Irish Association

“ I admit that one of the reasons why we rejoice is this, that whatever local government they establish in Ireland must assist the Irish people in the demand for their national rights. Every popularly-elected body in Ireland, whatever you may call it, will be a new focus of thought, and will give a new vent for its expression. ”

“ It is that the only way of healing the evils of Ireland,—difficulties of her administration, of giving contentment and prosperity to her people, and of making her a strength instead of a weakness to the empire,—is that the Irish people should have the management of their own domestic affairs ”

“ I think we have a special characteristic of life in this country which is both an outcome of history and remains a profound resource of life in Ireland. If I had to describe this characteristic I would say that we do not divide the purposes of our nation from the values of our community. And this is nowhere more evident than in the powerful continuum of voluntary effort which is so much part of the texture of Irish life. ”

“ In the recent Land Conference I recognise something more valuable even than the financial and legislative results which flowed from it, for it showed that the conception of reliance upon Irishmen in Ireland, not under some future and problematical conditions, but here and now, for the solution of Irish questions, is gaining ground among us. ”

“ It will be the work of the Society to show what a vast influence the Irish element had in building our free commonwealths whose alliance made the first great country of the people, in which with all its faults reposes the hope of the progress of the world into a world of the people instead of one of warring dynasties and vicious religious hatreds, setting nation against nation. We look to this Society for active, earnest, ardent work for the enlightenment, brotherhood and unity of this people first, and of all other peoples in the long event. ”

“ I trust that the opportunity of making a great advance on this question of Irish government will not long be delayed, and when that opportunity comes my firm belief is that a greater measure of agreement than hitherto as to the ultimate solution will be found possible, and that a keener appreciation will be felt of the benefits that will flow to the Irish communities and British people throughout the world, and that Ireland, from being disaffected, impoverished, and discouraged, will take its place as a strong, harmonious, and contented portion of the empire. ”

“ If we accomplish no more than we have accomplished, I am satisfied. I am satisfied that we have saved Ireland's honour. I am satisfied that we should have accomplished more, that we should have accomplished the task of enthroning, as well as proclaiming the Irish Republic as a Sovereign State, had our arrangements for a simultaneous rising of the whole country, with a combined plan as sound as the [111] Dublin plan has been proved to be, been allowed to go through on Easter Sunday. ”

“ For a principle to be fundamental in a country does not mean that it must be absolute. I hope society in Ireland will be organized that the idea of democratic control of its economic life will so pervade Irish thought that it will be in the body politic what the spinal column is to the body—the pillar on which it rests, the strongest single factor in the body. ”

“ It is consoling, too, to our national pride, long wounded by contemptuous references to our industrial incapacity as compared with our neighbours, to find that our latest efforts are regarded by them as worthy of imitation. From the other side of the Channel no less than five County Councils have sent deputations of farmers to Ireland to study the progress of the movement, and already an English Organisation Society, expressly modelled upon its Irish namesake, has been established and is endeavouring to carry out the same work. ”

“ It produced in Ireland a literature which has not been surpassed among any people for its profound and ardent sense of nationality.
The union of the Irish people lay in the absolute community of learning, institutions, and law. Irish law was one of the most striking products of Irish genius. If we know nothing of its beginnings, we see it as a body of custom that spread over the entire [pg 226] country, varying not at all from province to province. ”

“ In the second place, I believe that not merely have we in our Irish policy to satisfy those who live in the island of Ireland itself, encompassed, as Mr. Disraeli once said, by that melancholy ocean, we have not merely to satisfy the Irish themselves within Ireland, but, for the good of our Empire and for the continuity and solidarity of our relations with our brethren across the Atlantic, it is necessary that we should produce an Irish policy which shall satisfy the Irish people. ”

“ That, in carrying out these resolutions, the representatives of the Irish people should always keep in mind the adopting such a prudent and wise course as shall enable them to realise for the Irish nation the greatest possible quantity of good, and as shall also enable them to support and sustain in office, without any violation of principle, the first and only true and honest government that has ever been known in Ireland. ”

“ They have taken the whole of the public affairs of Ireland into their charge. They have taken every public interest in the country under their protection. Whoever wants anything done or attended to, whether he be Catholic, Protestant, or dissenter, now looks to the Home-Rulers, and to them alone. Not the humblest peasant in the land but feels that, if a petty village tyrant has wronged him, the Irish party in the House of Commons will “know the reason why.” ”

“ They are engaged in transforming the universal proprietary of Ireland in order to add materials for their exactions from the living and the moribund. I am told that not less than £5,000,000 are lifted from the Irish people every year by the innumerable agencies of clerical suction which are at work upon all parts of the Irish body, politic and social. ”

“ But at the moment I am dealing only with the influence of politics on Irish social and economic life.
I am aware that any political deficiencies which the Irish may display at home, are commonly attributed to the political system which has been imposed upon Ireland from without. If you want to see Irish genius in its highest political manifestation, it must be studied, we are told, in the United States, the widest and freest arena which has ever been offered to the race. ”

“ The agricultural prosperity of Ireland is a powerful bond of union with England, the nearest and best market for Irish produce. Another bond of union may be found in the grant of legislative independence, or such a modification of the present parliamentary system as may place the disposal of purely Irish interests in the hands of Irish representatives, satisfy the just desires of the patriotic, and leave no room for sentimental grievances to fester into international feuds. ”

“ On the evening of the reassembling of the Society after the War of the Revolution, the President delivered an address in which he said: "Gentlemen, Members of the Charitable Irish Society: I congratulate you on this joyful occasion, that we are assembled again after ten years' absence occasioned by a dreadful and ruinous war of eight years; also that we have conquered one of the greatest and most potent nations on the globe so far as to have peace and independency. May our friends, countrymen in Ireland, behave like the brave Americans, till they recover their liberties." ”

“ It would take too much of my space to recount all the varied activities of the League, all that it did to preserve ancient Irish culture, to make the past live again in the lives of the people, to foster national sports and recreations, to organise Gaelic festivals of the kind that flourished in Ireland's artistic past, to create an Irish Ireland and to arrest the decadence of manners and the Anglicisation which had almost eaten into the souls of the people and destroyed their true Celtic character. ”

“ The soul of Ireland has to be kindled, and it can be kindled only by the thought of great deeds and not by the hope of petty parsimonies or petty gains.
Now, great deeds are never done vicariously. They are done directly and personally. No country has grown to greatness mainly by the acts of some great ruler, but by the aggregate activities of all its people. Therefore, every Irish community should make its own ideals and should work for them. As great work can be done in a parish as in the legislative assemblies with a nation at gaze. ”

“ Throughout their history Irishmen have always wrought better for others than for themselves, and when they unite in Ireland to work for each other, they will direct into the right channel all that national capacity for devotion to causes for which they are famed. ”

“ Their position is that they are Unionists, not merely because it is for the good of Great Britain, but because they hold it to be for the good of Ireland, and it is the Irish argument weighs with them, and if they were convinced it would be better for Ireland to be self-governed they would throw in their lot with the rest of Ireland, which would accept them gladly and greet them as a prodigal son who had returned, having made, unlike most prodigal sons, a fortune, and well able to be the wisest adviser in family affairs. ”

“ The national movement never flagged for a single generation. Never for a moment did the Irish cease from the struggle; in the swell and tumult of that tossing sea commanders emerged now in one province, now in another, each to fall back into the darkness while the next pressed on to take his place. An Anglo-Norman parliament claimed (1459) that Ireland was by its constitution separate from the laws and statutes of England, and prayed to have a separate coinage for their land as in the kingdom of England. ”

“ The recognition by the Liberal party of the rights of Ireland, the visits of English Liberals to Ireland, the work done by Irishmen in English constituencies, are creating a feeling of unity and reciprocal interest between the masses of the people on both sides of the Channel without example in the seven hundred years that have passed since Strongbow's landing. ”

“ For twenty-five years past—with the exception of the abortive Fenian movement—the Irish people have acted as if green flags, denunciation of England, and poetic sunburstry were enough to establish Ireland's claim to national independence.
We trust and believe that a change for the better is coming. Ireland is beginning to see that the men who are able to do something for themselves, the men of judgment and prevision in their own affairs, are likely to bring the best intelligence into national deliberations. ”

“ The policy of “Unionist” leaders is to meet the Irish desire for an uplifting pride in the life of the Irish commonwealth by a flat denial. Ireland, we are told, is not, nor ever has been, nor ever can be, a nation. A disorganized and contentious people, incapable of rightly using any polity Irish or English, we have not, it is said, even the materials of a nation. We are only “material,” to use an old Irish expression, for an Empire. The island in fact was never a kingdom till England gave it a king worthy the name ”

“ But it is alleged that the Irish Legislature, as framed by the Constitution of 1782, gave to the country an uninterrupted flow of prosperity for eighteen years, and hence the volunteer movement was of great benefit to the race, at least temporarily. ”

“ But, proud as we must all feel of Irish services to the Republic ‘on the decks of fame’ and on many a stricken field, is it not rather our duty as an organization to shed the light of history upon Irish services in the council chamber and the law court, in science and scholarship, and the fine arts? In the retrospect of the year that is gone, what Irish-descended American can fail to thrill with pride at the spectacle of that distinguished and at the same time enthusiastic assembly which paid honor to the memory of Augustus St. ”

“ Gradually the people of Ireland were being drawn together. All classes suffered under the laws to abolish Irish trade and industry. Human charities were strong in men of both sides, and in the country there was a growing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners, the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common citizenship. It had proved impossible to carry out fully the penal code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. ”

“ When the history of the Irish Convention comes to be fully recorded, it will be seen that a great desire was universally felt, cordially uttered, in that assembly, to bridge over the gulf which divides us from yesterday in Ireland, and to recover for the future much of what was admirable, valuable and lovable in a past that is not unkindly remembered. ”

“ It is possible that if Home Rule compels Irishmen to turn their whole minds to Irish affairs, the so-called representatives who misrepresent their country may be dismissed from the world of politics, and the Parliament at Dublin be filled with members who, whether they come from the North or from the South, whether Unionists or Home Rulers, whether Roman Catholics or Protestants, whether landowners, tenant farmers, ministers of religion, merchants, or tradesmen, represent the real worth and strength of the country. ”