CHAPTER X

CONCLUSION

     “Unsettled questions have no pity for the repose of nations.”

     —­EDMUND BURKE.

The position of the mass of the Irish people with regard to the present form of government has nowhere been more cogently expressed than in the chapter on the Union in the “Cambridge Modern History,” the writer of which describes it as a settlement by compulsion, not by consent; and the penalty of such methods is, that the instrument possesses no moral validity for those who do not accept the grounds on which it was adopted.  If Englishmen get this firmly fixed in their minds they will understand that we regard all Unionist reforms, whether from Liberal or Conservative Governments, as instalments of conscience money, in regard to which, granting our premises, it would be sheer affectation to express surprise or to feign disgust at the lack of effusive gratitude with which we receive them.  “Give us back our ancient liberties” has been the cry of the Irish people ever since George III. gave his assent to the Act of Union.  The ties of sentiment which bind her colonies so closely to Great Britain are conspicuous by their absence in the case of Ireland.  The ties of common interest which are not less strong in the matter of her colonial possessions are, albeit in existence as far as Great Britain and Ireland are concerned, obscured and vitiated by the system of taxation which makes the poorer country contribute to the joint expenses at a rate altogether disproportionate to her means, and which, while making her in this wise pay the piper, in no sense allows her to call the tune.

Never has there been applied in Ireland that doctrine which the Times enunciated so sententiously half a century ago in speaking of the Papal States—­“The destiny of a nation ought to be determined not by the opinions of other nations but by the opinion of the nation itself.  To decide whether they are well governed or not is for those who live under that government.”  If the Times were to apply the wisdom of these words to the situation in Ireland instead of screaming “Separatism” at every breath of a suggestion of the extension of democratic principles in Ireland, it would take steps to secure a condition of things under which the people would not be alienated and would be a source of strength and not of weakness.

Writing in that paper in 1880, at a time when Ireland was seething with lawlessness, Charles Gordon declared—­“I must say that the state of our countrymen in the parts I have named is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone Europe.  I believe that these people are made as we are, that they are patient beyond belief, loyal but broken-spirited and desperate; lying on the verge of starvation where we would not keep cattle.”