The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-03-12
THE IRISH SITUATION.


The enemies of Home Rule for Ireland
are never weary Of making insidious COM
parsons between the content of Scotland
and the discomfort of Ireland. The COM
parison of ireland with Scotland is abb
surd. The antecedent conditions are not
the same. Scotland never came to Eng
land by conquest but by peaceful union,
when James the Sixth was called to the
throne of England. Scotland from the
first was well treated and her national
pride respected as she would not have
been had she simply been raided, robbed,
captured and conquered by Anglo-Norman
English bows and spears and treated like
a quarry slave for seven hundred years.
Scotland has none of the vices or the
wrongs of a conquered and prosecuted peo-
pie to vex her: she came to England's rule
a proud, free people, not conquest, and
England has never attempted such an adj
ministration of the affairs of Scotland,
never enforced such civil and religious
disabilities upon Scotland as she did upon
Ireland, from the violation of the treaty of
Limerick down to the Catholic emancipa-
ton act of 1929.
England has never dared in matters of
either church or state to treat Scotland in
the past as she has treated Ireland. She
conquered Ireland, placed her people in
letters and treated them as Pharaoh did
the IsraeIites when he Knocked and
scourged them because they could not
make bricks without straw. But England
never dared treat Scotland like slave, be-
cause Scotland did not surrender to Eng
land as being a child of conquest She
came not as q slave, but as a free people,
the peers of the proudest Englishman.
William the Thirds name was blackened
by the massacre of Glencoe; the Duke Of
Cumberland behaved like a butcher after
Culloden, but these were episodes of open
war and instruction not against oppres-
sion but in obedience to the sentiment of
hereditary loyalty to the Stuarts. But in
Ireland from the days of Elizabeth down
to 1898 the settled policy of the govern
ment was devised in the spirit of Glencoe
and executed with the brutality of Cum
berland. As consequence of this differ
ence of treatment by England, Ireland and
Scotland are as different today as the
white man of the North, who has always
been free man by inheritance from the
good old colony times, is different from
the freedman of the South, whose father
and mother and all his ancestors back to
good old colony times were slaves.
The evils of the English government
against Ireland in the past are visited
upon England of today. She has made a
nettle of Ireland by past misgovernment,
yet she stamps her feet and swears today
because she cannot handle that nettle as if
it was a lovely rose without thorn. But
even in Scotland it is not all content.
There are home rulers in Scotland. There
Gladstone has his greatest popular
strength. The crofters in Scotland whose
sheep walks have been turned into game
preserves are nearly as miserable as the
Irish, and have been driven by their mis-
cry to fly to Canada, Australia and Amer
lea. The comparison of Scotland and Ire
land is ignorant and superficial in the
light of history. Separated from its acct
dents and coincidents the Irish situation
today stands for a ceaseless and deter
mined constitutional struggle for the grant
of home rule, which the English colonial
dependencies of Canada and Australia en-
joy; home rule that Austria grants to
Hungary and Bohemia; home rule that
the state of Washington enjoys in the
United States.
Mr.. Gladstone says that England when
she assumes to govern Ireland, should give
her a just and humane government accord
ing to the definition of the decent opinions
of mankind. The just Indictment of
England today is not the weakness of her
title to Ireland, which is just as valid as
her title to India, but the fact that from
the accession of William the Third, in
1853, to the accession of William the
Fourth, in 1880, England did not discharge
her moral duty by Ireland, and give her
that Just and humane government with
out which a people can be neither happy
or prosperous. Ireland's fight within the
lines of constitutional agitation for politi-
cal Justice began with Dean Swift's pitiless
indictment of English rule in his DRAPER
Letters
Lord Chesterfield, as viceroy of Ireland,
confessed the reality OF the abuses against
which Swift directed his solemn sarcasm
and unanswerable irony. Burke never
ceased to denounce the awful anti-Cath-
Ollie code. Grattan and Flood forced Eng
land to grant Ireland a domestic lcgisla-
ture. William Pitt promised Catholic
emancipation when he extinguished Graf
tan's parliament and forced the Act of
Union, but George the Third refused to let
Pitt keep his word. Fox. the friend of
Ireland, died before he could do her JUS
tice. O'Connell forced Catholic emancipa-
ton, and Gladstone from 1865 to the pres
ent hour has been Ireland's ablest friend
among English statesmen.
If O'Connell in 1910 could have had the
English support from Peel that Parnell
finally obtained from Gladstone Ireland
would not today need to be governed by a
camp Of 50, 0C0 soldiers. She would need
no more soldiers to hold down her hands
from rebellion than does Scotland.
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THE SUNDAY PoST-INTELLIGENC
Snenial Faetrras of the SuxDAy posrv~-r,1,