O. S.
YET ONE MORE PLAN FOR IRELAND.
Feeling rather lonely because almost everybody had entered for the great Irish Problem Competition in the morning and evening press except myself, I sat down and wrote the following solution, which I posted immediately to the Editors of The Times and of The Westminster Gazette:—
"Sir"—I began indignantly, for I noticed all the best competitors begin like that. In these Bolshevistic days I should have preferred of course to have started off with "Comrade" or "Brother," or even, since I was writing from the heart of the country, have opened with "Eh bor," as people do in dialect novels, but, fearing I might be disqualified, I began, as I say, "Sir," and went on, much as the other statesmen did:—
"In all the lengthy annals of this Government, vacillation between weakness and tyranny has never proved so disastrous as it is proving in Ireland to-day, and the conduct of that unhappy country's affairs is now plunged in a chaos so profoundly chaotic that it has become a gross misuse of language to call them affairs at all. Out of all this welter and confusion two salient facts are seen to emerge:—
"(1) No two Englishmen are agreed upon a settlement that will at the same time satisfy the just aspirations of Ireland and preserve the integrity of the British Empire.
"(2) No two Irishmen are either.
"At the same time the number of sane and carefully considered plans for the government of Ireland was never so great as it is to-day. When will our incompetent Cabinet perceive that the only way of warding off the stain of perfidy which dogs their footsteps and threatens to overwhelm them is to make use of all these plans? I put aside for the moment the most violent proposals of the extremists on either side, such as that of the annexation of England by the Sinn Fein Empire and that of the deportation of all Irishmen to the Andaman Islands and the re-colonisation of the country with correspondents to the daily press; but between these two extremes there surely lie innumerable solutions which both can and ought to be employed. I will only name here a few of them:—
Asquith autonomy.