Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the older Nationalists who
were patriots before anything, and who were prepared to ." liberate " Ireland honourably by armed insurrection, has addressed a strong letter to the Archbishop of Cashel on the Government Purchase Bill. He loathes the Government, he says. " Its Irish policy is an amalgam of insolence and despotism," and " its leader likened Irishmen to Hottentots" —nonsense, Sir Charles 1—but its proposal to begin the great work of purchase with forty millions ought to be at once accepted. " If a native Prime Minister sub- mitted to an Irish Parliament a Bill framed on the same lines, it would be received with a burst of national en- thusiasm." " How is it possible to get anything better than this from any Legislature to the crack of doom P" He goes into columns of powerful argument, and especially meets that influential argument from malice, the objection that the great absentee proprietors will " escape " with great sums. They, says Sir Charles, who has governed a State, "are the very men we want to be rid of," and " it does not matter a rotten potato to the tenant who gets the purchase-money." Nobody doubts the writer's devotion to the Home-rule cause, and the Unionists would do well if they circulated this letter, plus a side-note on that word " Hottentot," in tens of thousands through Ireland.
