“Unless you hate war, as such, you cannot really hate Prussia. If you
admit war as an essential part of civilisation, then what you are
hating is merely Prussian efficiency.”
And with this mission of universal peace mingled his dream of a
reconciled Ulster. He knew that there was no abiding cause of disunion
between North and South, and hoped that out of common dangers shared
and suffering endured on a European battleground, there would issue a
United Ireland. For this he counted much on “the brotherhood that binds
the brave of all the earth.” “There is a vision of Ireland,” he wrote
in 1915, “better than that which sees in it only a cockpit, or eternal
skull-cracking Donnybrook Fair--a vision that sees the real enemies of
the nation to be ignorance, poverty, disease; and turning away from
the ashes of dead hatreds, sets out to accomplish the defeat of these
real enemies. Out of this disastrous war, we may pluck, as France and
Belgium have plucked, the precious gift of national unity.”
In one of my letters he writes--
“One duty does indeed lie before me, that of devoting myself to the
working out of a reconciliation between Ulster and Ireland. I feel God
speaking to our hearts in that sense out of this terrible war.”
In his Political Testament he makes a dying plea for the realisation of
his dream.
“Had I lived I had meant to call my next book on the relations of
Ireland and England: _The Two Fools: A Tragedy of Errors_. It has
needed all the folly of England and all the folly of Ireland to produce
the situation in which our unhappy country is now involved.
“I have mixed much with Englishmen and with Protestant Ulstermen, and
I know that there is no real or abiding reason for the gulfs, salter
than the sea, that now dismember the natural alliance of both of them
with us Irish Nationalists. It needs only a Fiat Lux, of a kind very
easily compassed, to replace the unnatural by the natural.
“In the name, and by the seal of the blood given in the last two years,
I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland--a thing essential in itself
and essential as a prologue to the reconstruction of the Empire. Ulster
will agree.
“And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in Ireland,
and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this war has taught us
anything it is that great things can be done only in a great way.”
As a writer in the _Freeman_ very truly says--
“If Tom Kettle could have asked for a gift in return for his great
sacrifice, it would have been that a great peace unite the hearts and
strivings of all those of his fellow-countrymen who worked for the only
land he loved.”
Mr. Leslie interpreted his vision exquisitely--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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