The Irish standard. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn. ;) 1886-1920, 1917-05-26
John Richard Green's History of

England" states:
by one OF the revenges of history,
a people cut off from self government
at home had long held power to direct
and confound English politics across
the sea. From 1901 to 1886 10 British
ministries fell on the Irish question.
After the enactment of a union de-
signed in the darkest period of politi-
cal reaction and panic, Irishmen had
wandered among the English working
classes as missionaries of democratic
liberty, had given them models of pop
ular organization, had provided lead
ers to plan the first National Trades
Union,' and to inspire a Chartist agi-
tation. 1t was the Irish who in the
Emancipation Act struck the first ire
mendous blow at the dominance of the
Established Church. in the 1.-THE war
at its extravagant claims to property,
and in the Disestablishment Act at it's
political Importance. In the land
question the Irish had forced the order
of-battle. They gave to English farm
ers and laborers new motive and i'm
petus by the spectacle in Ireland of
an unrestrained landlordism, of it's po-
litical and social bankruptcy, and of
the power of a national movement;
while they compelled the English aris-
tocracy to enter the lists crippled by
their alliance with an agrarian system
! in Ireland developed under penal laws,
land maintained by coercion. In four
teen years the power of the landed
gentry in Ireland was shattered, and
the reverberations of the battle were
felt in England. The first Irish land
act was followed by the first agitation
among English rural laborers since
1884, and by first vain attempt to
give English farmers compensation
for disturbance. The second act was
followed by the first tightening of the
game laws, under which, Bright had
told the country people in 1S45 five
thousand of them were yearly fined,
! imprisoned, or transported; and by a
more effectual compensation for farm
ers-With no voice now raised for the
sacred right Of freedom of contract
Into the chasm that yawned between
England and Ireland, England had
thrown, said Mr.. Goschen, concession
after concession. We have
toppled into it great boulders of prin-
ciple; we have made gigantic parlia-
! mentary sacrifces.'
"It was not eternal principles that
had gone; it was but the form of con-
stitution which England had estab-
lished for herself before the union, and
thought to maintain unchanged after
it. A century of Irish coercion OBJ
scured in the governing country Ben
tham's teaching of scientific 'proce-
dure and regular method of law as the
subjects best protection, and allowed
to creep into popular opinion a notion
of legal administration as a course of
discretion, and of resistance to law as
carrying with it no crime. Ireland
cost the Commons loss of old liberties
through the rule Of debate to carry
coercion, the closure to suspend the
habeas corpus act, and the guillotine
to enact perpetual crimes act, and to
force the commission for the Parnell
trial.
'tThe system of two-party govern
ment, which England had evolved to
suit her own conditions, was over.
turned in the more complex state Gre
ated by the union, when the Irish
party, representing separate interests,
became the model for new groups.
Irish passion was enlisted against their
old antagonist the House of Lords, to
which their people had ever appealed
in vain, and within a generation the
hereditary authority of the aristocracy
was broken and the dominant power
of their house. Before the union of the
Irish people with the working classes
of Great Britain fell the ascendancy
of primo-geniture and the power of
great. estates, shaking to its founda-
lions the old English constitution.