Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1698136296996.pdf (Ireland)
LET TER To the Right Hon.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, Prime Minister of England, etc.

L E T 1ER To the R ight Hon.

William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister of England, etc.

S ir , T H E 28th of January, 1881, will long be a memorable date in the history of Great Britain and her depen­ dencies.
On that day a small but select force of British troops, strong in the formidable arm of artillery, under the leadership of a general supposed to combine in himself the most advanced knowledge of theoretic war, with a com­ prehensive grasp of its administrative details, suffered complete defeat at the hands of a body of South African Dutch farmers, hitherto a despised and contemptible enemy.
Destitute of artillery, unlearned in the science or the practice of war, utterly untaught in any of the manual exercises or tactical combinations which give strength, solidity and mobility to organised bodies of men, and led by persons of humble class and hitherto peaceful conditions of life, these Dutch farmers succeeded in beating back, with terrible slaughter, the well considered and carefully arranged assault of an infantry column covered by the fire of six pieces of artillery, and led by officers whose devotion to the honour of their profession was sealed with their lives.
While this extraordinary spectacle— the future “ Bunker's H ill” of the southern hemisphere— was being enacted on the frontier of the distant territory of the Transvaal, a scene was taking place in a nearer region, and on a widely different stage, the consequences of which are likely to have their echoes prolonged into the future in tones as lasting as those which will record to future generations the stand made by the Dutch farmers in defence of their freedom.
This second scene was only a conflict of opinion—a warfare of words ; its theatre was the Chamber of Parlia­ mentary Debate ; and the sounds of its strife, softened by cushioned benches and carpeted floors, scarcely passed the threshold of the Chamber; and yet alike in the English Parliament House, and on the African hill side, the cause of [ 2 ] contest on this 28th January, 1881, was the old simple issue of freedom’s first right, the right of men to live upon their own land.
And on which side may I ask, Sir, were you in this conflict of opinion, on the 28 th January?

You, the long self-constituted archangel of freedom over the world?

Was that powerful voice, which had so often trembled upon every platform in the land, in denouncing the oppression of the Ottoman, now raised to protect the poor— to save the Irish peasant from extinction, or to secure to a long suffering and perpetually outraged race, the bare justice of a right to live?
You stood there, Sir, as Prime Minister of England, wielding the strength of a vast majority, secure in the power of your unequalled position, confident in the exalted tradition of your name, to strangle liberty, to deny justice, to dises­ tablish freedom.

You stood there the advocate of might, the defender of tyrannical power, to lay the weight of your half-century of parliamentary experience in the scale of coercion.
You stood there to strike down a struggling people ; to reawaken passion ; to reopen wounds ; to head the assault of privilege upon the peasant.

There, cheered by the men whose hate towards you is only less intense than the vengeful animosity they bear to the Irish people, you used that eloquence which time has made a habit, to champion eviction, to pull down the thatched roof, to drive the widow and the child upon the world.
The torrent of your invective, the ripple of your reasoning, the easy current of your logic, were alike employed to blur the poor man’s cause, to cast shame upon the people, to libel liberty.
You did more than all this, Sir— for the wrong doer ever carries in his wrong some measure of his punishment— you stood there to carve above the grave which your enemies had dug for you, the final sentence upon your political life ; and to write in characters that will last for ever the sorrowful epitaph of your own error.

And never since a minister first spoke in Parliament dX Westminster had any man such a chance of writing his [ 3 ] name large upon the tree of time.
This Ireland had long been waiting for you.
For seven hundred years the furrows of her bosom had lain fallow waiting for the seed of justice; for seven hundred years the veins of her heart had yearned for liberty, and her eyes had strained through tears and blood to catch the sheen of the dove of peace amid the black ravens of war your country has sent her ; but justice, peace and liberty came not to her ; and never in all that vast period did the rising sun upon her hill tops let her read across the narrow strip of sea one message of sorrow for the past and hope for the future.
To you she felt she had a right to turn.

You had been the champion of strange men in distant lands.

You had raised your voice in defence of people writhing under foreign rule, or vainly struggling in the grasp of tyranny.

You had climbed to the pinnacle of home power on the ladder of foreign liberty; and you had been ready at times, in the pauses of distant enterprises in the cause of freedom, to listen to the nearer pleadings of your fellow beings.
And what, Sir, has been the result of her appeal to you?

Out of the depths of her misery she called to you ; out of the long accumulated agony of her hunger and her thirst and fever, she asks you for food, for rest, for shelter, and you offer her a rod.

You, the champion of the full-fed landholders of Bulgaria.

You, the advocate of the peasant seated in plenty amid the You, the upholder of rentless Sclave and Tuscan hills.
prosperous Servian, and olive-fatted Ionian, have nothing to give this weary, starving, maddened Celt, save scorn, insult and the gaol.

You could vapour of freedom on the distant Danube, and play the tyrant on the nearer Shannon.

You could invoke the sacred name of freedom in Corfu, only to be the champion of coercion for Cork.
You could play bear­ leader to the Bulgar, the Sclave, the Neapolitan, and jangle his chain in the ears of Europe ; but the quiet extinction of millions of your own people was an every day matter that was beneath the sublime loftiness of your comprehension.

Was the Irishman not sufficiently classic for your ideal of [ 4 ] freedom ?

Did his potatoe want the true flavour of attic salt ?
and was his cabin home so destitute of Homeric association that you could not raise your voice to save it from the crowbar ?

You could not plead ignorance of the state of Ireland.

Your memory roaming over the half-century of your parlia­ mentary experience, could cull some choice specimens of horrible fact from the catalogue of her bitter sorrow.
You had passed the prime of existence when a million of Irish people perished in three years upon Irish soil, and another million fled from the famished land across the ocean to carry into the great western continent the pale and emaciated evidences of English land law.
You were a minister of the crown under that leader who made this awful Irish famine of 1845 and 1846, a stalking horse, under the cover of which he might carry out his long meditated desertion from his political party, and abolish the corn laws of England.

You had seen two generations of Irish people goaded by cruel wrong into fruitless revolt.
You had seen two millions and a half of people pass, for want of food, from a land which, even in its darkest hour of famine, was still sending from its shores food to other lands ; yet out of this vast insight into the foul working of inhuman laws you could not find example for aught save fresh enactments to grind to powder the suffering people.
The spectacle of one “ gentleman ” obliged to reside in England roused your followers to pity and indignation ; but there was no word from your lips, no quicker pulsation in your heart for the hundreds of thousands of peasants forced to fly under the pressure of your land laws, or condemned to a perpetual treadmill of toil upon a wheel of hunger.
You could grow eloquent upon the outrage of a stone flung at the hired server of the Queen’s writ, and you could denounce with horror the crime of a man reinstated by force in the ruins of his dismantled hovel, but you had no words to stamp infamy upon the violators of that other Writ before whose measureless justice the word of king or the law of parliament are but voiceless mumblings and incoherent folly.
[ 5 ] It is now 42 years since the historian of the whigs began one of those essays, in whose brilliant pages lies his best claim to be remembered in the future with words which described you, Sir, as the “ rising hope of those stern and unbending tories,” who were then mutinously following a leader whose moderate opinions they abhorred.

Since these lines were written you have filled the measure of the poets satire upon human inconsistency, by “ boxing the compass” of political thought.
You have also set your sails to catch the passing winds from the rude boreas of rationalism, to the incense breathing zephyrs of ritualism.
Hitherto men have thrown over these vast inconsistencies the veil of indul­ gence to genius, or have explained them as the sincere but eccentric workings of an active brain ; but on the 28th of January, 1881, you have totally reversed all previous wan­ derings, you have doubled back upon 30 years of your career; 11 And as the hare whom hounds and horns pursue, Turns to the place from which at first she flew/’ you have buried yourself in the ranks of your worst enemies, whose tumultuous cheers, as you drove yourself deeper into the mire of their clumsy conservatism, were the natural signals of triumph over your unequalled recantation.
Was no one near to save you from yourself?

No friendly spirit from the dead abyss to breathe a warning whisper in your ear ?

Did not the howls of rapturous applause which greeted you as the apostle of coercion, from mouths which for a quarter of a century had never ceased to curse you in secret, and to scoff at you in public— did not they warn you that the road you had chosen was strange to your footsteps ?
or was it that your self-imposed assault upon the Vicar of Christ, six years ago, has borne the fruit of a just retribution in the self­ delivered destruction of your own reputation ?

T o you alone in England was the task possible of closing those wounds which many centuries of English mis- government had inflicted upon Ireland.

You alone could have spoken words carrying from the height of your great position conviction to the masses in [ 6 ] England, consolation to the Irish people.
You could have said to the people of Ireland : “ During 700 years we English have oppressed and persecuted you ; we have robbed you of liberty and land ; we have hunted you like wild beasts, shot, hanged, gibbetted you ; we filled ships with your help­ less women, and your children made orphans through our fiendish cruelty, and sent them to rot of fever, or to feed the lust or cupidity of the slave holders of our West Indian Islands ; when these deeds of savagery could no longer be enacted in the face of the world, we devised laws of cunning malignity to hold you down.
W e bribed the son to betray his father ; we put a premium on the daughter’s dishonesty to her mother; we condemned you to perpetual poverty; we darkened the light of knowledge to you ; we made your religion a badge of infamy ; your love of country a crime.

W e heaped upon you mockery, contempt and insult.

We set above you as magistrates and rulers men who hated you with deadly hate.

We promoted those who betrayed you, and gave titles to those who sold you.
We cramped and checked every effort of your agriculture or your commerce.

Whenever your long accumulated wrongs forced you into fruitless revolt, we had only the bullet, the halter, or the convict ship to offer you.
A t last, in spite of our every effort, you rose to your feet, guided by a man of wonderful force of character, and impelled by wrongs that had become the byeword of the world, you forced from us the concession of the barest measure of religious toleration ; but these shreds of liberty were flung to you in the insolence of contempt, and the vindictive acknowledgment that they were only given because we dared not longer withhold them.
When famine came upon you, the sole result of laws framed and devised with the avowed intention of keeping the sword of want ever suspended over your head, we saw your millions fall with tardy effort to save them ; and our papers and some of our pulpits wrote and preached the terrible doctrine that there was at length a hope of clearing the Irish peasant from the soil of Ireland.
When famine had made desolate the land, [ 7 ] and the gaunt gables of innumerable ruined homes rose over the silent waste, we warped every measure of land reform from the possible benefit to the people and transferred the land in its huge accumulations into the hands of a class of possessors who differed only in being newer and fresher leeches upon the life-blood of the peasant.

Gradually you recovered from the prostration of that time.
Back across that western ocean, over which our laws had driven you, came the return flood of light and liberty, of even human justice, of all men's equality, from that great republic, which, born out of the throes of our tyranny, fed by our exiles and strengthened by our weakness, stands a colossal continent of refuge to the persecuted sons of men over the world.

Slowly shamed out of our selfishness we flung you again some scraps of justice.
W e refrained from forcing you to support in luxurious idleness a church which you did not belong to.

W e gave you per­ mission to remain upon your own land provided you could pay a tax liable to be fixed by your masters at any rate they chose to inflict upon you.

A couple of severe seasons come ; you are starving ; you find yourselves face to face again with the landlords famine.

tighten their grasp upon the soil; the “ driver,” “ server,” bailiff, policeman, are abroad.
Behind them in gloomy pro­ cession stalks the antithesis o f tyranny— resistance.

Against the “ driver " appears face ; against the “ server ” comes the “ reinstater.” The “ notice to quit ” is letter ” ; Boycott produces followed by the “ threatening Rory ; Bence Jones calls forth Captain Rock.

There is nothing wonderful in all this, except that it should have been possible in the end of the 19th century.

It is my oppor­ tunity, and I will take advantage of it.
Out of the power which is mine, I will set right for all time, this huge injustice, and I will begin by setting it right.

You, Irishmen, shall have to respect the law ; but I, the Prime Minister of England, It is not a question of will first make the law respectable.
mercy before justice, it is a question of justice before injustice, of right before wrong, of truth before falsehood.” The old scenes are reappearing : the blackened [ 8 ] Sir, all these words you might have spoken, and all these things you might have done.

Spoken with the consciousness that your words were true to justice and to yourself ; done with the knowledge that you were laying the first real plank across that awful gulf which yawns between the heart of Ireland and the body of England.
Out of your own free will you have deliberately elected not to make this departure from the evil policy of centuries ; but, on the contrary, to continue the old courses of coercion, which now extend their weary lengths from William of Orange to yourself.
Perhaps after fulfilling that inscrutable law, so often all you were but exemplified in history, which seems to ordain that the wrong done by one nation to another cannot be undone save through a bitter expiation ; and that in first inoculating with the virus of coercion your intended agrarian reform, you were only the unconscious instrument of the punishment to England fore­ shadowed by the poet Spencer when he wrote : “ It is to be feared that Almighty God reserveth her (Ireland) for some secret scourge which shall by her come into England.” I f you have imagined that you could persuade the Irish people to reverence a bad law merely because it was a law, or meekly to bow their backs to the rod of coercion, and then to accept with gratitude a lightening of their burdens, you are but little aware of that true liberty which the Roman Catholic faith teaches to its followers.
That right of private judgment which you claim to exer­ cise in matters of God we demand in matters of man.

The infallibility of our faith beyond the grave teaches us the fallibility of all things human upon earth, enables us to judge of right and wrong, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, by standards of reason that are not the dictates of the varying opinion of kings, lords or commons.

I have the honour to be, etc., etc., A N IR IS H C A T H O L IC .