IRELAND AND AMERICA.

Taihape Daily Times, 25 June 1918, Page 4

IRELAND AND AMERICA.

Under the tittle “Ireland and America Still Stand Together,” the Philadelphia Ledger publishes an impressive appeal to the Irish not to desert in the war its two best friends—the Tricolour and the Stars and Stripes. Commenting upon Mr. Lloyd George’s speech and his references to America, it says:—“The vast majority of the American people would feel a genuine glow of friendly approbation towards the British Parliament, if at last it established an Irish Legislature on College Green. But the American people must have the courage and clarity ,of vision to assure Mr Lloyd George, his Cabinet, and Parliament that it stands squarely behind him and them in the conviction .that there is no conceivable adequate excuse for any people who profess to love liberty to stand aside in indifference, when the united democracies of the world are in the death grip of a still undecided battle with the only despotism on which is posibly strong enough £o-day to trample out freedom among mankind. America will not for a moment forget that Ireland enlisted before we did. But we are now in it. Will the Green Flag, which waved proudly beside ours in safety and fair-weather comradeship of peace, furls itself and retire to the tent of Achilles when the sun is hidden by the smoke of battle? If the House of Lords'should show a belated Bourbonism and kill Irish. Home Rule, it should itself be killed politically. America would be more than impatient at any such criminal blundering; but, in any case, American opinion will expect the chivalrous Irish to fight for freedom, for American as well as Irish liberty for usecour of Belgium, for the salvation of France. They cannot ‘spite England* without betraying their historicfriends, faithful through every trial, and without surrendering liberty herself to the ravisher.”