Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, 1920-04-07Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, 1920-04-07
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
_Tuesday, March 30th._--Someone--I suspect a midshipman--has been telling
Mr. BROMFIELD that five British Admirals have been sent to Vienna to
supervise the breaking up of the Austrian Fleet, and that the said Fleet
now consists of three motor-boats. He was much relieved to hear from Mr.
HARMSWORTH that only one Admiral had been sent, and that the disposal of a
Dreadnought, several pre-Dreadnoughts and sundry smaller craft will give
him plenty to do.
There appears to be a shortage of ice in Hull. It is supposed that the
Member for the Central Division (Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY) has not cut so
much as he expected.
The debate on the Home Rule Bill was resumed in a much higher temperature
than that of yesterday. Mr. ASQUITH, as he thundered in carefully-polished
phrases against the "cumbrous, costly, unworkable scheme," earned many
cheers from his followers, and the even greater tribute of interruptions
from his opponents. For a moment he was pulled up, when to his rhetorical
question, "What has Home Rule meant to us?" some graceless Coalitionist
promptly answered, "Votes!" but he soon got going again. Ireland, he
declared, was a unit. The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background
of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and
bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the
Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we
don't trust _you_," came the swift reply from Sir EDWARD CARSON.
Mr. ASQUITH'S own remedy for Irish unrest was to take the Act of 1914 and
transform it into something like Dominion Home Rule. Any county--Ulster or
Sinn Fein--that voted against coming under the Dublin Parliament should be
left under the present administration.
Mr. BONAR LAW did not fail to point out the inconsistency of condemning the
Government scheme for its complexity and then immediately proposing another
which would involve not one but a dozen partitions and make the political
map of Ireland look like a crazy quilt. He advised the House to reject Mr.
ASQUITH'S advice and pass the Bill, even though it should have the
paradoxical result, for the moment, of leaving Nationalist Ireland under
British administration while providing Unionist Ulster with a Home Rule
Parliament for which it has never asked.
I suppose Mr. DEVLIN is not like the Sinn Feiners, who, according to "T.
P.," are so contemptuous of the Bill that they have never read a line of
it. Parts of his speech, and particularly his peroration, seemed far more
suitable to a Coercion Bill than to a measure which is designed, however
imperfectly, to grant Home Rule to Ireland. The Nationalist leader may be
forgiven a great deal, however, for his inimitable description of Lord
ROBERT CECIL as "painfully struggling into the light with one foot in the
Middle Ages."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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