Irish independence

“ Ireland is a distinct nation whose just right is sovereign independence. This right has been asserted in every generation, has never been surrendered and never allowed to lapse. We call the nations to witness that to-day as in the past it is by force alone that England holds Ireland for her Empire and not by the consent of the Irish; and that England’s claim to have given the Irish people ‘self-determination’ is a lie: her true attitude being shown by the recent ministerial statement that ‘under no circumstances could any English Government contemplate the ultimate independence of Ireland’. ”

“ Throughout every single hour of seven hundred long years, Ireland has been secretly plotting or openly fighting against England. Not one solitary reign, from Henry II down to Victoria I, but has been marked with Irish dissatisfaction of English rule. Either in the aggregate or in detail, the Irish people have, throughout that long period, been constantly asserting their right to independence, and their unalterable antipathy to the presence of a foreign power upon their shores. ”

“ England has so successfully hypnotized the world into regarding the neighboring conquered island as an integral part of Great Britain that even Americans gasp at the mention of Irish independence. Home rule they understand, but independence! "How could Ireland maintain an independent existence?" they ask. "How could you defend yourselves against all the great nations?" ”

“ It is a favourite line of argument to show that we have no choice between the maintenance of the Union and the concession to Ireland of national independence. The evils of Irish independence are universally reckoned by Englishmen to be so intolerable that we shall never agree to it. ”

“ The object aimed at by the Irish National party—the recovery of Ireland’s national independence, and the severance of all political connection with England—is one that would require the utmost efforts and the greatest sacrifices on the part of the whole Irish people.... I am not one of those who despair of Ireland’s freedom, and am as much in favour of continuing the struggle to-day as some of those who talk loudest against constitutional agitation. ”

“ The (to many) surprising fact became known that the Rising was not an attempt to help Germany or to put Ireland into German possession, but to free Ireland from all foreign influence: that the leaders proclaimed themselves followers of Tone and Mitchel and Davis and Parnell, that they claimed that Irish Nationalism meant according to these exponents (and no man in Ireland ventured to question their authority) Irish independence, nothing less and nothing more. ”

“ The Fenians stood for an Irish Republic, and so do we. No policy which left England in control of the Irish Nation could be regarded as final. There is only one way, and that is to get the absolute and complete independence of Ireland, free from English rule and English domination. ”

“ We will see to it that pharisaism shall be confronted by an Ireland clamouring for independence. And we shall not be friendless. Our race has power in America, in Australia. Ireland’s freedom, too, is essential for the American conception of the freedom of the seas.
The issue is now before us. We are in the birth-time of big changes. Let us not lose the great chance of freedom. Let the Irish Democracy once and for all declare that Ireland is a Nation entitled to sovereign independence. ”

“ The motive passions of the Irish agitation have all along been hatred toward England and a desire to make Ireland a nation, holding her independent place among the nations of the world. This design was proclaimed by the Young Irelanders of 1848 and by the Fenian rebels of 1866; it has been avowed, in intervals of candour, by the present Nationalists themselves. The grant of an Irish Parliament will stimulate rather than appease this thirst for separate national existence. The nearer complete independence seems, the more will it be desired. ”

“ Men of English blood who were absorbed by the Irish nation and who accepted the Irish civilization fought as stoutly for the independence of their adopted (and adopting) country as did the descendants of the Milesians. England could never count on the fidelity to her ideals and policy in Ireland of the second generation of her own settlers. History cannot produce another instance of a struggle so prolonged and so pertinacious. ”

“ The changing of rack-rented farmers into peasant proprietors After years of struggle and sacrifice and increasing strife, the Irish cause has emerged at length triumphantly from the contest, and Ireland is on the highroad to nationhood and independence. Stupendous obstacles had to surmounted, centuries of prejudice had to dissipated, the power of a tyrannical and domineering oligarchy, accustomed to an unquestioned ascendancy, had to be shattered ere the Irish people were in a position to assert their will and to bring the English government to recognize the justice of their claims. ”

“ Their great weakness has lain in the fact that they have had no consistent aim. Some of their leaders have looked for a return to Ireland’s Constitution, and built upon the watchword of the volunteers, ‘The King, the Lords, and the Commons of Ireland.’ Some have dreamed of a complete independence, of an Irish republic shaping its own world policy. Some have wholly distrusted politics, and given their strength to the intellectual, spiritual, or material regeneration of the people. Among these men have been found the sanest practical reformers and the wildest revolutionary dreamers. ”

“ Until Dublin Castle is superseded by a National Parliament and Ireland voluntarily incorporated with the British Empire, as Canada, Australasia, and South Africa have been incorporated, an Irishman resorting to arms to achieve the independence of his country is doing only what Englishmen will do if it be their misfortune to be invaded and conquered by the Germans in the course of the present war. ”

“ The Irish were not prepared for freedom, still less republican freedom. There was not sufficient concert, or patriotism, or intelligence, to secure popular liberty, and the antipathy between the Catholic and Protestant population was too deeply seated and too malignant to hope, reasonably, for a lasting union.
All the measures which have been adopted for the independence and elevation of Ireland have failed, and the country is still in as Condition of Ireland. lamentable a state as ever. It presents a grand enigma and mystery to the politician. ”

“ No, my lords; I acted as an Irishman, determined on delivering my country from the yoke of a foreign and unrelenting tyranny, and the more galling yoke of a domestic faction, which is its joint partner and perpetrator in the patricide, from the ignominy existing with an exterior of splendour and a conscious depravity. It was the wish of my heart to extricate my country from this doubly rivetted despotism—I wished to place her independence beyond the reach of any power on earth. ”

“ Whether they failed or succeeded in wresting the independence and ideals of Ireland for a while from the fell clutch of circumstance, they live with their race forever.
Under Plantagenet and Tudor rule, the Irish leaders presented a sullen but armed resistance. A never completed invasion was met by sporadic raids and successive risings. A race of military outlaws was fashioned, which accounts for much in Irish character today. Previously the Irish, like all Celtic civilization, was founded on the arts, on speech, and on law, rather than on war and feudalism. ”

“ It is an exposition of the national teaching of five Irish leaders, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, James Fintan Lalor, John Mitchel and Charles Stewart Parnell, all of whom held and taught that the national claim of Ireland was for independence and separation; their ghosts haunt the generation which has disowned them, they will not be appeased till their authority is again acknowledged. ”

“ There are, no doubt, in America many patriotic Irishmen who think this far too little for Ireland to demand; who contend she should seek nothing less than total separation and independence; the price, undisguisedly, being civil war with its lottery of risks and chances. However this may be, the Irish people, if ever their voice has been heard for a century, on the 18th of November, 1873, solemnly and publicly spoke for themselves, and their demand so formulated is now before the world. ”

“ Yet the English on the whole seem to be against him in his Irish policy, which is denounced as unpractical, and which his opponents even declare to be on his part an insincere policy, entered upon and pursued solely as a bid for power. It is generally felt among the upper classes that no concession and no boons would satisfy the Irish short of virtual independence of British rule. If political rights could be separated from political power there might be more hope of settling the difficulty, which looks like a conflict between justice and wisdom. ”

“ There is a strong Chartist, or republican, element in England friendly to the Irish claim of legislative independence, and this element, which we hear comparatively little of in America, for reasons it is not necessary to discuss in this history, is growing more powerful as time rolls by, and some day, not very distant, perhaps, is bound to greatly modify the existing governmental system of the British Empire, and render it more popular.
Ireland is very rich in monastic and martial ruins. ”

“ 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 ”

“ An independent nation is, in all essentials, what it has made itself by its own efforts; but a nation conquered, and held in subjugation ever since it had a history, is what its conquerors have made it, or have caused it to become. Yet this reflection does not seem to inspire Englishmen generally with any feeling of shame. The evils of Ireland sit as lightly on the English conscience as if England had done all which the most enlightened and disinterested benevolence could suggest for governing the Irish well, and for civilizing and improving them. ”

“ By all admissions we have made a mess of Ireland. With singular and unwonted perverseness we have refused for more than a hundred years to apply to Ireland the principles of self-government that have justified their application in every province of the Empire that is mainly inhabited by people of our own race. We have risked and we have incurred the disaffection of the Irish themselves; we have imposed on them and on ourselves untold suffering and expense; we have imperilled the whole fabric of our Parliamentary institutions. ”

“ Yet not merely civilization, but the extreme grandeur and magnificence of Ireland in "former times," is the first postulate of all Irish discontent. It is because England has dimmed her glory and overthrown her royal state that Irishmen burn with patriot indignation, and not by any means because she has merely left barbarism and disunion still barbarous and disunited after seven centuries, and has checked, instead of encouraging, the industry and commerce of the land. ”

“ When you destroy national enthusiasm and pride, you have killed a nation. To destroy Ireland as a nation, she must not only be conquered, she must be obliterated. Her people must be swept away and the land filled with Englishmen. And even then the latent life in the soil, the traditions, the sacrifices, the buried patriotism, would come out like an atmosphere and be breathed into the blood of the newcomers, until in a generation or two they would be as Irish and as distinct as the original Celtic people. Irishmen cannot become provincials. ”

“ It drained the national resources—it disgusted the national understanding—it made Ireland disunited, and England at once contemptuous of Irish feeling, and suspicious of Irish loyalty. The safety of the empire obviously rendered it impossible to leave in its rear a nation which might throw itself, at a moment’s notice, into the arms of France, Spain, or America—which had actually solicited a French army, and which still carried on transactions amounting to treason at home, and alliance abroad. Thus, the regenerators of Ireland, instead of raising her to a republic, sank her into a province. ”

“ If we withdraw the Irish Government from Ireland, and put an end to its separate local existence,—surely we should place its management as a portion of the general government, not merely on a footing of equality, but on that of identity, with the executive for other parts of the United Kingdom. ”

“ At the basis of the opposition to Conscription stand the moral rights of Ireland, the very rock as it were of Irish nationality, the rights to choose her own future and to protect her people from the horrors of the European War. If there were any statesmanship left in England to-day it would look to creating harmony between Ireland and England, knowing that the real interest of nations is built thereon. ”

“ Above all, Ireland has been a builder of empires, not for self, but for others, not for filthy lucre, but for God’s cause, honor and freedom. Many are thinking that the difficulties in the face of the Irish Free State are almost insuperable. ”

“ In memory of the long, the hospitable roll of their patriots, in memory of their long fidelities, in memory of their national faith, and of their story of honour and of suffering, the people of Ireland once more claim a government of their own in their native land, that shall bind together the whole nation of all that live on Irish soil, and create for all a common obligation and a common prosperity. An Irish nation of a double race will not fear to look back on Irish history. The tradition of that soil, so steeped in human passion, in joy and sorrow, still rises from the earth. ”