Page:The issue; the case for Sinn Fein.djvu/9

7 "'If you glance at the history of Ireland during the last ten years, you will find that agitation really means something short of rebellion; that and no other is the exact meaning of the word. It is to place the country in that state in which its government is utterly impracticable except by means of an overawing military force.'"

Not such a far cry after all from the Iron Duke to the Tin Viscount!

Tithes were abolished in 1838, again not by a Parliamentary Party, but by the people themselves after a bloody seven years' war.

Then came Disestablishment in 1869. How did that come? When in 1868 Gladstone proposed his Church resolution, a hundred Irish members voted—fifty-five for and forty-five against! Obviously Disestablishment was not carried by Irish representation at Westminster. Let Gladstone himself tell us what carried it:—

"'Down to the year 1865 and the dissolution of that year, the whole question of the Irish Church was dead. Nobody cared about it, nobody paid attention to it in England. Circumstances occurred which drew attention of the people to the Irish Church. I said myself in 1865, and I believed, that it was out of the range of practical politics.'"

In other words, Fenianism secured Irish Church Disestablishment. Lord Derby, writing from the opposite camp, agreed with Gladstone:—

"'A few desperate men, applauded by the whole body of the Irish people for their daring, showed England what Irish feeling really was, made plain to us the depth of a discontent Whose existence we had scarcely suspected, and the rest followed, of course.'"

Let us hear the same two unimpeachable witnesses concerning the Land Question. "I must make one admission," said Gladstone, "and that is that without the Land League the Act of 1881 would not at this moment be on the Statute Book." "Fixity of tenure," said Lord Derby, "has been the direct result of two causes: Irish outrage and parliamentary obstruction. The Irish know it as well as we. Not all the influence and eloquence of Mr. Gladstone would have prevailed on the English House of Commons to do what has been done in the matter of Irish tenant right, if the answer to all objections had not been ready: How else are we to govern Ireland?" In plain English, every concession wrung from England has been secured simply by making the English Government otherwise impossible in Ireland.

THE FAILURE OF PARLIAMENTARIANISM.

If this be so, what is the use of sending Irishmen over to talk at Westminster? That is the question which we have to face squarely. In the hand of a genius like Parnell, the parliamentary policy secured a temporary success, because, with the help of Joe Biggar, the Fenian, he played the game in his own way—by parliamentary obstruction—and because he secured the co-operation of the anti-parliamentary Nationalists. But even he only looked upon the experiment as a temporary expedient. "Have patience with me," he said to a Fenian in 1877; "give me a trial for three or four years; then if I cannot do anything, I will step aside." He made a very striking declaration in November, 1880, when the freedom of Limerick was conferred on him:—

"'I am not one of those who believe in the permanence of an Irish Party in the English Parliament. I feel convinced that sooner or later the influence which every English Government has t at its command—the powerful and demoralising influence—sooner or later—will sap the best Party you can return to the House of"