IRELAND'S UNRELENTING ENEMIES. PLAIN TALK FOR ULTRAMARINES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 34, 20 December 1873, Page 10

IRELAND'S UNRELENTING ENEMIES. PLAIN TALK FOR ULTRAMARINES.

(' Dundalk Democrat.') We notice in the speeches and writings of the anti Irish -Protestants, about this time of the year especially, a sort of aelf-importancu or arrogance for which, we fear, the well-meant conduct of Irish Catholics must be held accountable in part. It never answers, as a countryman of ours is said to have remarked, <o " have reciprocity all one Bide * ' and the state of things to which we now ad pert illustrates the evil thus humorously characterized. The Catholics of Ireland are striving— and, to their eternal lion6r it will be told, they have ever striven — to put to flight the baleful prejudice and hostility of those people by kindly overture, by friendly speech, by generous deed. In the history of the world there is nothing to surpass the magnanimity, forgiveness, tolerance, liberality of Irish Catholics towards a body of men who had played towards them the odious part of jai'ors — a garrison of oppressors— jannizzaries of England. In the Listory of the world there is nothing Io equal the meanness and ingratitude with which (with eorae glorious exceptions) such generous action has hitherto been received und requited. No sooner is an inch of freedom won, no sooner is a right or privilege wrested from the subjugating power, than the Irish Catholic, instead of considering it little enough to enjoy exclusively hiuioelf, hastens to share it with a Protestant countryman ! Is it the long denied right of returning Catholic members to Parliament ?— behold ! the most Catholic constituences of the land hasten to confer the honor and trust on Protestants. Is it the right to municipal dignities, so cruelly and foully kept from them by Protestant power ?- Io ! the Catholics make their freshly won liberties or dignities a first offering of patriotic conciliation and generous feeling, and, in p'a-e of returning exclusively Catholic mayors and councillors for a couple of hundred years or so, by way of bringing accounts Io a level, use their day of power in electing Protestants as well as Catholics to positions of civic trust, emolument and honor. And while all this is going on, even while Irish Catholics are thus putting their late oppressors to the blush, they have to endure the language of taunt, insult, and insolence; while in the very act of practising a tolerance and a generosity which those men alas ! never extend to them, tUey h^vo to listen to charges fortooth, of bigbtrv, intolerance and oppression ! Ererr new offer of the hand in fraternal feeling, every new invitation to let the dead past bury the dead, is met with a cynicism of an insulting dcniuml for " assurances " and " guarantees." There is a point at which amiability sinks into self-depression. Too great anxiety to urge reconciliation upon some men is regarded only as a sign of weakness, and intensifies the evil which it is meant to allay. Studying the'langunge of the Ultramarine organs — watching the contetnptible coquetting of some of them with the national questi< n, the savage animosity with which they "excommunicate" the few high minded and largo hearted Protestants, lay and clerical, who dare to take 6ides with their country — noting their pretences occasionally that they might indeed go a little farther, perhaps, if wd would give them " assurances" and *' guarantees," und hostages (which geueiatly tarn out to be requisition?, more or 1 83 disguised, to flout or trample an

some Catholic principle or practice)— one must begin to feel that we huve, perhaps, made too much of these people, and, by our vte\\Hfteant invitations to fraternal co-operation, inflated them with the idea that we can't do without them, and that it is our part ever suppliantly toiroD and sue them, theirs being to ape the mien of the lofty Jove himself. J

There must be an end io this sort of thing. We hope the Irish Catholics will never desist from the practice of that tolerance, liberality and magnanimity which has kept pace with the gradual reconquest of their liberties. We trust they will never . isgrace themselves by imitating the exclnsiveness, the bigotry and intolerance of which they w»re so- long the victims, and of which they are victims even still wheiever Ultramarineism has power. We trust they will ever be ready to hold out the hand of reconciliation and cordial friendship to those of their Protestant fellow-countrymen who n:ay be touched with the holy spirit of patriotism. But a little plain talk now may save a world of delusion ; we will have no more extravagant inportunin»s or supplications to men like Mr William Johnston, for the best of all reasons — that the liberties of Ireland are within our reach without them. We would rather win those liberties with them j but we can win them without them. The efforts we make to dispel prejudice* honestly conceive* or entertained, must not be regarded as the entreaties of petitioners. 'Twere well if the plainness of our speech now opened the eyes ofliish Ultramarines to their real position present and prospective. The sixty or seventy votes in Parliament that can and will win Homo Rule— that will compel its concession— will not include one — no, not oven one I—returned by any Ultramarine" or Orange constituency. Their contingent, their shaio in the work will be nil. There will be Protestants among the Home Rule Parliamentary party ; but they will be there by votes representing the liberality and patriotism of Catholic constituencies, and the revolt of enlightened Protestant patriotism against ah Ultramarine stupidity The so called Conservative, Orange, or Ultramarine constituencies will not be able to return a solitary unit to the party io Ireland The work will have to be done without them, aud will be. We do not, indeed go to the Hon. David Plunkett's extreme of sanguine prophecy • we do not believe in Nighty or ninety;' or even in seventy Ifome Rule members being returned at the next election. But we know that with the ballot now in our possession, we can, in a few effor's, return at least fifty or sixty men who will make the concession of Home Rule ac ma h a matter of certainly as the sotting of to-morrow's sun j and this not only without the help of, but despite the opposition of Ultramarine constituencies.

Are there, even now among the Irish Ultramarines, men capable of realising their position? We doubt it. We think it likely that Jinglai d s final desertion and betrayal of them will find them what they aro to-day. They have got a foretaste of her good faith in the Cuurch Disestablishment. Uo confederate in a crime wag ever more specially bound to another then was England bound by the Act of Union not to disturb, but to maintain, the Protestant eßtnblish.nent in Ireland. Yet when political exigencies required it, she, without hesitation, broke her faith, made her own terms with the assailants of that cstabhsment, and laughed at tlie rage- of her betrayed Ultramanne mercenaries. Do these men imagine she will concern liereelf about them or their views, feelings., or supposed interests, as to the remnants ef the Act of Union, om> moment after party exigencies hare made the U-lad«fcone of the hour decide or surrender? Poor dolts 1 They will be used for t'.e interval ; their impotent liootings of "No Home Rule* will for the time command much patronising praise ; but the only thing .1 minister weighs in the lustresort is votes in the House ; and when Irish Ultramarineism can only poll twenty or iiirty votes, wlile Irish nitionahty (Catholic and Protestant) polls seventy or eighty v, c Minister of the dny will deal with the strong side, as he did on the Church question, and let the Irish Orangemen goto Hanover or HonsKong for conclut-i n. °

In that hour, it may be, fome of them will realise th& humiliation and the danger and. the disgrace of tin ir lot. They will be without a country— disowned and de-erted by England— abandoned in thenu'Jst of the nation which they fought against as an alien garrison! In that hour, doubtless, many of them will bewail the blindness and faluitv that curse them now, and that prevent them from preceivin" that the cause of Irish nationality is going to triumph whether tliey'hefo it or ODpope it. In tliat hour, perhaps, they wil discover that, the appeals of then- fellow -countrymen were not s-upplieatiou* " ad lnisercordium " but the honest generously-inspired invitations of men who desired no sectional triumnh, no factious vie.'orr j men who, though possessed of the means to win the national ri^hu'themselves, invited their brethren of all creeds, classes, and orders to have a share in an inevitable glory I