I am
Yours faithfully,
Randolph S. Churchill.
John Ogilvy, Esq.
50 Grosvenor Square, W.: March 19, 1893.
My dear Sir,—In accordance with your wishes I write a few lines to you for the County Longford Meeting which is to be held to-morrow.
It is a pleasure to me to offer my congratulations to the Unionists of Longford on the energy and courage which they display in publicly demonstrating, among a population apparently hostile, their firm and tried attachment to the Parliamentary Union between Ireland and Great Britain and their determination to resist all efforts to sever that Union.
I used in the foregoing sentence the word ‘apparently’ for indeed I do not believe that the bulk of the farmers and peasant farmers of Ireland are by any means confident as to the blessings which are to flow from Home Rule. I hear from many quarters, some of them of great authority, that there is arising and spreading in the minds of the Irish agricultural population an anxious doubt as to what will be their position under an Irish Parliament and whether the taxes which that Parliament will be forced to levy on income or on land, will not be far more onerous and exhausting than the rents they formerly paid to the landlords.
They will remember and reflect that under an Irish Parliament not only will they be absolutely cut off, in times of difficulty and of depression and of failure of crops, from all the sources of relief which from the Imperial Parliament they can now confidently draw upon and be assisted by; but they will be in the hands of a Government which, from sheer financial exigencies, will be compelled to treat the Irish taxpayer with the utmost rigour and harshness, to lay upon him imposts heavier than he can bear, and to exact relentlessly the payment of those imposts to the last farthing and on the earliest day that they become due.
I think you may well impress upon the farmers and peasant farmers the perfect security of property which they now enjoy under the protection of the Imperial Parliament; the perfect freedom which they possess from oppression of any kind, either from heavy taxation or from the unjust exactions of a pauper Government and Parliament; the great advantages in respect of their rentals secured to them by the Imperial Parliament and the great facilities afforded for the easy purchase of their freeholds by its liberality, which opportunities under the Home Rule Parliament will, from the squalid poverty of its resources, become illusory and insecure and in time absorbed by the hopeless insolvency of the Irish Government.
These are the great truths and facts which the loyal minority in Irish counties can urge upon the farmers and the peasantry. The Irish people, in respect of their material interests, have always been bright and quick-witted; they will, with their ready imagination, quickly discern that though it may be pleasant and profitable to be represented in the Imperial Parliament by an independent and numerically powerful party who can extract from the British Exchequer and legislature no inconsiderable concessions to Irish wants, necessities and demands, it will be a widely different state of things when they (the Irish agricultural population) are handed over, body and soul, tied and bound and without appeal, to the uncontrolled domination of that ‘separate and independent’ party who—untrained in the art of just and economical government, eager to enjoy at any cost, and even only for a brief period, the profits of office and the delights of a reckless exercise of patronage and power—will have given over to their insatiable appetites the lives and properties of those who now exist and flourish, in tolerable prosperity and in perfect safety, by the cultivation of the Irish soil.
I have always been opposed to what is called ‘Home Rule’ more upon the grounds that to the Irish people themselves it must bring distress, poverty, misery and ruin, than on account of the dangers it will entail upon the British Empire, though those dangers are exceedingly great.