Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
History
Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Irish question
"If the craving for national institutions, and the disaffection bred in
this void of the Irish people's heart, seem to us irrational and even
insane, in the absence of any more substantial grievance, we ought to
ask ourselves what would become of our own patriotism if we had no
national institutions, no objects of national loyalty and reverence,
even though we might be pretty well governed, at least in intention, by
a neighbouring people whom we regarded as aliens, and who, in fact,
regarded us pretty much in the same light. Let us first judge ourselves
fairly, and then judge the Irish, remembering always that they are more
imaginative and sentimental, and need some centre of national feeling
and affection more than ourselves."[50]
And all this was written sixty-seven years after the Union of 1800.
Mr. Goldwin Smith then deals with the subject of the Irish and Scotch
unions much in the same way as Mr. Lecky.
"The incorporation of the Scotch nation with the English, being
conducted on the right principles by the great Whig statesman of Anne,
has been perfectly successful. The attempt to incorporate the Irish
nation with the English and Scotch, the success of which would have
been, if possible, a still greater blessing, being conducted by very
different people and on very different principles, has unhappily failed.
What might have been the result if even the Hanoverian sovereigns had
done the personal duty to their Irish kingdom which they have
unfortunately neglected, it is now too late to inquire. The Irish Union
has missed its port, and, in order to reach it, will have to tack again.
We may hold down a dependency, of course, by force, in Russian and
Austrian fashion; but force will never make the hearts of two nations
one, especially when they are divided by the sea. Once get rid of this
deadly international hatred, and there will be hope of real union in the
future."[51]
Mr. Goldwin Smith finally proposes a "plan" by which the "deadly
international hatred" might be got rid of, and a "real union" brought
about. Here it is.
"1. The residence of the Court at Dublin, not merely to gratify the
popular love of royalty and its pageantries, which no man of sense
desires to stimulate, but to assure the Irish people, in the only way
possible as regards the mass of them, that the sovereign of the United
Kingdom is really their sovereign, and that they are equally cared for
and honoured with the other subjects of the realm. This would also tend
to make Dublin a real capital, and to gather and retain there a portion
of the Irish talent which now seeks its fortune elsewhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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