TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 127

TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

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man who left his country for his country's good, and from a member for West Belfast, whom the dispensation of nature provided with no more means of understanding Ulster sentiment than of legislating for the planet Mars after a recent peep at it through a telescope. The two gross causes of domestic differences in Ireland—religious inequality and an incorrigible landlord system—are, one of them utterly gone, and the other on the fair way to extinction by landlords' as well as tenants' consent. While this last deadly quarrel endured, it being a matter of life and death for the Irish agricultural multitude, Protestant as well as Catholic, it may be admitted that the war raged with all the ferocity that words could fly withal. A generation ago the discussion was conducted with pellets out of the mouths of blunderbusses on the one side, and with the hangman's ropes and crowbars and transportations by fever-ships on the other. The fierce verbal warfare of the last twelve years on both sides has saved life, but has not spared feeling. It has been a French Revolution, with a good deal of the lurid rhetoric of the Jacobin clubs, if you will, but without anything that the wildest partisan could compare with the September massacres or the noyades of Nantes, through which the landed aristocracy of France had to wade to a foothold of agrarian reform. The wounds created by words, after all, soon heal if they proceed not from poisonous hearts. We have had our share of the wounds, and we are not indisposed to do our share of the healing. The sort of language which was a desperate people's only weapon under insufferable wrong and against apparently resistless forces loses all its justification in circumstances in which both the wrong is on the high road to redressal, and the public opinion of the world is gathering in ever-increasing masses to our support. From the … continue reading »

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