Ireland as it is, and as it would be under Home RuleBuckley, Robert John
History
Ireland as it is, and as it would be under Home Rule
Buckley, Robert John
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Irish question
The country people call this place "the back of God-speed," "the back
of the world," and "the divil's own hunting ground," but why they do
it nobody seems to know. The village is on the road to nowhere, and I
dropped on it, as it were, accidentally, during a long drive to the
remotest end of Galway Bay. Yet even here I found civilised people who
regard the proposed College Green Parliament with undisguised
aversion. Not the inhabitants, but Irish tourists, bent on exploring
the wildest and remotest nooks of their native land, among them a
Dublin barrister, whose critical analysis of the powers proposed to be
entrusted to the unscrupulous and self-seeking promoters of the Land
League may prove useful and interesting to non-legal English readers.
A Galway gentleman having during the drive pointed out a large number
of desolate mansions rapidly falling into ruin, the conversation
turned on the universal subject, and my legal friend embarked on a
dissertation on the iniquity of the Gladstone land laws, which have
had the effect of ruining a large number of the country gentry of
Ireland, driving them from their native shores, impoverishing the
landlords without any perceptible benefit to the tenants, who appear
to be no better off than ever. What surprised him most was the arrant
nonsense talked by the English Gladstonians, and the blindness and
apathy of the English people generally, who in his opinion were being
gradually led to the brink of a frightful abyss, which threatened to
swallow up the prestige and prosperity of the British people. He
said:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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