The
government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to
pay. At the same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised
the police on its present basis to ensure that rents should be paid. To
the wisdom of this policy, history is able to call witnesses by the
million--unhappily however it has to call them from famine graveyards,
and the waste womb of the Atlantic.
This essential wrongness of Unionism, so amply illustrated in every
year of its working, continues. But at least, our bluff Englishman
urges, the dead past can be suffered to bury those crimes and blunders
of Unionism which you have enumerated. Let us start with a clean slate.
Now, as will have been gathered from a previous chapter, we recognise in
this invitation an accent of soundness. We modern Home Rulers desire
above all to be loyal to the century in which we live. We are sick of
that caricature which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a sort of
perpetual suttee, in which all the interests of the present are
immolated on the funeral-pyre of the past.
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