Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
"At the same time the number of sane and carefully considered plans
for the government of Ireland was never so great as it is to-day. When
will our incompetent Cabinet perceive that the only way of warding
off the stain of perfidy which dogs their footsteps and threatens to
overwhelm them is to make use of all these plans? I put aside for the
moment the most violent proposals of the extremists on either side,
such as that of the annexation of England by the Sinn Fein Empire and
that of the deportation of all Irishmen to the Andaman Islands and the
re-colonisation of the country with correspondents to the daily press;
but between these two extremes there surely lie innumerable solutions
which both can and ought to be employed. I will only name here a few
of them:--
ASQUITH autonomy.
Dominion Home Rule.
DUNRAVEN autonomy.
GREY autonomy.
Red autonomy.
Government by Dhail Eireann.
Government by Dhail Ymaill.
Administration by the L.C.C.
Clan warfare.
"And there are infinite shades and variations of all these.
"Every one of the policies I have named, and as many more as possible,
should now be adopted at once, one after the other, I suggest, for
quarterly periods and in alphabetical order.
"But let there be no mistake. They must be strictly enforced. It must
be impossible for Irishmen to come to England in the future and say
to her, as they have so often said in the past, 'You made us promises
which, when we leant on them, proved a broken reed and turned to dust
and ashes in our mouths.'
"One of the bitterest reproaches that is hurled, and hurled justly, at
British maladministration is that through all the seeming variations
of misgovernment there has been in fact no change. Dublin Castle
remains where it did. This must be altered at once. _The site of
Dublin Castle must be moved every three months._ There must be
infinite change, and it must be infinitely thorough and infinitely
systematic, so that, side by side with the continuous grievances of
all dissatisfied parties, will be the certain assurance that those
grievances will in strict rotation be remedied.
"The objection will, of course, be raised that these continual changes
of government will involve a certain amount of disorder; that one
system will scarcely be working before it is superseded by another;
that the rapid alterations in the _personnel_ of the judicature, civil
service and police will be inconvenient; that everything, in fact,
will be in a muddle. But by how much is not well-organised muddle to
be preferred to unsystematic anarchy? And as each type of government
recurs in due course will it not be found to work more simply and
satisfactorily?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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