THE IRISH FREE STATE.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 February 1922, Page 8

THE IRISH FREE STATE.

BORN AT 2.20 A.M., DECEMBER 6, 1921. A GREAT TRIUMPH FOR THE PRIME MINISTER. London, Dec. 9. “I am overjoyed to hear the splendid news you have ju§t sent me. 1 congratulate you with all my heart on the successful termination of these difficult and protracted negotiations, which is due to the patience and conciliatory spirit which you have shown throughout, and I am indeed happy in some small way to have contributed by my speech in Belfast to this great achievement.” —George, R.I. “We have made one error recurrently in our treatment o-f Irish problems. “We have paid far too little attention to those things which are idealist and sentimental. One of the Irish delegates said across the Conference table, ‘You cannot quite dismiss us and our claims and our history in that way. W’e too are an ancient parent state, and we have through the centuries flung our sons and settlers into every corner of the habitable and civilised globe,’ That claim is true; that claim has modified the fundamental view which we have adopted and by which we stand.” The Lord Chancellor. The historic peace terms with Sinn Fein create an Irish Free State within the British Commonwealth of Nations. That State, under a Governor-General as the* representative of the Crown, will have power to make its own laws through a Parliament and an Executive Government. “Ireland will* be placed in the same position as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The state will be known as the Irish Free State.” In those triumphant words the Lord Chancellor announced on Tuesday that the age-long Irish controversy was settled. And the triumph is not only that of the Prime Minister and of Sinn Fein —but of Sir Campbell-Bannerman, who being dead yet speaketh, for it was he who made the heroic settlement with South Africa, which is the model of the Irish settlement to-day. AN HISTORIC DAY.

It was early on Tuesday morning that “the representatives of the British Government and the accredited plenipotentiaries of Sinn Fein put their names ito a document which the Lord Chancellor believes will be memorable in history, and on which he is prepared and his colleagues are prepared to ask for and abide by the suffrages of their fellow countrymen.” The historic agreement between Qie Government and Sinn Fein was signed by the following: Britain. —Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Churchill.

Ireland. —Mr. M. Collins, Mr. A. Griffith, Mr. G. Duffy. The Star's Political Correspondent, who was in Downing Street till 2.30 a.m. on Tuesday, awaiting the result of the Irish Conference, gives this glimpse o-f the scene outside the Prime Minister’s, house.

“A score or so of journalists, fnostly London morning paper men; a few provincial journalists and representatives of American papers, a few taxis waiting for us, two motorcars for the Sinn Fein delegates, a policeman or two, and a messenger, sound asleep in his box, and the envy of us all—such was the group collected in Downing Street this morning at 2.15, when we leajned that an agreement with Sinn .Fein had been reached.” THE SOUTH AFRICAN MODEL. It was the high honor of the Lord Chancellor to give to the country on Tuesday a brilliant resume of the main conditions of the settlement, and it was interesting to note tfie great emphasis which he placed on the South African model and the remarkable coincidence of dates. “No arrangement could have been happier than that the' terms of peace should be first announced to the world by Galloper Smith,” says the Westminster Gazette. “We shall,” said the Lord Chancellor, “try the experiment in the most generous form upon the lines upon which it was successfully tried in South Africa. “1 am bold enough to hope even now that it may be that Ireland will reproduce the lessons of patience and of statecraft which were first taught or almost taught in this Empire by the happenings in South Africa in the last 17 years. “We propose, so far as the affairs of Southern Ireland are concerned, not to enter upon this arrangement in the spirit of men who would be parsimonious in that which was given, and, with one single important reservation, we place Ireland in precisely the position of Canada, of Australia, of New Zealand, and of »South Africa. “There is no power that is given to any one of those great self-governing Dominions that we do not equally concede to th 6 State which is to be creat’d, and that State will be known as the Irish Free State.

“There is precedent in this Empire for the-*creation of a nation—a constituent and loyal part of this Empire. There is precedent in the history of the Orange Free State, a community torn by bitter discord, ravaged within our memories by bloodshed, and to-day by no means the least loyal part of bis Majesty’s Dominions.” The Lord Chancellor pointed out a remarkable coincidence that to Ireland would be given “the privileges they gave to South Africa, strange to say, on the very day the last soldier had been withdrawn from South Africa, and he hoped that in Ireland there would be a reproduction of what had happened in South Africa.”

OUR GENIUS FOR GOVERNMENT. “Great Britain,” says the Times, “has gone to lengths of generosity greater than many of her sternest critics have ever demanded. Viewed as the world will view them, these are indeed fitting peace terms to mark the (•lose of an age of discontent and mistrust, and the beginning of a new era of happiness and mutual understanding. They proclaim that the genius of the British nation for government is not dead, and that our statesmen have not lost the ancient secret of our national greatness. “If the signatories to the agreement have surmounted difficulties that have defied the statecraft of generations, and have solved the problem that centuries found insoluble, Englishmen will thank them, one and all, and will rejoice with the King in the spirit of his message to the Prime Minister.” THE PRIME MINISTER’S VICTORY. “The Prime Minister adds one of the greatest of his achievements to his re«ord,” the Political Correspondent

of the Daily Chronicle. “He will not be able to go to Washington. But from all parts of the Empire he received a multiJ tude of telegrams of congratulation on what, it is hoped, will be the settlement : of the age-old problem. It was one of the happiest days in his life.” I “It is, perhaps, the greatest of our political achievements, and certainly it 'has been the most difficult,” says the Chronicle. “Tc Gladstone belongs the honor of lighting the torch, to Mr. Lloyd George the even greater honor of carrying it home.”