rt progress. I believe that the material prosperity of this
country will increase by leaps and bounds in exact proportion to the
loosening of Saxon restraint, and freedom from selfish English
interference. Our trade has been deliberately strangled, our
manufactures deliberately ruined, by English influence on behalf of
English interests. Then you ask us to believe that we have benefited
by our union with England! We do not believe it. England has been the
greatest modern curse, spreading her octopus arms over every weak
country in the world. She goes to make money, and says she only wishes
to push forward civilisation. Read Labouchere's opinion of England,
and you will see what she is--a greedy, whining hypocrite. She holds
India by fear, at the point of the bayonet--all for greed. Then her
speakers get up on their philanthropic platforms, and after shooting a
few thousand niggers and poisoning off the rest with rum, they say
that such and such a country is now under the blessed rule of England,
which is established merely for the propagation of the truth as it is
in Jesus. You make out that your rum, rifles, and missionaries are
only instruments in the hands of the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Away with such hypocrisy! England is a
big bully, crushing the weak and truckling to the strong--truckling to
the weak, even, when fairly taken to. Look at the Transvaal. When I
see what a handful of Dutch farmers did with your grand army--when I
see how a country with less than a quarter of the population of
Ireland freed itself and knocked your bold army into a cocked hat, I
am ashamed to be an Irishman submitting to foreign rule. You will at
any rate see why we Irishmen in Ulster are even more rebellious than
our southern countrymen. It is because these devilish plantations were
in the North, and because we are outnumbered in the North by men who
are really foreigners. Let them be loyal. No doubt it suits them best.
But we will only be loyal to our country, which is Ireland, not
England. And if these Scots, wrongly called Ulstermen, don't like the
new arrangement, they can leave the country. No obstacle will be
placed in the way of their departure. That I can promise you. They
will leave the land, I suppose? That being so, we can spare the
settlers. And as they got the land for nothing, they must be content
to part with it on the same terms. Now you understand the No Rent cry.
Now you understand t