IRISH AFFAIRS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1353, 28 September 1886, Page 2

IRISH AFFAIRS.

TO THB EDITOR. Sib, — la your issue of the 24th instant you are very severe on Ireland and the Irish. If prosperity is to be restored the foremost thing to_ be is to jremove the cause of the misery which das existed ever since the Union. How is this to be done? Simply by granting Home Rule. The outrages which you allude to the Land Leaguers have been striving to end by depriving the landlords of the power to goad and oppress the people into desperation. Except by the landlords there are no outrages in any part of Ireland worth mentioning, except in Belfast, and these are the direct fruit of a Cabinet Minister’s incendiary harangues. Monstrous outrages on life and property have been perpetrated on the peasantry for generations, not in certain parts of the country, but all over it; and yet you do not condemn these I The leaders of the Home Rule agitation are under no obligation to assist any English Government in upholding the supremacy of infamous laws, against which the Home Rulers have thousands of times protested and declared that those infamous laws must, of necessity, produce crime. The private rights of the people have been violated. so long and continuously that they have been treated worse than negroes of Carolina. The question which some one asks—“ Would

it not be the height of folly to place all the property and intelligence of Ireland helplessly * at the feet of the Land League ? is utterly absurd. Is it not the height of folly to suppose that all the property and Intelligence of Ireland are opposed to the Land League, or rather the National League ? We know that nearly all the intelligence is in favour of Home Buie ; property cannot speak I The outrages to which you refer as a re* sponse to Sir Bedvers Bullet are the direct effect of outrages ten thousand times worse perpetrated by the landlords, supported by those same laws which you seem so anxious to enforce. Bemove the cause, the effect will cease.

You tell us of a “ cruel and cowardly outrage ” committed near Me wry, in which two cows and a goat suffered. I hope God will reward you for your tender heart. You have much sympathy for oowa and goats, but none whatever for human beings unless they he “ loyal.” I will tell you what oeeorred ia the county Kerry last February. Many families wßre ejected, not because they refused to pay rent, but because the landlord, wished to see them suffer. Among them was a maiden of twenty years of age, who was 111 of typhus fever. The miserable cabin that sheltered her was thrown down, and she wai carried out into the driving sleet and rain to die — and she did die !' If your sympathy be not confined to cows and goats, perhaps you would denounce the perpetrators of this cowardly murder—perpetrated in virtue of your favorite laws, and enforced by the licenced and liveried assassins of the English Government] The Castieblayney paragraph is too absurd for notice. Most likely you got it from the Dublin Express. Competent observers are quite right in saying that the people have lost all regard for the law in some district; and I aid never they never had any respect for laws made by an alien and hostile legislature tooppress and plunder them. The tenants do not refuse to pay any rent —they refuse to pay a rent which the land cannot produce. The Act passed which struck at the root of all English ideas as to the relation of landland and tenant was of soma little use; but you reveal the source of all the trouble by your remarks on that Act. It is always English ideas which must be enforced. Irishmen are to have no say in their own affairs! We do not want Englishmen’s ideas, or themselves meddling in our affairs. We are quite competent to manage them ourselves. Mr Parnell does not demand thatihe landlords should receive only “prairie value.” But the people who added all to that prairie value are manifestly entitled to at least sans of the value. Mr Parnell has actually bought some land for the tenants at twenty-onayears’ purchase! Lord Salisbury’s Government was very generous in lending at a low rate of interest five millions of money to purchase their 1 o'dings—bat at the landlords’ p ice ! You do not tell us that his Government, and every other English Government, have annually robbed us of double that amount. How is it possible for Ireland to prosper so long as this wretched antagonism to property, which belongs to the people, which has been created by their own sweat and toil, exists ? They who produce everything have no protection for anything. So long as an alien and a tyrannical Government enforce on the Irish people the unjust laws which the people have had no hand iu making, and which they are under no moral obligation to obey, so long there cannot be either peace or prosperity. What Ireland wants is protection from the murderous instincts of the landlords, which drive the people to violation of the law, cruel and unjust as they are, and this can be attained only by conceding the just demands of nine-tenths of the people. Give them Home Buie, and then peace and contentment will follow. Trade flourished before the Union—it has been crashed by English legislation. Irishmen do not want capital to flow into their country, they want to prevent Englishmen robbing them of their own. The educated and mercantile classes do not stand aloof from the Home Bale movement— they are, on the contrary, its bone and sinew. The Irish Americans know the bondage in which their countrymen at home exist, and coasequently aid them in their efforts to shake off an odious tyranny. The laborer Is worthy of his hire, and so is an Irish MJ?. Our colonial legislators do not turn up their noses at what is called an honorarium; than why should Irishmen? The British Ministers all get very good screws. Why do you not denounce them as dishonest ? So long as Englishmen have the making of laws which are to be enforced in Ireland, to long there never will be peace or prosperity. When the laws are worthy of being obeyed they will be. Most of the violence which we have lately read of has been produced by the descendant of one of the greatest traitors England ever produced—the infamous Jack Churchill. I am proud to say that the great majority of the English democracy are on our side, and none more rejoices at it than An ißimniiK.