The New Irish Constitution: An Exposition and Some Arguments
History
The New Irish Constitution: An Exposition and Some Arguments
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government
Fitzmaurice shows, are, allowing for the difference in time and in the
categories of political thought, substantially those which the Rockingham
Ministry would, had they been free agents, have imposed in 1782. Their
imposition would have precluded the union, and we should have been saved
that sorry story, to be read in Mr. Barry O’Brien’s succinct pages, of
concessions delayed until they had lost their grace, and promises redeemed
when they had lost their virtue.
Much of these historical chapters is but melancholy reading. But it is for
Englishmen to remember these things, as it will be, I hope and pray, for
Irishmen to forget them.
The third part of the book comes nearer home. At a time when our
fellow-subjects across the oceans are repudiating, as Irishmen have
repudiated, the name of “colonists,” with all its suggestions of the
dependent tenure of Roman law, and are claiming, as Irishmen long ago
claimed, the status of a “dominion,” it does not lie with Englishmen,
least of all of the Imperialist school, to challenge the claims of the
Irishmen of to-day to nationality. Professor Hobhouse reminds us that
where this stubborn non-conformity to the ruling order endures, it must be
accepted as the touchstone of nationalism. But the Irish demands are
reinforced by English exigencies, and, as three Liberal Members of
Parliament remind us, the Imperial Legislature is already disintegrating
domestically under the stress of its manifold burdens. Not for the first
time is the path of justice thus discovered to be also the path of
expediency.
In the later chapters of this book will be found a view of the present
state of Ireland, from the pens of those best qualified to speak of it,
the pens of men who have spent their lives in ministering to her people. I
would commend to the attention of the reader those chapters, in which a
great dignitary of the Roman Church, a distinguished scholar of the Church
of Ireland, and two members of Nonconformist bodies, who stand high in
their respective communions, pray for the deliverance of the social life
of their country from the obsession of a busy and alien fanaticism.
Dea magna, dea Cybelle, dea domina Dindymi,
Procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo:
Alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos.
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It must be understood that the responsibility for each chapter is confined
to the person who wrote it. We are all united in a common allegiance to
the principles of Home Rule, but that allegiance is not incompatible with
some diversity of view as to the form which it should take. It seems to me
that the book gains, rather than loses, in value by this degree of
latitude of opinion. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that the
order in which the chapters appear makes no pretence to anything so
invidious as an order of merit—otherwise the first chapter would have been
the last; it is designed simply with a view to a logical sequence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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