by the fact that in one generation 4,000,000 emigrants, who left home penniless, have become possessed of real and personal property to the amount of £655,000,000, besides having sent home to their friends since 1851 a sum of £32,000,000. This shows an average accumulation of £14,000,000 yearly, or £7 per head on the medium number of exiles.

That which baa been fatal to the success of all the purposes and sohemes proposed for the redress of Ireland's wrongs has been that English Premiers during the chief part of this century, have clung tenaciously to the principle enunoiated by the English Cabinets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — viz., that Ireland should be ruled in the interests of England and by English ideas of government. Cowley says : " The liberty of a people conBißts in being governed by laws whioh they have made for themselves, under whatever form it be of government." That some of the people to whom constitutional liberty is denied should be rash enough and wioked enough to perpetrate crimea ia no argument against the extension of justice to the nation. No leaa an authority than Macauley has said : "If it were possible that a people brought up under an intolerant and arbitrary system should subvert that system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the objections to despotic power would be removed. We should in that case be compelled to acknowledge that it at least produced no pernicious effects on the intellectual and moral charaoter of a nation. We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages the more assured we feel that the revolution was necessary. The violence of these outrages will always be proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people, and the ferooity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live. . . . Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a selfevident proposition that no people eught to be free until they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim ! If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in Blave'y, they may indeed wait forever." Fifty years ago there were agrarian disturbances in England, marked by outrages as bitt6r and as malignant as anything which has occurred in Ireland. They were met, not by Coercion Acts, bit by remedial measures. Amid the Babel of political pasßion and the labyrinth of political intrigue he will do beßt who stands most steadfastly by the conviction that the just course ia always the wise course. There is indeed behind the Irish difficulty a bigger question than that of granting or declining to grant her the privilege of Home Rule. Britain has too long forgotten that it is the duty of nations to govern subject races not for the gain of the rulers, but for the good of the governed. God has undoubtedly made of Britain an elect race — elect to the possession of power, of piety, and nerve, of dominant qualities that fit her to rule. But to what end? To the mere aggrandisement of Britain or that she may uplift the lands she rules. History unhappily shows that she has deemed her power given to her for her own gain. India has been governed that England's wealth might bB increased. Never did John Bright wax more eloquent than in his denunciation ef England's blind selfishness in her Eastern dominion. General Gordon resigned office as secretary to the Viceroy of India be fore he entered upon his duties because he found so vast a system of favouritism and injustice prevailing that he believed he could not hold the office and be true to himßelf and his conscience. The history of South African colonisation ia a blot upon England's name. Here in New Zealand the worl j is asked to inspect the proofs of our progre«s, and amid the trophies of our success a cannon is shamelessly displayed with whioh vast plains were purohased from the natives. Worth at its beat bat a handful of corn, of no worth to

I the natives except as an implement of murder, I it yet stood in our greatest Exhibition bearing I the placard that told its Btory of shame. Were • righfc views held of what is duo between man and man, between race and race, no man or men dare display so gross an illustration of unholy dealing any more than a man who desired to be thought well of dare boast that he had purchased a block of land from an infant with a lighted match. Let British people recognise that at any cost to themselves they must seek the highest good of the people they govern : let Irish history be read with an honeßt desire to discover how far they have failed in this ; let sympathy ba felt for every jußt aspiration of the Irißh people ; let an earnest determination prevail to govern Ireland in the spirit of that constitution which ia the bulwark of our own freedom. If this be done honestly and fearlessly, a remedy shall be found for Ireland's wrongs which, whatever form it may take, shall for the first time in history result in the establishment of a truly United Kingdom. [The End.]