The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1885-11-28 00:00:00

MR. PARNELL'S MANIFESTO TO THE
IRISH ELECTORS.

The following Manifesto to the Irish voters in
Great Britain has been submitted to Mr. Parnell,
and by him approved, and ordered to be circu-
lated :

To our Countrymen in England and Scotland.
The Liberal party are making an appeal to the
confidence of the electors at the General Election
of 1833, as at the General Election of 1880, on false
pretences. In 1880 the Liberal party promised
peace, and it afterwards made unjust war. Economy
and its Budget reached the highest point yet at-
tained. Justice to aspiring nationalities, and it mer-
cilessly crushed the national movement of Egypt
under Arabi Pasha, and murdered thousands of
"Arabs rightly struggling to be free." To Ireland
more than to any other country it bound itself by most
solemn pledges, and these it most flagrantly violated.
It denounced coercion, and it practised a system
of coercion more brutal than that of any previous Ad-
ministration- Liberal or Tory. Under this system
juries were packed with a shamelessness unprecedented
even in Liberal Administration, and innocent men
were hung or sent to the living death of penal servi-
tude; 1200 men were imprisoned without trial; ladies
were convicted under an obsolete Act, directed against
the degraded of their sex, and for a period every
utterance of the popular press and of the popular
meeting was as completely suppressed as if Ireland
were Poland, and the Administration of England a
Russian autocracy; the representation of Liberalism
in Ireland were men like Mr. Forster and Lord
Spencer, who have left more hateful memories in Ire-
land than any statesman of the century. The last
declaration of Mr. Gladstone was that he intended to
renew the very worst clauses of the Coercion Act of
1882, and if our long-delayed triumph had not turned
the Liberal Government from office, Lord Spencer
would at this hour be in Dublin Castle. Coercion
would be triumphant in Ireland, and the landlords,
ti instead of making the reasonable abatements e-
n-anded by the depression of agriculture, and con-
ceded by every landlord in England and Scotland,
would be evicting wholesale, with the encouragement
of Lord Spencer and the backing of police, sol-
diery, coercion magistrates, and filled gaols.
The Liberals began by menacing the Established
Church, and, under the name of free schools,
made an insidious attempt to crush the religious
education of the country to establish a system of
State tyranny, and intolerance, and to fetter the right
of conscience which is as sacred in the selection of the
school as in the free selection of one's church. The
cry of Disestablishment has been dropped, the cry of
Free Schools has been explained away, and the tv
last cries left to the Liberal party, are the so-called
Reform of Procedure, and a demand to be indepen-
dent of the Irish party. Reform of Procedure means
a new gag, and the application to enemies of
Radicalism in the House of Commons of the despotic
methods, and the mean machinery of the Birmingham
Caucus. The specious demand for a majority against
the Irish party is an appeal for power to crush all
anti-Radical members in Parliament first, then to
propose to Ireland some scheme doomed to failure
because of its unsuitability to the wants of the Irish
people, and finally to force down a halting measure of
self-government upon the Irish people by the same
methods of wholesale imprisonment by which dura-
bility was sought for an impracticable Land
Act of 1881. Under such circumstances we
feel bound to advise our countrymen to place
no confidence in the Liberal or Radical party,
and, so far as in them lies, to prevent the govern-
ment of the Empire falling into the bands of a party
so perfidious, treacherous, and incompetent. In no
case ought an Irish Nationalist to give a vote, in our
opinion, to a member of the Liberal or Radical Party,
except in some few cases in which courageous fealty
to the Irish cause in the last Parliament has given a
guarantee that the candidate will not belong to the
servile and cowardly, and unprincipled herd that
would break every pledge and -*elate every principle
in obedience to the call of the Wnip, and the mandate
of the Caucus. The executive of the National League
will communicate the names of the candidates whom
they think would be excepted from the terms of this
manifesto. In every other instance we earnestly
advise our countrymen to vote against the men who
coerced Ireland, deluged Egypt with blood, menaced
religious liberty in the school, freedom of speech in
Parliament, and promise to the country generally a
repetition of the crimes and follies of the last Liberal
Administration.

(Signed) T. P. O'CoNson,
President of the Irish National League of Greet

Britain.
Justin M'Cartby, Thomas Sexton, T. M. Healy, J.
E. Redmond, James O'Kelly, J. G. Biggar (Exeou-
tive).