MR. JOHN O'LEARY ON IRISH POLITICS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 17, 15 August 1884, Page 21

MR. JOHN O'LEARY ON IRISH POLITICS.

Mb. Hugh Mubphy sends the following letter to the Nation :— Paris, June 4, 1884. Dea.k Sib,— Your letter announcing my election as president of the Glasgow Young Ireland Society has been prevented by some mishap from reaching me before now. lam sorry for this, for I fear my silence must have seemed to at least some of you to savour of discourtesy, which is, T hope, altogether foreign to my nature. It w®uld certainly be an ill return for the compliment you have paid me. I grant lam willing to accept the position of president of your Society, it being, of course, understood— as from the nature o£ things it must, I suppose, necessarily be— that the office is, aad, indeed, must remain, an honorary one. I shall, however, as soon after my return to Ireland m the beginning of next year as I possibly can, make it my bnsiness to visit Glasgow, and offer a few words of thanks, or probably more of counsel, to my young Ireland friends. In the meantime, though I am in little mood for writing just now, and more or less disinclined to express any very definite opinions on the present state of public affairs, I still feel as if I owed it to you to say something. You are right in thinking that my politioal opinions have underi gone little, if any change since '48, and I think they are little likely •to suffer any material modification while God grants me the full possession of my faculties. Now, as then, I have little faith in Parliamentary action (which does not, however, involve want of faith in all public action), and still less in Parliamentary men. Now, as then, lam for the straight course at all times, and for the strong course whenever possible. Of course you do not need to be told how much I deplore and detest the new and horrible dynamitic and Invincible delusions that have seized upon some few of our countrymen everywhere, and, unhappily, upon a good many of them in America. I should almost begin to despair of our future if I did not believe that this was a mere passing craze— the Irish form of that Nihilistic movement which, in some shape or other, seems spreading everywhere at present. " Non tali atixilio nee defensoribns istis tempus egit." It is by far other men and far other means Ireland must be served if Bhe means to be free, or ever to take any forward steps on the road to freedom. As to what these measures should exactly be, and what men or classes of men are destined to carry them out, these are questions I cannot enter into with any fulness now. One measure, however, is always urgent, and never more urgent than now, no matter what dishonest or ignorant spouters may constantly tell you to the contrary. " Educate that you may be free," said (iavan Duffy long ago, and no man living has done so much to help us to educate ourselves as the very author of the maxim himself. I hope I have in my time done a little in that way too ; but, alas 1 how much of that sort of education that tends to make a nation free— as, indeed, of any sort of education— we still need, the" most cursory perusal of Irish or Irish- American papers but too clearly shows. In fine, to put the thing in a nutshell, to do more we must know more. To turn from measures to men, we must learn to be tolerant of all sorts and conditions of men. Our sole standard should be whether a man means honestly to serve Ireland. As to whether a man thinks wisely for Ireland, it is generally only the few can know, and, mostly, time alone can with any certainty tell ; and we, none of us, can be so certain of our own wisdom as to be entitled to condemn a man simply because he differs from us. But I cannot do better than end ihi9 letter, as 1 end my letters, by giving you the words of the man who has taught us all sorts of high and noble lessons, too easily forgotten by some of us, and probably never learned at all by others :—: — We hate the Saxon and the Dane, We hate the Norman men ; We cuise their greed for blood and gain, We curse them now again . Yet start not Irish- born man — If you're to Ireland true, We heed not blood, nor creed, nor clan. — We have no curse for you. What matter that at different shrines We pray unto one God — What matter that at different times Our fathers won this sod ? In fortune and in name we're bound By stronger links than steel. f ■ And neither can be safe or sound But in the other's weal. — Sincerely yours, John O'Lkaby.

The titular Bishop of Eaebon, formerly Bishop of Wilna, Mgr. Adam Stanislaus Krasioski, who was exiled to Siberia for twenty years by the Russian Government, was received in special audience by His Holiness lately with whom he conversed in Latin for a lengthened space cf time. The Bishop afterwards presented to the Holy Father several students of the Polish College at Borne. The London coi respondent of The Boston Herald, in describing the terror and stupidity of the London police after the recent dynamite explosions, 6ays : " Meanwhile, at the baße of the Nelson column a solitary constable paraded, his orders being, as he told me, to allowno one within three yards of the lions. Strange to say, he was on speaking terms with two individuals with whom I entered into conversation. One of them was a Frenchman, and the other an English republican, and both of them informed me that it would be the greatest pleasure to them in the world to assist in laying the monument low. What the two were doing in Trafalgar Square I could not find out, but they remained there for some considerable time."