I admit that there are two classes 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 assert it, as Mr. Blunt chose to assert 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 smashing 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 grass 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 unassuming 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 class 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 passing 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 gratitude 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 passions 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 class 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 God 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 passions 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.)