MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 110

MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

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the last degree painful and dangerous that, at so critical an hour, we should have two minorities to contend against in place of one. But among misgoverned nations absolute unity is not often to be had, even under the pressure of national emergency. There were seven warring factions among the Greek insurgents when the sympathetic British frigates opened fire in Navarino Bay to give them freedom. If the Irish Opposition of the future is to move its votes of censure before there is an Irish Government to be censured, that is simply one of the pains of self-government which Ireland will have to face slightly before her time, and which Ireland alone will have any right to grumble about. The only polemics a democratic country has any right to proscribe are those of the argumentum baculinum. So long as the Belfast minority or the Dublin minority are content to observe the ordinary police regulations in their discussions, they have a right to speak, and hoot, and demonstrate to their liking, and to combine their forces together, whether for Cork municipal honours, or for a coalition ministry in the future, and in proportion to the common sense of their programme and the respect for their character will be their success with the electors. All that British Home Rulers have the right to require is that the Irish people shall put forth a demand which is reasonable by a majority which is decisive. This they have done, in the teeth of unparalleled difficulties, by a more convincing verdict than any by which England ever voted Whig or Tory, or the United States supported Abraham Lincoln in the crisis of the slave war. High above the clamour of the two minorities put together stands the solid phalanx of the Irish Nationalist majority, most of them returned by majorities of thousands in South and North, and ready with an unmistakable programme, and an equally unmistakable … continue reading »

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