IRELAND'S CLAIM TO SELF-DETERMINATION

New Zealand Tablet, 20 February 1919, Page 11

IRELAND'S CLAIM TO SELF-DETERMINATION

CARDINAL O’CONNELL’S POWERFUL ADVOCACY. His Eminence Cardinal O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston, U.S.A., gave the following address at Madison Square Garden, on Tuesday night, wherein he emphasised the fact that “Justice to Ireland will prove that the war’s aims were won,” says the New York American of December 15: In finally yielding to the repeated urgent invitations of your committee to be present here at this significant meeting to-night, I have listened to the advice of duty alone. As the case was presented to me it became clear to my mind that to stay away would be tantamount to the evasion of a grave obligation to my faith, my country, and my race. "When the voice of that sacred trinity of motives calls, no man with a Christian conscience can refuse to rise and follow it, no matter what the cost or the sacrifice. I had to choose between convenience, conventionality, and duty. I have made my choice, and here I stand. The Irish people through all the painful vicissitudes of their history have been faithful, as no other people in all the world, to the Christian faith. The most Christian country in the world to-day, according to the testimony, even of her enemies, is Ireland. When her children, fleeing from an intolerable condition of servitude under a foreign domination of all freemen, came in pitiable exile to these shores of free America, they brought with them the noblest virtues of Christian souls. Where even to-day would the Church in America be—for that matter in the whole English-speaking world, England included but for the fidelity, the great-heartedness, the unquenchable devotion of the children of Erin ? Is it possible that any of us bishops or priests of America could ever be guilty of forgetting that to the heroic generosity of the Irish we owe such glorious monuments to faith as the superbly beautiful Cathedral of this wonderful city, dedicated to Ireland’s patron saint and erected by the sacrifices of his faithful sons and daughters ? _ What is true of this noblest Christian shrine in America’s greatest city is equally true of thousands and thousands of humbler fanes in humbler communities all over the land. Can any of us among the Church’s leaders ever remain silent and inactive when there is at stake the welfare of the people to whom we owe our very daily bread and the roof that shelters us ? There is no legitimate length, no limit within Christian law, to which I and every prelate and priest of America should not be glad and happy to go when the cry of the longsuffering children of the Gael comes to us, and when as now, before the tribunal of the whole world, the sacred cause of justice to every nation and every people is to be given a public hearing. It is because the people of Ireland have solemnly kept their sacred word, given to their great Apostle, to be faithful to Peter’s successor as they would be faithful to Christ, that they have felt the heel of a foreign despot mercilessly grinding them down into the very dust of humiliation. Yes, let us say it frankly and openly, for it is the truth is the fidelity of Ireland to all she holds most sacred which has. been the chief cause of her offending. , re we whose lives are dedicated to the eternal" principle for which Ireland has become a martyr among the nations so bitten by mere worldly interests as to be mute in this day when all the world of brutal might is summoned into court? God forbid!

. :In God's name let us # now -speak- out fearlessly for God's cause, for the cause* of justice to all- weak and strong, small and great, or let us be forever silent. - '- If we look back upon what has happened during the last four years, we shall see that conditions, hitherto accepted as permanent and absolutely unchangeable, have been so completely and . entirely transformed that almost nothing remains of them to remind us of what once stood as firm as Gibraltar. It is as if the elemental forces had suddenly asserted themselves and had completely overrun the earth. The kaleidoscope of the world has been shaken and the bits of colored glass in the child's toy have rushed into new combinations which puzzle the eyes of our brain. One after another thrones have been overturned and empires have fallen. Disorder has broken loose upon the earth, and unless some power greater than the forces of anarchy prevails, all Europe— the world—willbe shaken to the foundations of civilisation. The great war is oyer now, but he who fancies that because the great war is over universal peace will appear on scheduled time has a great disillusion ahead of him. No, unless now that the war is over, justice begins her rightful reign over the whole earth, there may be a momentary lull, but enduring peace will not be attained. It was for justice that humanity fought, and humanity will still be ready to go on with even fiercer wars until justice holds full sway. Be not deceived by false prophets. . Diplomacy which failed so utterly to preserve the peace of the world will not succeed alone in bringing it back. Underneath the smooth and cool phrases and barren formulas of a diplomacy which has forgotten its own purposes, we can even now hear the mysterious stirring of elemental forces striving urgently to burst through the cryptic formularies of a decadent system, striving to get into articulate speech what suffering humanity wants to say, striving with the impatience of agonising multitudes to stop the babble of bribed officialdom that honest men may be heard, striving to articulate in all the dialects of the world the word, which heeded, will help the staggering earth to recover itself; unheeded, will plunge the whole tottering world into universal anarchy. America is far away from the real theatre of mighty changes. But even America will not easily escape a movement so universal as now is visible on every horizon. • What is that movement? It is the pent up longing in the hearts of a dozen nations for the right to rule themselves. The doom of autocracy has already sounded. The silent millions of Russia, patient for centuries, have rushed madly into the vortex of revolution. Even in Germany, which seemed so content with itself, a new force is pushing out the older forms. Obviously, therefore, we are at the end of a period, and a new one is beginning. It is strange that when Poland and Servia and Czechs and the Slovaks and the Serbs and the Ukranians are clamoring for national rights and national recognition that Ireland, for full seven centuries dominated by a foreign rule acquired only by force, and even to-day exercised by force, should now more than ever call upon the world, but most of all upon America, as the bountiful mother of true freedom, to help her regain the treasure stolen from her, and reinstate her in full possession of her complete liberty. If in the blaze which the great war enkindled, various tribes and families of the ;human race beheld as with a new light their claim to separate consideration, is it any wonder that the people of Ireland, too, had even a clearer and a stronger vision of their age-long inheritance ? Ireland's position as a nation is nothing new which the war has just succeeded in creating. Never since the day her crown was stolen has she ceased to claim it back. In every century for 700 years by protest, by appeal, by Parliament, by arms, when other means seemed futile, but in any event, by one means or another as she found it in her power to use them, Ireland has never failed to keep alive her own sense of distinct nationhood, and impress it as palpably, as

conditions would allow, , upon a listening, world* As a profoundly Christian nation, she has clung to the law of God in all these demonstrations, of her. loyalty to herself. Rarely, very rarely, indeed, has she permitted even cruelty to goad her into forgetting it. ; But ever and always every method she adopted, every leader who spoke her cause, every victory won, every defeat suffered,- every weapon used, every strategy designed, ever and ever and ever, the same ultimate purpose is clearly visible, and that purpose is the vindication of Ireland's right to government only by consent of the governed.

That is the principle which ultimately won America's freedom; and it is because America" understands that principle that Ireland to-day relies upon America to echo it throughout the world for Ireland's liberty. Is it the Bolsheviki only who are to be acknowledged as free? Is it because, being Catholic, the Irish people repudiate Bolshevism that they are now to be repudiated and their just claim forgotten and neglected ? Let them beware in time who encourage by their actions and words to-day before the court of the world such dangerous conclusions as these. Is it really true that the blood of millions has been shed that right alone should rule the world, and that the monster "of brute f orce, might, which in many places besides Germany has dominated the fate of millions of human beings should be deposed for ever ? Is that really true ?

or is it to be still merely a cloak to hide indefensible, selfish purposes and to be dispensed ad libitum as governments feel inclined and to observe or ignore it as they like?

Was the great war a conflict for true freedom under right for all alike, or was it a grim hoax played upon the ingenuous by the shrewd manipulators of clever phrases? These are all questions' which any man in the streets who has ears can hear to-day. The world of honest, trustful men is waiting for the answer, a«d woe to the world if that answer be not honest, frank, and true. Surely since the peace of the world depends upon the answer it is the solemn duty of a! 1 of us, especially of those of us whose duty it is to hold up before all alike the great principles of Christian morality by which alone, mankind can live, to speak out fearlessly and clearly, lest being found faithless in such a world crisis we forfeit forever our right to be listened to by honest men. If faith is to survive this hour of universal groping and striving, the men of faith must speak. If they are silent now, then whose the blame if all faith perishes from the earth? Is that, then, the real meaning of Malachy's dread prophecy— religio depopidata? The deepest purpose of this meeting is that faith may prevail—faith in governments, faith in rulers and congresses, and all that set of divine principles and influences and human agencies by which the world is held in order. This war, we were told again and again by all those responsible for the conduct of the war, was for justice to all, for the inviolable rights of small nations, for the inalienable right, inherent in every nation, of self-determination. The purpose of this meeting to-night is very specific. The war can be justified only by the universal application of those principles. Let that application begin with Ireland. Ireland is the oldest nation and the longest sufferer. If these principles are not applied m her case, no matter what else may be done there will be no com P lete J ustice ' no genuine sincerity believable, and the war not bringing justice will not bring peace. •„ Who was it who by the enunciation of these great principles united the peoples of the whole suffering earth? It was our own President— Wilson of America, now Wilson of the world. To-morrow he lands at Brest-Brest, the very port out from which County Arthur Dillon sailed with his three thousand Irish troops to aid America to obtain from England the very principle of self-determination which to-day

Ireland demands, and which we of America, in accordance with the principles enunciated by our President; to-day. also are determined by every legitimate and lawful Christian means to aid Ireland to obtain. For Ireland equally with America fought in this conflict for right. - America has fought in this war not for selfish aims. She has given her best blood, her hardest toil, and her enormous wealth, and in return gets not one foot of soil, not a single material gain. She has a right to demand that for which alone she made such tremendous sacrificesjustice to all.

Let the test of sincerity be Ireland. Then we will he convinced thai, truth still lives.

Ireland must be allowed to tell the world freely what she wants, how she wishes to be governed. Speak up, Ireland make the world hear you! Wake up, England; for the world is watching you! May God grant that the voice of Ireland be heard, and that at last peace, entering Europe through Ireland's freedom, bring even to England its blessings and its fruits. I firmly believe that the day that England honestly faces her full duty to Ireland and fulfils it faithfully God will bless her as she has not known His blessing for many centuries. For as with the individual soul, so with the soul of a nation, a clear conscience is the only door to happiness.