The Project Gutenberg EBook of About Ireland, by E. Lynn Linton

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Title: About Ireland

Author: E. Lynn Linton

Release Date: August 3, 2004 [EBook #13109]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ABOUT IRELAND

BY

_E. LYNN LINTON._

LONDON:
METHUEN & CO.,
18, BURY STREET, W.C.

1890.

EXPLANATORY.

I am conscious that I ought to make some kind of apology for rushing
into print on a subject which I do not half know. But I do know just a
little more than I did when I was an ardent Home Ruler, influenced by
the seductive charm of sentiment and abstract principle only; and I
think that perhaps the process by which my own blindness has been
couched may help to clear the vision of others who see as I did. All
of us lay-folk are obliged to follow the leaders of those schools in
politics, science, or religion, to which our temperament and mental
idiosyncracies affiliate us. Life is not long enough for us to examine
from the beginning upwards all the questions in which we are
interested; and it is only by chance that we find ourselves set face
to face with the first principles and elemental facts of a cause to
which, perhaps, as blind and believing followers of our leaders, we
have committed ourselves with the ardour of conviction and the
intemperance of ignorance. In this matter of Ireland I believed in the
accusations of brutality, injustice, and general insolence of tyranny
from modern landlords to existing tenants, so constantly made by the
Home Rulers and their organs; and, shocking though the undeniable
crimes committed by the Campaigners were, they seemed to me the tragic
results of that kind of despair which seizes on men who, goaded to
madness by oppression, are reduced to masked murder as their sole
means of defence--and as, after all, but a sadly natural retaliation.
I knew nothing really of Lord Ashbourne's Act; and what I thought I
knew was, that it was more a blind than honest legislation, and did no
vital good. I thought that Home Rule would set all things straight,
and t