Against Home Rule | Page 6

to do nothing to interfere with private enterprise in feeding the
starving people, and as there was no private enterprise in the country,
where all classes were involved in the common ruin, the people were
left to die of hunger by the roadside. The lands the potato blight spared
were desolated by the adoption of free trade. The exploitation of the
virgin lands of the American West gradually threw the fertile midlands
of Ireland from tillage into grass. A series of bad harvests aggravated
the evil. The landlords and the farmers of Ireland were divided into two
political camps, and, instead of uniting for their common welfare, each
attempted to cast upon the other the burden of the economic catastrophe.
To sum up in the words of Mr. Amery--
"The evils of economic Separatism, aggravated by social evils

surviving from the Separatism of an earlier age, united to revive a
demand for the extension and renewal of the very cause of those evils."
The political demand for the repeal of the Act of Union, which had lain
dormant for so many years, was revived by the energies of Isaac Butt.
He found in the Irish landlords, smarting under the disestablishment of
the Irish Church, a certain amount of sympathy and assistance, but the
"engine" for which Finton Lalor had asked in order to draw the "repeal
train," was not discovered until Parnell linked the growing agrarian
unrest to the Home Rule Campaign. This is not the place to tell again
the weary story of the land war or to show how the Irish Nationalists
exploited the grievances of the Irish tenants in order to encourage crime
and foment disloyalty in the country. It is sufficient to say that this
conflict--the conduct of which reflects little credit either upon the Irish
protagonists or the British Government which alternately pampered and
opposed it--was ended, for the time at least, by the passing of Mr.
Wyndham's Land Act. We look forward in perfect confidence to the
time when that great measure shall achieve its full result in wiping out
the memory of many centuries of discord and hatred. But the Separatist
movement, which has always been the evil genius of Irish politics, has
not yet been completely exorcised. The memory of those past years
when the minority in Ireland constituted the only bulwark of Irish
freedom and of English liberty, has not yet passed away. The Irish
Nationalist party since Parnell have spared no exertions to impress
more deeply upon the imaginations of a sentimental race the memory
of those "ancient weeping years." They have preached a social and a
civil war upon all those in Ireland who would not submit their opinions
and consciences to the uncontrolled domination of secret societies and
leagues.
The articles upon the Ulster question by Lord Londonderry and Mr.
Sinclair show that the Northern province still maintains her historic
opposition to Irish Separatism and Irish intrigue. She stands firmly by
the same economic principles which have enabled her, in spite of
persecution and natural disadvantages, to build up so great a prosperity.
She knows well that the only chance for the rest of Ireland to attain to
the standard of education, enlightenment and independence which she

has reached, is to free itself from the sinister domination under which it
lies, and to assert its right to political and religious liberty. Ulster sees
in Irish Nationalism a dark conspiracy, buttressed upon crime and
incitement to outrage, maintained by ignorance and pandering to
superstition. Even at this moment the Nationalist leagues have
succeeded in superseding the law of the land by the law of the league.
We need only point to the remarks which the Lord Chief Justice of
Ireland and Mr. Justice Kenny have been compelled to make to the
Grand Juries quite recently, to show what Nationalist rule means to the
helpless peasants in a great part of the country.
But the differences which still sever the two great parties in Ireland are
not only economic but religious. The general slackening of theological
dispute which followed the weary years of religious warfare after the
Reformation, has never brought peace to Ireland. In England the very
completeness of the defeat of Roman Catholicism has rendered the
people oblivious to the dangers of its aggression. The Irish Unionists
are not monsters of inhuman frame; they are men of like passions with
Englishmen. Though they hold their religious views with vigour and
determination, there is nothing that they would like more than to be
able to forget their points of difference from those who are their fellow
Christians. It is perhaps necessary to point out once again that the
Roman Catholic Church is a political, as well as a religious, institution,
and to remind Englishmen that it is by the first law