re deeds
which neither hatred to England nor love of Ireland can justify. Even
sedition has its moral code, and like war itself is subject to
obligations which no man can neglect without infamy. The conspirators
condemned by the Special Commission--and among them are to be found the
most prominent of the Irish leaders[124]--have been guilty of conduct
which no wise man ought to forget and no good man ought to palliate.
They have for years excited Irish ignorance against England and against
English officials by a system of gross incessant slander; witness the
pages of _United Ireland_ when Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan
were in power at Dublin. The men whom we are told to trust are men who
did enter into a criminal conspiracy by a system of coercion and
intimidation to promote an agrarian agitation against the payment of
agricultural rents, for the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from
the country the English landlords[125]; they are men found guilty of not
denouncing intimidation which led to crime and outrage, but of
persisting in it with a knowledge of its effect.[126] They are proved to
have made payments to compensate persons injured in the commission of
crime[127]; they are men who have solicited and taken the money of
Patrick Ford, the advocate of dynamite; and have invited and obtained
the co-operation of the Clan-na-Gael.[128] Their whole system of
agitation has been utterly unlike that of honourable agitators,
conspirators, or rebels; it would have excited the horror of O'Connell;
it would have been repudiated with disgust by Davis, by Gavan Duffy, by
Smith O'Brien, and the other Irish leaders of 1848. The men who now ask
for our confidence have in their attack upon England forgotten what was
due to Ireland; they have deliberately taught Irish peasants lessons of
dishonesty, oppression, and cruelty, which the farmers of Ireland may
take years to unlearn. Of the degradation which they have gradually
inflicted upon the English Parliament one is glad to say little. It is,
however, well that the House of Commons should recollect that
parliamentary debates are open to all the world and that Englishmen and
Englishwomen see no reason why brutalities of expression should be
tolerated in the oldest representative Assembly of Europe which would be
reproved in any respectable English meeting. But you can sometimes trust
men's capacity where you cannot trust their moral feeling. Unfortunately
the Irish Parliame