FREEDOM FOR IRELAND

New Zealand Tablet, 18 March 1920, Page 33

FREEDOM FOR IRELAND

Meetings in behalf of Irish freedom are no novelty to Boston, but such an assembly as crowded Symphony Hall to the doors the other Sunday night to listen to such speakers declaring their loyalty to Ireland may fairly claim a place by iself in local annals (says the Boston Pilot). The great audience heard Rev. James Grattan Mythen, executive secretary of the Protestant Friends of Ireland, deliver a speech that explained the Grattan part of his name. “Wo are the spiritual heirs of the great Protestants who gave their lives for Ireland. 1 ask any student of Ireland, who are the great heroes of the people? The green, white, and orange tri-color of the Irish Republic was designed by a Protestant, Wolfe Tone. Those of you who know the history of Ireland need not bo told how Protestants have been in the van of the fight for Irish liberty.” Dr. Mythen synopsised the doings of the select coterie of ministers sent to this country thus : “This delegation of ministers is not a representation of Ulster men ; they are Britishers and nothing else. We said we would meet them in debate in Carnegie Hall, in any theatre, any hall, pay all expenses, give them an equal opportunity with us it they would come out in the open, but they refused. They are going about in closed churches, conventions of clergymen, and too like. 'ion cannot get to their meetings without a card; they know you. Is that lik.i Americanism Dr. Mytlien said: —“We fought the war to make the world safe for democracy; not to make the world safe for England.” Mr. Lindsay Crawford, an Ulster man, former President of the Independent Orange Lodge and present editor of the Toronto Stotrsmnn, was not less plain-spoken regarding the matters at issue. He called the British misrule of Ireland “The Murder of a Nation.” “On one hand,” he said, “we have Ireland a nation, and on the other we have dominant force murdering that nation." Touching about the oft-mooted point so dear to haters of Ireland, that the land was priest-ridden. Mr. Crawford had this to say; “The Protestant political parsons of Ulster have been the curse of Iceland. Now they have the audacity to come here and absolutely misrepresent themselves. Ireland to-day is a nation, but their first move is to try to break down that fact.” Professor Arthur Uphani Pope, who has held high positions at Brown University, Amherst, and the University of California, made it plain that “the issue of freedom for Ireland is not a domestic concern for any empire, .and it is certainly no concern of England merely; it is very far from being an English question. The freedom of Ireland is a question that concerns the whole of mankind. America has a special interest in the Irish question, because America was born in a passion for freedom.” lie went on to tell of the many nations over whose woes the people of the United States have agonised; Belgium, Serbia, Poland, and Armenia. “Why not Ireland?” he asked. -‘We have a very special debt to Ireland ; that debt remains to be discharged, and discharged it must be in all honor. We owe our liberty and our success in a very large measure to the sacrifice and inspiration, the toil and example of the Irish people. Some of our revolutionary documents were copies of Irish manifestoes.” Professor Pope went over the long bead roll of Irishmen distinguished in American history, and cited the testimony of English statesmen to the' fact that Irishmen had much to do with the loss of this country to the British Empire. Professor Pope closed his remarks with a statement that is well worth pondering; “Imperial England will never change until forced to do so by the enraged conscience of mankind. England destroyed Irish commerce the same year she destroyed Indian commerce when she put a tax of 300 per cent, on linen manufacture, and in 1847 exported 3,160,000 animals from Ireland when the people were starving.” Mr. Thomas IT. Mahoney, of Boston, was chairman and the resolutions passed by the assembly were read by Mr. Joseph Smith, well known in Boston journalism. The resolutions embodied the sentiments that had been expressed by the speakers. This crowded and enthusiastic meeting made up of Boston people who are not generally supposed to be deeply concerned with the aspirations of the Irish people, was the best possible answer to the propaganda so laboriously circulated by those who know but one motto—England, right or wrong—and who will think twice before they enter on a campaign which has been so sternly negatived from a quarter they least suspected. ' «■ The spirits of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Henry Grattan, Isaac Butt, and Charles Stewart Parnell certainly seemed to hover above the stately roof of Symphony Hail

on that Sunday night. And they might well be proud to know the stalwart way in which their modern representatives of the Irish cause voiced their righteous and time-honored sentiments. „ •§