IRELAND'S RESURRECTION.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1698, 14 February 1888, Page 3

IRELAND'S RESURRECTION.

- We take the following article from the Christian World,, as showing the progress the Irish Question is, makmg_ m pnbho opinion in England. It « from * e ? en “A Late County member,’ who is, we understand, on the staff of the paper and a constant contributor. The headwgis tha beading as it appeared m the Christian W I offi7think of that memorable night in the spring of last year-it seems almost a lifetime ago now—when we went to a division in the House of Commons on Mr Gladstone s Home Buie Bill. There were many of ns in that Parliament who had never had occasion to look into the history of Ireland, and who consequently had little acquaintance with it. We had to give a most important vote on a question which we had never s udied nor thouaht upon. The broad Liberal principle that men shonld be governed according to their own wishes decided the votes of many of us; of the writer, amongst others. Since then we have had some opportunity of looking up that history. Oh! what an awful history it is! Truly, here, increase of knowledge is increase of sorrow. It » » ;«gres. g from chamber to ohwnbeirof horrors. He must he a strangely-constituted Englishman who can rise from the reading, for instance, of that part of Leoky’s “ History of the Eighteenth Century ’ which deals with Ireland! without feelirgs of the deepest pam and shame. Hardly, if any, less horrib'e i. the storv of the present century. See, for instance Sir A. Alison’s picture, of the ™H?.t«y of Europe,” of the almost moonceivable^poverty oVthe bulk of the Irish population during it. first fifty the story told in Blue Books by Royal Commission/ appointed to inquire into the state the same period; or read the account of any traveller nassitg through the country who chronicled what he saw. There is no other such record, we believe, in the annals of any civilised country. Towards the of the half century the horrors begin to thicken. Then began the awful famine ; it came pestilence; and, succeeding both, the sti more awful wholesale clearances. We call these last •' more awful,’’ because they were directly man-caused. Human beings, by Sounds and tens of from their homes and off the land with evf ry circumstance of heartless cruelty. These cruel clearances, though on a ■Okie, have been continued even down to the nresent day. It in really difficult to read this fad Irish rtory without tears. Deepest pity for the sorrows of the people and indignation •gainst the authors of them, stir the feelings of the reader as each fresh page of misery passes under review. Most or all he wonders that such things could have happened so near to onr doors, actually m part of this United Kingdom and under B r iti' b ral [; What a record for people of tther lauds ft) read is this story of suffering and wrong! Some of its chapters equal anything to be found in the darkest stories of human cruelty »nd misery. Where, for instance, in the history of the Protestants- and that has some chapters which are very terrible readingwill you find anything crueller than the long, deliberate, almost diabolical vio' ation of ail the most precious rights and feelings of human beings,*which, under the name of the Penal Laws, we Protestants kept in operation upon the Catholics of Ireland for threequarters of last century ? Those shameful laws carefully devised to keep our Catholic fellow subjects in ignorance, in poverty, and m degradation, “began their evil work at the Catholic’s birth, stood by him at his cradle, blighted what should have been his schooldays, stood at bis bridal bed, carefully closed every avenue of advancement to him in life, and in death stood by bis oomn and his grave.” Hor had they even then finished their cruel mission; they extended their withering curses to bis inheritance, u he «ft any, and to bis fatherless children. Thu inhuman code was enacted by British Legislators, and was kept fixed upon unhappy Ireland by British power. Even more horrible than it, though of much .ahortei duration, were the indescribable scenes of torture and horror which led to the rising ot 1798 The gli 130 ? 1 *® 8 we bouki which tell the story of those days of horror are so frightful as to be almost moredible-and these things were done less than a century ago Then the rising itself which was mus provoked was repressed in another deluge of blood. It was while the country was still writhing under martial law, the result of these events, that we took away the Irish Parliament The story of the circumstances under wmon

that wa« taken away, and of the mean* by which we took it away, is of a piece with the rest of the record of our treatment of their nation, no black and shameful is it.