3
THE ISSUE
INDEPENDENCE.
Does Ireland wish to be free? Do we alone among the ancient Nations of Europe desire to remain slaves? That, and that alone, is the question which every Irish elector has now to answer. Let us put everything else out of our minds as irrelevant claptrap. Let nothing distract us from this single issue of Liberty. We must turn a deaf ear to sentimental whining about what this or that man did, his length of service, his " fighting on the floor of the House," and so on. Whatever may have been done in the way of small doles, petty grants, and big talk, the fact is that we are not Free and the issue is, Do we want to be Free? Why should we be afraid of Freedom? Would any sane adult voluntarily prefer to be a slave, to be completely in the control and power of another? Men do not willingly walk into jail; why, then, should a whole people? The men who are afraid of national liberty are unworthy even of personal liberty; they are the victims of that slave mentality which English coercion and corruption have striven to create in Ireland. When Mr. John Dillon, grown tremulous and garrulous and feeble, asked for a national convention this autumn "to definitely forswear an Irish Republic," he was asking Ireland to commit an act of national apostasy and suicide. Would you definitely forswear your personal freedom? Will Mr. John Dillon hand his cheque-book and property over to some stranger and indenture himself as a serf or an idiot? When he does, but not till then, we shall believe that the Irish Nation is capable of sentencing itself cheerfully to penal servitude for all eternity.
It was not always thus. "I say deliberately," said Mr. John Dillon at Moville in 1904, "that I should never have dedicated my life as I have done to this great struggle, if I did not see at the end of it the crowning and consummation of our work—A FREE AND INDEPENDENT IRELAND." It is sad that, fourteen years later, when the end is in sight, Mr. Dillon should be found a recreant and a traitor to his past creed. The degeneration of such a man is a damning indictment of Westminsterism.
Parnell, too. save for one short moment when he tried by compromise to fool English Liberalism but was foiled, proclaimed his belief in Irish Independence.
This is what Parnell said at Cincinatti on 23rd February, 1880:—
"When we have undermined English misgovernment, we have paved the way for Ireland to take her place among the nations of the earth. And let us not forget that that is the ultimate" goal at which all we Irishmen aim. None of us, whether we be in America or in Ireland, or wherever we may be, will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England."
Were he alive to-day, when the last link is snapping, on what side would Parnell be? Would he forswear an Irish Republic or would he proclaim once more, as he said in Cork (21st Jan., 1885): "No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a Nation. No man has a right to say: Thus far shalt thou go and no farther. And we have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland's nationhood and we never shall"
