THE IRISH CRISIS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 17934, 30 July 1920, Page 2

THE IRISH CRISIS.

( » To the Editor. ! Sir, —I have read the leading ar- 1 tide in Tuesday’s "Chronicle.” You 1 are not altogether to blame for not knowing what is happening in Ireland. The campaign of lying against the people of that country is as viru- ' lent to-day as a similar propaganda was against other peoples in the past. The wonder is that we have not yet been assured that the Irish have been cuttinff off the hands and feet of babies and boiling down their mangled bodies for motor oil. Did the Irish assassinate the Lord Mayor of Cork, or threaten to assassinate the Cardinal-Archbishop of Armagh? Was it the Irish who shot the priest in his quiet home in Belfast last week, and hunted the nuns from their convent and then sacked it? Did the Irish wreck towns in every quarter of the country apd imprison or deport without trial, or even charge, the chosen leaders of the nation? Is it the Irish who cause to be suppressed in NewZealand newspapers the clear evidence of wilful murder, and the coroners’ juries’ unanimous verdict of wilful murder, against the police and the military? Is it the Irish who suppressed the first edition of the “Letters of Queen Victoria,” which showed England’s method of provoking rebellion in Ireland? G. K. Chesterton would throw a great deal of light on this point. He is English of the English, and is England’s most powerful and picturesque writer to-day. If you are not entirely blameworthy for not knowing these things, you are at least entirely inexcusable for repeating the brutal and bombastic statement of IMr Winston Churchill, Minister for War, made a short time ago in the “Mother of all the Parliaments.” Editors may re-echo his threat that England, having come triumphantly out of the world war, was not to be scared by the Irish; but force is not its own justification. If practice makes perfect, she should easily crush a small nation. This is what the Russian statesman had in mind a few days ago, wuen he declared Russia’s inability to trust her where email nations were concerned. lam sorry you have given a new birth to the threat; it were better forgotten. It is the fashion of men to put thei rtrust in things that are big, confounding them with things that are great- Such is not God’s fashion, In Vvhom the Irish put their trust. He is the primal source of justice, and He often brings to nought me devisings of the wicked by the agency of those who seem to be beneath voutempt, England may yet crush Ireland with her big battalions; but bigness is not greatness, and the Irish cause has the approval of the world. You state, and rightly, that “Americans went through the agony of the Civil War ... to preserve the integrity of the country”; but the Premier of England is engaged in a struggle to destroy the vital integrity of Ireland. He would hack her in two to please the foreign fanatics of the north-east corner, who, beaten constitutionally, fall back upon the big battalions of England, which seem to be at the beck and call of fanaticism. He would do this at the expense of tearing up and throwing in the face of the King as a scrap of paper the Home Rule Act to which His Gracious Majesty has solemnly set his signature.—l am, P- J. POWER. Hawera. (Our reply to Dean Power’s letter will be found in our editorial columns.—Ed. “Chronicle.”)