Forced into geographical relations with the Irish, an unwarlike people
with indomitable tongues, England has in the middle ages, naturally done
to this unwarlike people just what a warlike people would do in the
middle ages--taken everything. With painful volubility the unwarlike
people has for centuries sounded its fate over the world, touching the
heart of Gladstone and other good Englishmen, and tempting him and them
to many struggles. Behold him at the next step, then, in the role of
warring upon the unwarlike, of oppressing the oppressed, of answering an
Irish clack with a British click! Is it not pitiful? Gladstone fell ill
from it. He paid there and then for his illustrious name. And, next, of
those brave Boers! God nerved their quick muscles and darted straight
their wonderful eye; and when the single hand rose against the hundred
hands of British Briarius they were not forsaken. Oh! how clearly that
question seemed to an American! No geographical necessity was there--no
race hatred, no hotbed to foment conspiracy against the sister country
England. The independence of those Boers, if they desired it, ought to
have been fought for by England, by Gladstone, willingly,
irresistibly--in the very name of England's own love of liberty for
herself. And finally Gladstone so saw it.
What a puzzle are those Hibernians!