GOLDWIN SMITH ON THE IRISH IN AMERICA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XV, Issue 45, 2 March 1888, Page 31

GOLDWIN SMITH ON THE IRISH IN AMERICA.

(Brooklyn Catholic Review.) PBOFESSOB GOLDWIBT Smix'h is out again on those dreadful Irish. One wonders, to read him, how the Professor can manage to get to sleep at night because of the Irish. He is, if we mistake not, a Professor of Political Economy, or something such. He is beyond all question a Professor and a persistent practicer of actual lying wheneTer lie broaches an Irish subject, and he is constantly broaching Irish •übjects. His favourite channel of communication is the London Times, the deadliest enemy of the Irish people. Of course the Times eagerly welcomes Smith's anti-Irish tirades; and the more bitter and the falser the tirades are, the more welcome are they to this most unscrupulous aDd infamous of journals. For the Times does not sin in ignorance. It sins against light, and glories in its public sin and shame. It knows perfectly well that Goldwin Smith is lying, and that his lies, like its own, are especially intended to make the bad blood already existing worse by trying to poison the public mind of England against the Irish. But that is the traditional policy and purpose of the London Times. Goldwin Smith does not confine himself to the Irish in Ireland. It seems that he has been studying the Irish element over here, if not all over the world ; and he ht»s discovered strange things in the course of his studies — that is, things that will be strangd to any person who is not mentally constituted on the Goldwin Smith plan. The man is BO con-iimed with vanity that he evidently imagines people keep track of his lucubrations. In his latest letter to the Times, published the other day, he says that since he wrote " years ago " he has seen the Irian in America. We believe the man did pay a flying trip to one or two of our cities with a lecturing tour in view, but he fell flat, as most frauds do, and hastened away from us to join what to him was more congenial company. The people of this country are not easily converted from convictions which they have deliberately arrived at, and certainly Goldwin Smith is not the man to alter the American judgment on the affairs of Ireland. Here is what he discovered : He has seen, he tells the Times, the Ixißh in America " trooping blindly to the polls behind a demagogue or priest, forming the rank and file of an army of corruption, filling American cities with misgovemment, disorder and jobbery ; swelling the statistics of crime, and re-enacting in the Mollie Maguire con■piracies the murderous agrarianism of their own land ; trampling on andbutcheriog the unoffending negro, and bunting down the helpless Chinese." And Goldwin Smith has " seen " all these horrors, mind. Verily, no man is a prophet in his own conntry ; for assuredly none Of our own political prophets have seen a tithe of what the Professor, With his own little eye, saw at half a glance. While wondering at the stupendous mendacity of this professor of falsehood, Irishmen could wall afford to pass it by with a smile of contempt, were it not for the capacity some people have of swallowing any monstrosity. We are painfully curtain that very many not illintentioned people in England will take the " awful disclosures "here revealed by Goldwin Smith as cold facts, for not every one is aware how utterly discredited and discreditable a person Smith is. That is where the mischief of the thing comes in. The more brazen and barefaced the lie, the more harm is it likely to effect. Of course it would be simple waste of 'ime for us to go to work and refute sweeping and wholesale falsehood. It is suffici' at refutation hereto say that every one of Smith's stateoieutß quoted are precisely the reverse

of truth and fact. As for the Irish-American vote in the United States, any practical politician will to-day admit that it is at once the most conservative and independent. While as for the Catholic priesthood., all the world confesses that priests as a class have less to do with politics than any other class of oar citizens. Smith, however, has some mercy on the liish, though none on himself or his character for veracity. He does not think "the peculiarities of the race indelible, but strong," and every statesman should note them. We are inclined to think and hope that the peculiarities of the race are indelible, and it is just that fact which has preserved the race from destruction. Mr. Smith concludes his letter in characteristic fashion. To hand over Ireland to the politicians of New York or Chicago, he considers, or to their mates in the House of Commons, would bn the greatest folly and most heinous crime ever deliberately committed by public men. Smith thinks it safer to hand Ireland over to the tender mercies of the Cromwell, Balfour, Salisbury order of politicians, who mistake official thuggism for statesmanship and patriotism. What offence have the politicians of New York and Chicago committed against Goldwin Smith 1 The London Daily News well asks, when commenting on the imprisonment of the Lord Mayor of Dublin : " What can an Irish peasant think of the law that imprisons the best men in the country?" What, indeed ? Can they be expected to love, honour, and obey it ? Such a task is beyond human nature, especially when more than half England revolts against such law. On the whole, we are inclined to rejoice rather than not at the publication of Smith's letters, particularly in the columns of the London Times. In a time of mortal struggle it is just as well to see the worst of your enemy, and nothing could be much worse than the worst of Goldwin Smith and the London Times.