LORD RIPON AND IRISH IDEAS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTLTOR."1
SIR,—Lord Ripon, whose words have weight, is reported as declaring himself a confirmed Home-ruler on the ground that Ireland must be governed in accordance with Irish ideas. What are Irish ideas of government? What political ideas can be said to be common to Ulster and Connaught? What political ideas have the Celtic Irish ever shown but a peculiar devotion to personal leadership, the natural consequence of their long and sad exclusion by a train of disastrous circum- stances from familiarity with free institutions ? The most active part of the political agitation has had its hotbed in the Fenianism of New York, where the Irish have been the rank- and-file of Tammany, and when the American Republic was fighting for its life rose in insurrection on the side of the slave power. We talk of Irish nationality. Can Ireland be said really to have been a nation ? During the first moiety of that most unhappy history the island was divided between two absolutely alien and murderously hostile elements, that of the Anglo-Norman Pale and that of the Celtic Septs, while the Septs were far from united among themselves. During the second moiety the island was divided between the Protestant Teutons of the North and the Catholic Celts of the rest of the island, living in the bitterest enmity with each other. The Union found them grappling in murderous civil war. How, in such a school, was a political character common to both elements and apt for free government to be formed ? We are told that the Union reduced the Irish people to political serfdom. An immense majority it rescued from political serfdom, under the government of Protestant Ascendency, and endowed eventually with the full privileges of British citizens, which they now enjoy in every respect, and with more than their share of Parliamentary representa- tion. Why is England, and England in the present genera• tion, to bear all the blame and burden of Irish history? Why are not Pope Adrian, the Norman conquerors of England who with his sanction extended their conquest to Ireland, the Catholic powers, which in their struggle with Protestantism dragged her a helpless victim in their train, the France of Louis XIV., and afterwards the France of the Revolution, to bear their share of the indictment ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
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