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The Speeches (In Full) of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., and William O'Brien, M.P., on Home Rule, Delivered in Parliament, Feb. 16 and 17, 1888.
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.)