A PLEA FOR HOME RULE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 190, 17 November 1876, Page 13

A PLEA FOR HOME RULE.

"It may be said that we have not got very clean hands ourselves. • • . . . Ido not think that we are entitled on all occasions to such uniform and peculiar credit for humanity as we sometimes claim for ourselves. I make that confession frankly. There was a dreadful massacre at Glencoe. There were great atrocities perpetrated at the siege of Badajoz in the Peninsular War; or, coming down to a later period, I am bound to say I cannot defend the proceedings that -were taken at Cephalonia, or more recently in Jamaica. I cannot and will not defend each and all of those proceedings. 1 ' These words are taken from "the splendid and impassioned speech delivered on the historic common of Blackheath by the great orator and statesman, William Ewart Gladstone, to his constituency of Greenwich, and through them to the empire and the world, in condemnation of the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. Mr. Gladstone need not have gone to Cephalonia, or Badajoz, or Jamaica for instances of the brutality of mio-ht by Englishmen, and we believe in our hearts that while these far distant places were on his lips incidents much nearer home were in his heart and memory. Mullaghmaist and Wexford, the excesses at a hireling conquering soldiery in '98, the artificial famine of 46 and 47, the emigrant ship, the convict cell, and the gibbet, which destroyed, not 12,00 C people, but half the population of a country numbering millions of people— these are more likely to have been present to Mr. Gladstone's historic mind than English cruelties on the hereditary enemy of the European continent, or Eastern black. These are not atrocities of very ancient date, and when Mr. Gladstone himself undertook the task of doino- justice to Ireland he must have made himself acquainted with the horrors to to which she had been subjected even in this century and in his ™ £ c T^l ,- As well mi S ht olie ex Pect Bulgaria to forget before 1900 the brutalities of Batak as that Ireland should cease to remember the 300 -women massacred around the Market Cross of Wexford, the faithful men that swung from the disgraceful gibbet the thousands of exiles that were driven from her shores each succeeding year, the convict cells filled with her truest sonß, the hundreds of thousands that starved to death beneath a rule which called itself beneficent and paternal. These are memories which shall never die until Mr. Gladstone, or some other statesman who has the power, prescribes for Ireland what he sees to be the only salvation for the discontented provinces under the suzerainty of the lurk, and that prescription is Home Rule. It is " mild," and it would be •' effectual."—' Ulster Examiner '