The Speeches (In Full) of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., and William O'Brien, M.P., on Home Rule, Delivered in Parliament, Feb. 16 and 17, 1888.Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart)
History
The Speeches (In Full) of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., and William O'Brien, M.P., on Home Rule, Delivered in Parliament, Feb. 16 and 17, 1888.
Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart)
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901
There is no disguising the fact that your whole suppressive machinery,
the whole machinery for effectually suppressing the League, has totally
broken down, and for a very simple reason, because the act was conceived
upon the theory that you were dealing with a people who were only pining
to be delivered from the terrorism of the National League (_cheers_),
whereas you find to your cost you are dealing with a people who are the
League themselves, ready to guard it with their lives, and to undergo
any amount of torture rather than betray it. (_Nationalist cheers._) Why
do you not put the Secret Inquiry clauses in force for the purpose of
suppressing branches of the National League? Why! Because you know you
would have to send thousands of people to jail who would rather go there
than let you wring one tittle of information out of them. Your only
other source is informers, and it is our proudest boast that with an
organization numbering upwards of 500,000 men, up to this time you have
not been able to bring a single informer into the market, though no
doubt the market price of the article was never higher. (_Cheers._)
I want the right honorable gentleman to tell us here to-night what he
has got by all his wild and vicious lunges against the Irish people. I
have no patience with talking of "crime in Ireland," outside Kerry. The
Moonlighters and the Government have had Kerry to themselves for the
last five or six years. Between them be it, and let them divide the
honors. (_Loud Nationalist cheers._) They tell us of a number of persons
partially boycotted. I do not know what the local policeman may be
pleased to call "persons partially boycotted"; but I am pretty sure the
list would go up or down, according to the requirements of the
Government. Let the right honorable gentleman give us a list of new
land-grabbers who have taken farms (_cheers_), or let him give us a
list, and I only wish he would, of the land-grabbers who, since this act
has been put in force, have accepted their neighbors' farms. As to
legitimate boycotting, I shall always hold with the perfect right of the
community to exercise legitimate influence on men who for their own base
and greedy purposes are the pests of society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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