holding the seaway between Europe and
America, Ireland, in the grip of England, has been reduced to an
economic slavery that has no parallel in civilization.
And it is to this island, to this people that the appeal is now made
that we should distrust the Germans and aid our enslavers. Better far,
were that the only outcome, the fate of Alsace-Lorraine (who got their
Home Rule Parliament years ago) than the "friendship" of England. We
have survived the open hate, the prolonged enslavement, the secular
robbery of England and now the England smiles and offers us with one
hand Home Rule to take it away with the other, are we going to forget
the experience of our forefathers? A Connacht proverb of the Middle
Ages should come back to us--"Three things for a man to avoid;
the heels of a horse, the horns of a bull; and the smile of an
Englishman."
That Ireland must be involved in any war that Great Britain undertakes
goes without saying; but that we should willingly throw ourselves into
the fray on the wrong side to avert a British defeat, is the counsel
of traitors offered to fools.
We must see to it that what Thierry wrote of our fathers is not
shamefully belied by their sons. Our "indomitable persistency"
has up to this excelled and subdued the unvarying will applied to
one unvarying purpose of those who, by dint of that quality, have
elsewhere subjugated the universe. We who have preserved through
centuries of misery, the remembrance of lost liberty, are not
now going to merge our unconquered souls in the base body of our
oppressor.
One of the few Liberal statesmen England has produced, certainly the
only Liberal politician she has ever produced, the late Mr. Gladstone,
compared the union between Great Britain and Ireland to "the union
between the mangled corpse of Hector and the headlong chariot of
Achilles." (1890.)
But, while I cannot admit that England is an Achilles, save, perhaps,
that she may be wounded like him in the heel, I will not admit, I
will not own that Ireland, however mangled, however "the plowers have
ploughed upon her back and made long furrows," is in truth dead, is
indeed a corpse. No; there is a juster analogy, and one given us by
the only Englishman who was in every clime, and in every circumstance
a Liberal; one who died fighting in the cause of liberty, even as in
life he sang it. Byron denounced the union between England and Ireland
as "the union of the shark with its prey."
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