NIHILISM IN ENGLAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 8, 15 June 1883, Page 25

NIHILISM IN ENGLAND.

The following letter has been addressed to the Daily News :—: — Sir, — I suppose the two feelings which first rise in the minds of every one who reads the story of recent seizures of explosives are horror at the danger we have escaped, and admiration of the gallantry of those who, whether as po. icemen, as chemists, or as common labourers, have literally taken their lives in their hands in order to save their fellow-countrymen. That Parliament should, in these circumstances, pass a bill of some sort in the desire to secure the common safety is but natural. But in estimating the probable success of its efforts, it may be as well to remember that the dauntless courage shown by detectives and experts has been at the least equalled by the hardihood of the men who have for months past calmly slept in a factory of deatb, and who have carried about with them in their hands the substances which they knew might at any moment make themselves the first victims. It may well be doubted whether any superadded penalty of penal servitude will much embarrass that succession of conspirators who are ready thus to offer their own lives in sacrifice to their cause. It were better surely that we should ask what cause it is that goads such men to desperation, and makes plots of murder and destruction undermine our proudest civilisation. In such questioning it can hardly fail to strike us that the two countries alone thus threatened are England aDd Russia. In the latter we have already seen the futility of arbitrary power to save a Government detested by a nation. We see plainly enough that no remedy can avail but to give freedom and justice to the people. Why can we not see that England's danger comes from precisely the same cause, and can be cured only by the same remedies as that of Russia? WThe only difference is that in Russia it is only the Czar and police oppress, in England it is the whole nation of Englishmen that Oppresses the whole nation of Irishmen. I say deliberately oppresses for the bitterest oppression lies not in the rack and the thumbscrew, but in the denial of lights of self-government and of making the laws which the social state of the country requires. This oppression England exercises over Ireland, and by it makes every Irishman an enemy. The Irish members are summoned to Westminster, and are told they must submit to what Acts Englishmen choose to pass. The Bills they propose (there are a score of them before the House just now) have not the remotest chance of becoming law; It is not a fortnight since the Premier told them that he would neither legislate nor let them legislate, for the removal of a grievance which he admitted to be undeniable, and the existence of which is daily causing misery and death. To such a system of Government Nihilism is the

answer in England as it is in Russia. When we shall -see that we too have been tyrants, that our good intentions hare been no better than the Czar's, that self-government is the light of the Irish people as it is of the Russian, then we shall have reached a perception of the true causes of our present peril, and have recognised that its removal depends, not on hasty Explosive Acts, but on the determination to allow to 'lreland the exercise of the same constitution which we have vindicated for ourselves. — lam, sir, your obedient servant, J. BOYD KINNEAR.