The Irish Question Its Essence Course Solution And The Issues It Involves For Ireland And For England PDF Download

Excerpt from The Irish Question: Its Essence, Course, Solution, and the Issues It Involves for Ireland and for England Sir, In common with many thousands of Her Majesty's subjects I have read your extraordinary letter addressed to Lord De Vesci, inviting "free communication of views from the various sections most likely to supply full and authentic knowledge of the wants and wishes of the Irish people"; - and in common with some hundreds of them I have undertaken to comply with your request. A most astounding request it is. In the first place, it seems to imply an abdication on your part of the elementary functions of statesmanship. The business of a steersman is - to steer, - of a responsible politician - to devise and carry out a policy. Again, I should have thought that the proper, the constitutional source of "full and authentic knowledge of the wants and wishes of the Irish people" would have been the hundred-and-odd representatives of the Irish constituencies "duly" elected a few weeks ago to serve in the Commons' House of Parliament, and elected on a plan designed and arranged by yourself. But once more, the passage I have quoted contains an ambiguity from which few of your public utterances on the Irish Question are wholly free. The ambiguity lies in the term "Irish people." What do you mean by the "Irish people"? Again, when you have got this knowledge, "What will you do with it?" How will you test it? What would you do, suppose the weight of evidence furnished by these "various sections" should lead you to make proposals (when you come one of these days to "settle" the Irish Difficulty) that would not commend themselves to a majority of the Irish members? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.