The Speeches (In Full) of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., and William O'Brien Part 2

I challenge honorable gentlemen who speak of the immorality and dishonesty of the Plan of Campaign,--I challenge the right honorable gentleman to name any single deed of outrage or of crime that is traceable to the Plan of Campaign, from end to end of Ireland.

(_Cheers._) I challenge him to name any one case in which the demands we have put forward have been declared by any land commissioner or judical tribunal in the country to be dishonest or exorbitant. I challenge him more than all to adduce to the House to-night one solitary case in which he has succeeded, with all his powers and his terrors, in breaking up a combination that was once formed on an estate. (_Cheers._) And remember always that this Plan of Campaign is the merest segment of the Irish difficulty. It is a mere rough-and-ready way, which has been found effective to cure the blunders of your legislation, and to cure your folly in not closing with the bill of my honorable friend, the member for Cork. (_Cheers._) My honorable friend and myself and others are the mere Uhlans and cadets to the army of millions of Irishmen who stand ranked under the standard of my honorable friend, the member for Cork.

(_Cheers._)

Now, as to the National League, I want to examine the right honorable gentleman. (_Laughter._) We have heard it stated over and over again in most portentious accents in this House, that the authority of the National League and of her Majesty's Government could not co-exist in Ireland; that either one or the other must pack up and go. What has all this tall talk come to? ("_Hear, hear._") Is the Leage gone, or does it show the slightest sign of going? There are eighteen hundred branches of the National League in Ireland; rather more, I believe now, because the right honorable gentleman's act has added some more. (_Cheers._) Not more than two hundred and fifty of those branches have been nominally grappled with. There are about fifteen hundred branches, or over five sixths of the whole organization, on which not a finger has been laid.

Why? Is it that the right honorable gentleman has conceived a sudden affection for the National League? (_Laughter._) Is it that these branches are declining in power, or is it that they have abated their principles one jot in terror? No; but because the Government has made such a disastrous and grotesque mess of their attempt to suppress a couple of hundred branches that they dared not face the ridicule, the colossal collapse, that would attend any attempt to grapple with the whole of this organization. (_Cheers._)

Everybody who knows the so-called suppressed counties of Kerry and Clare knows that the suppressed branches hold their meetings just as usual, under the noses of the police. We know it by the figures and by the cash which comes that the subscriptions, instead of falling off, are increasing. The resolutions are pa.s.sed in the usual way, and I can tell you they are regarded with more sacredness and more efficacy than usual by the whole community. I will read an extract from a branch report in _United Ireland_ the week before last ("_Hear, hear_"), one of these suppressed branches which have, according to the local policeman, disappeared from view. It says: "A large representative meeting was held on Monday, Mr. George Pomeroy in the chair." No concealment of names.

"Balloting for officers and committee took place with the following result, after a most vigorous compet.i.tion for offices (_Nationalist cheers_), the only emolument for which will probably be a couple of months in jail: J. O'Callan, 60 votes; G. Pomeroy, 58; S. O'Keefe, 56; D. Hanlon, 50; O'Leary, 60; Power, 44; Fitzpatrick, 47"; and so on. "The first five are elected." (_Nationalist cheers._)

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 t.i.ttle 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.

I admit that there are two cla.s.ses of victims at the mercy of the Chief Secretary,--public speakers and public newspapers Public speeches are the merest appendages of our organization. And why are public speakers at his mercy? Simply and solely because we do not choose to be driven away from our free right of public meeting, but choose to a.s.sert it, as Mr. Blunt chose to a.s.sert it in the light of day. (_Cheers._) If we choose to give our speeches in private, we could run a coach and four through the provisions of this act with absolute impunity. My friends here were for months engaged on the Plan of Campaign. We have no secrets we are afraid to acknowledge. ("_Oh, oh._") None. I only hope the honorable gentleman who says "Oh"--(_an honorable member: "Rochester"._) Certainly. They have actually been for months and months on the business of the Plan of Campaign, even with warrants over their heads.

Talk of me in connection with Mitchelstown. I may be giving the right honorable gentleman a tip, but I do not object to say that my honorable friend, the member for South Tipperary (Mr. J. O'Connor), was far and away a more formidable person than I was in the Plan of Campaign; but because he happens to be a man of few words, he will be walking in this lobby to-morrow night instead of reposing on a plank bed, as he would if he had spoken. (_Cheers._) I do not mind telling it, and he will not mind it either, for his work, and he is victorious. I might say a good deal about the meanness of this policy of subjecting journalists to milk-and-water diet, for the simple fact that they recorded the right honorable gentleman's failure ("_Hear, hear_"), because that is the sting of their offence,--because the meetings are held, and held in spite of the Government. (_Loud Nationalist cheers._) You might as well issue a proclamation suppressing the sun in the heavens, and then go about smas.h.i.+ng the faces of the sun-dials for recording that the sun is moving on its way in spite of you. (_Laughter and cheers._) Worse still is it to attack the humble news venders, and intimidate their wives and their little children. ("_Hear, hear._")

The Chief Secretary might have remembered that the right honorable gentleman who sits next him (Mr. W. H. Smith) is a person who in former years might easily have come under the same category. (_Nationalist cheers._) The right honorable gentlemen sold _United Ireland_ in his day. ("_Hear, hear._") I mention it not as a reproach to him, for he was an extremely good customer; but if he had not parted with his Irish business as he did, under the subsequent legislation of this Government, the right honorable gentleman would have been liable at this moment to three months on a plank bed for having for six months sold the paper.

(_Cheers._) I hope that chivalry on that side of the House has not died out, and that they will not resent in the case of a miserable shopkeeper at Killarney what they will condone in a Misister of England. I can speak of my own knowledge of that policy, and its absolute and downright failure, even against so vulnerable and perishable a property as we know a newspaper is. But the right honorable gentleman has not succeeded in suppressing a single newspaper, and he never will, although he has proceeded from the editors to the printers, and from the printers to the printer's devils. (_Cheers._)

There is only one redeeming feature in the right honorable gentleman's policy, and that is its colossal and monumental failure. That fact actually softens in the hearts of the Irish people the memory of the atrocities he has committed against them. We feel that we have taken his measure now, and that we are a match for him. (_Irish cheers._) We feel that he has failed, and that he will go on failing as long as gra.s.s grows and water runs. We are almost grateful to him for what he has done to advance the Irish cause by awakening the consciences of Englishmen (_Opposition cheers_), by knitting the two peoples together in common human sympathy, and common abhorrence of the brutal and cruel system of terrorism which he is exhibiting in full working order in Ireland. The Chancellor of the Exchequer claimed at Hastings that at all events the Chief Secretary had held his own. This was rather a meek and una.s.suming claim, after the high and swelling boasts that we heard from the same lips in the palmy days of last session. (_Cheers._) But has he even held his own? He has demoralized every department of his own Irish government, and every cla.s.s of his own officials. There is not an office in Dublin Castle that is not at this moment subjected to as much espionage and as many precations against betrayal as if it were the palace of the Czar. ("_Hear hear._") He has the distinction of having developed an entirely new phase of the Irish difficulty among her Majesty's soldiers.

My friend Mandeville and myself were whirled away by special train in the middle of the night to Tullamore, and I confess I felt considerably consoled when I heard that the next use the right honorable gentleman had to make of a special train was to take her Majesty's soldiers away from Tullamore for cheering Mandeville and myself. (_Laughter and cheers._) Don't let him ride off on the statement that these were mere Irish soldiers. Some of them were, no doubt; but there were also his own countrymen, the Scottish Fusileers. (_Cheers._) By some unhappy accident they too had to be hurried off by special train for some awkward manifestations at Mitchelstown. The right honorable gentleman had to employ police patrols to watch the prison officials. He cannot even count on the Royal Irish Constabulary, for to my own knowledge he had to employ policemen to watch the police. (_Laughter and cheers._) That is what is called "holding his own in Ireland." He succeeded only in kicking out a few of the bonfires that were lighted on the occasion of our release; but the spirit of nationality that lighted them is beyond his power. It will burn when the memory of his unhappy time in Ireland will be a mere speck among the dark clouds of misgovernment, which are pa.s.sing away into a forgotten and forgiven past.

The right honorable gentleman and his friends plead for a little more time. There are in this House many members who can remember Mr.

Forster's triumphant account of his experience at Tullamore; that he was winning; that the people were with him; that the followers of my honorable friend (Mr. Parnell) were a mere back of broken men and reckless boys, and that you had only to give him (Mr. Forster) a little more time to make his victory appear to all the world. That was seven years ago; but the triumph has not appeared. Does the wildest man in this House imagine that the second Tullamore experience will be more successful? Does the Chief Secretary's best friend claim that he is a cleverer man or a more profound statesman than Mr. Forster? He is no doubt in a position to inflict untold suffering on our poor people. I do not deny that it is no child's play for us. No man's health is exactly the same after imprisonment of the sort that some of my poor friends are enduring to-night; but the sufferings in the prison cell are only small compared with those that the Chief Secretary is bringing on many a humble family ("_Hear, hear_"), to say nothing of the petty persecution that is going on at the hands of every village constable who has a quarrel with the people, and of the confusion, uncertainty, and ruin into which the right honorable gentleman is plunging the whole business of the country. It is a burning shame that such an ordeal should be inflicted on a people whose only desire is to live in peace, and to rule in peace in their own land. ("_Hear, hear._") It is sometimes almost unbearable, but the Irish people will bear it. We are not cowed. We are not even embittered.

The right honorable member for Mid-Lothian has accomplished in two years what seven hundred years of coercion had not accomplished previously (_Irish cheers_), and what seven hundred more would leave unaccomplished still. He has united the hearts of the two peoples by a more sacred and enduring bond than that of terror and brute force; and our quarrel with England, our bitterness toward England, is gone. (_Cheers._) And it will be your fault and your crime if it ever returns,--a crime for which history will stigmatize you forever. We, at all events, are not disruptionists. (_Cheers and counter cheers._) It is you who are the disruptionists and the exasperationists and the separatists. We have never made a disguise of our feelings. We say what we mean.

The right honorable gentleman, the member for Newcastle, and many another good friend beside him, have been over in Ireland this winter, and they can tell you that when the name of England is uttered now in an Irish crowd, it is no longer uttered with hatred, but with hope and with grat.i.tude to those awakening British hearts which have never authorized this policy of the Government in Ireland. You are the Separatists. We are for peace and for happiness, and for the brotherhood of the two nations. You are for eternal repression and eternal discord and eternal misery for yourselves, as well as for us. We are for appeasing the dark pa.s.sions of the past. You are for inflaming them, whether for purposes of a political character I do not know, but for purposes in the interests of that wretched cla.s.s of Mamelukes whom you support in Ireland, who are neither good Englishmen nor good Irishmen, and who are being your evil genius in Ireland, just as they have been the scourge of our unhappy people.

That is the state of things; and in such a cause and between such forces, I believe the end is not far off, and to the G.o.d of justice and of liberty and of mercy, we leave the issue. So far as we ourselves are concerned, we shall be amply compensated, whatever we have suffered and may have to suffer in our grand old cause, if we can be sure that we are the last of that long and mournful line of men who have suffered for it.

And, believe me, upon the day of our victory, we will grant an easy amnesty to the right honorable gentleman opposite for our little troubles in Tullamore, and we will bless his policy yet as one of the most powerful, though unconscious, instruments in the deliverance of Ireland. (_Loud Opposition cheers._)

Mr. FINLAY (_who arose amid loud cries of "Balfour" from the Opposition and Home Rule benches_) said that the honorable member who had just spoken had charged the Unionist party with inflaming pa.s.sions and animosity in Ireland that were in a fair way of dying out. He was not aware of any section of the party against which that charge could be made. It had always been the mission of the Unionist party to see that equal justice should be done in Ireland, and to appease those animosities which were the relics of past misgovernment and past misfortunes. They believed that in a country so divided as Ireland was, equal justice might best be done in an Imperial Parliament, and not by handing over one part of the country to the domination of another. The honorable member had said that there was no bitterness on the part of the Irish members towards England. But the party had three voices. One was the voice that spoke in the House of Commons, the second the voice that spoke in Ireland; but to get at the real springs of the movement, they must hear it on an American platform. (_Ministerial cheers._) He objected to that House being turned into a court of appeal from judicial sentences in Ireland, and he regretted to have heard the cheers which came from the Opposition side of the House when the honorable member for West Cork had said that he recommended the tenants at Mitchelstown to resist the law by force. (_Mr. Gladstone expressed dissent._)

Errata

The first line indicates the original, the second how it should read:

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notwithstanding a similiar observation notwithstanding a similar observation

think it right hriefly think it right briefly

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bound to make kown bound to make known

Lord Sailsbury continued Lord Salisbury continued

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He declared that "if Parliament pa.s.sed ant act for granting He declared that "if Parliament pa.s.sed an act for granting

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comments on tne comments on the

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beyond the the Channel beyond the Channel

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narrowly than almost anywhere else), I will find their way narrowly than almost anywhere else), will find their way

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the purpose on this occsion the purpose on this occasion

in a proportionate diminution of derelect farms.

in a proportionate diminution of derelict farms.

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we have read with increased satisfacfaction we have read with increased satisfaction

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I think, the symathetic silence I think, the sympathetic silence

exhibit the tase of the Prime Minister exhibit the taste of the Prime Minister

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in process of accomplisment in process of accomplishment

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I argued that the Land League, as i operated at that time I argued that the Land League, as it operated at that time

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