UNBIASED OPINIONS.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 7171, 15 September 1886, Page 4

UNBIASED OPINIONS.

[Wk deem it njrht to state tliat wo in no way identify onrsclve-' with tbu opinions oxprcssod in article) nppoanng under this head.]

IRELAND AND THE IRISH— No. 20. Rightly to understand tho policy of Elizabeth and hei minister Cecil, and to enter into the motives which lamely actuated their treatment of the Irish people, it is necessary to take a brief survey of tho course of tho momentous contest bein<£ fought out, upon tho Continent of Europe, between the two contendiag partien, the Catholics aad the Protestants, for supremacy. Germany, France, the Netherlands, and, to a certain extent, Spaiu, during the second half of the sixteenth century, were, no less than the British Isles, the principal theatres of the tremendous struggle between tho old order and the new, in Church and State. In this struggle, involving the whole of Western Europe and the British Islands, neither of the contending parties, neither the Roman Catholics nor -the Protestants, had the faintest conception of the modern notions of ro'igious toleration, far less of religious equality, between tho rival Faiths : nay ! Catholics and Protestant would alike have scouted the idea as a suggestion of the Evil Ono. The Roman Catholic?, however, being upon the Con tin n nt. by far the more numerous aud more powerful of the two, were naturally the aggressors iv this religious war; and for tuat and other reasons, prosecuted the Prote-Btams with a pious feivour and ardent zeal for saving the souls of tluso deluded heretics, and promoting the cause of their Holy Faith, compared with which the worst ptreecutions inflicted upon the Roman Catholics by the Protestants, when they had it in their power to return the favour, sink into insignificance. Never th le?s, it may bo fairly maintained that alike in Catholic and Protestant thtre was the same spirit at work, diifeiing only in the moJe of its manifestation. In Great Intain, or moro properly England aud Scotland, this spirit of anti-Christ — for such it truly may bo termed, however aad whensoever shown — was held in chtckaui guatly mitigated in severity, not only by a colder and tnoie lutionul national temperament, hut perhaps even more by tho balance between the two opposite parties being so nearly cvtn us to verge ou a state of unstable equilibrium, in England and Scotkud buth Catholics and Piotestants were loug pretty fairly matched in numbers, iv mateiial resources, iv social and intellectual iid vantages, as well us in other con ditious which did not hold to tho ban.c extent either in Germany, or even iv France itself ; which hardly obtained at all in Spain and its dependent provinces, the Netherlands. Let us cast a irlauce at the remarkable doings, at this period, ot Philip tho Second ; of his Geneial, the Duke of Alva, at the head of an immense body of the lawless, avaricious, and ill paid soldiery of Spain and the Milanese ; of the Council of Bloorl, and of the Hol> Inquisition in these proviaces of the Netherlands, now known as Holland aud Btl^iuu) ; deeds perpetrated within a dayV tail of the English coasts, deeds which the perpetrators openly threatened should be ere long »een.icted iv heretical England itself. When the sudden abdication of the Emperor Charles placed the Kingdom ot Spam and its dominions, including the Nttherl' nds, under the rulo of one of the most ignoble aud dastardly of monarchy hia Eon and successor Kmg Philip the Second, the chains ot civil und religious tyranny which had for ages confined the free action of the intelligent, enterprising, and naturally independent inhabitants ot these Provinces, were drawn tighter than at any preceding period. The compulsory union, in any case, of these Provinces, with such a power as Spain, under such a dynasty as the Bourbons, a dynasty characterised down to this very day by imbecility, obstinacy, aelfishnesp, aud cruelty, almost without a parallel in history, would have been a dire calamity. But at no preceding age, probably, and assuredly at no succeeding, in the history of civilisation, has a drama of such horrors been enacted as that played by Philip of Spaiu, in the desecrated name ot the Christian religion, in the Spanish Netherlands, upon his miserable subjects, horrors which now, after the lapse of three hundred years, cause the reader of Motley's toj wonderfully graphic pages to thudder and to sicken.

On February 16th, 1568, a decree of the Holy Office, recently established in the Nethtrlanris, under tue direct sanction of King Philip, and supported by Alva and hid army, condemned nil the inhabitants. some three millions in number, or nearly six times the entire population of New Zealand, to suffer dtath as heretics, only a few persons, specially named in the decree, being excepted. Men were to be burned, women and children buried alive ! A decree, howevtr, of which the very uioustiorifcity rendered iLs execution practically impossible. Yet it has been reasonably calculated that one hundred thousand victims at the lowe&t estim.ite perished by the hands ot the txeculiuner at the decree of King Philip's Council of Blood; this number not mciuJinsj the countless oihuis who icll iv saoka and sieges at the hand a or the iniuiiattd fcoldiery, or who perished of nuked neas and starvation. ' The whole country/ says Motley, ' became a charnel houbc ; the death-bull lolled hourly in every village ; not a family but was called to nioutn tor its dearest relatives. . . There was hardly a house whijli had n»i been mad.' dt^olate. '1 ho Bcalluldf, the guiiovvg, the funei il files, which had been BulhcKiit iv ordinary tiuiet, furnished now nn entirely icadeiiuate iintijiuery for the iucefasaut executions. Lolumusand siaki-« ine\Lr.) street; tho door posts of private hooaes ; the fcuces in tho iidds, were laden with human carcases, strangled, burned, beheaded." (Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. 11, p 126 ) Egmont. ('To la continued, )