=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.