MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 104

MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

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Commission. They shrink from boycotting it, as upon one pretext or another they will by-and-by shrink from facing it, having the deadly feeling at their hearts that investigation has invariably proved the Irish landlords to be in the wrong. While Sir James Mathew's eye is upon them, those who are only meditating eviction will possibly be circumspect. Those who may be inclined to reject summarily all applications for reductions of rent this ruinous winter, will remember that the result of similar action in 1886 was that the Tory Government next session suspended the judicial rents for three years. They will hesitate before driving a Liberal Government to do likewise.

The difficulty of getting through the winter without an explosion, in face of hostile landlords, sullen officials, and a population struggling for bare life against an agricultural crisis which dismays the stoutest hearts, is, after all, only the initial difficulty. ' If it is so hard to bind the country to the peace for three months,' cry the croakers,' how is your majority of thirty-eight going to frame in a few months a permanent Constitution for an island where you have not merely a Belfast minority bombarding you from one extreme, but a Dublin minority opening fire from the opposite extreme?' The task is a formidable task. Nothing short of genius and a noble enthusiasm for peace between the two islands will be equal to it. To the men whose policy of ascendency has had a trial of centuries, and produced nothing better than ages of civil war suppressed or overt, may be conceded the proud satisfaction of knowing that the undoing of their work is no child's-play, and that the Government which has to pass a Home Rule Bill has a harder road to travel than a Government which had only to pass a Coercion Bill. It is because the task is heroically hard that it has become necessary to confront it. To … continue reading »

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