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The disastrous role played by them has been unfolded by many interpreters of history, by none with a more vivid accuracy than we find in the pages of M. Paul-Dubois: "Had Ireland," he writes, "been left to herself she would, in all human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence, in establishing political unity under a military chief.
That strange accusation of Sir Horace Plunkett, that "the clergy are taking the joy the innocent joy from the social side of the home life," was, I think, sufficiently answered by the apposite reply of M. Paul-Dubois, that this is a strange reproach in the mouth of a Protestant who has undergone the experience of spending a Sunday in Belfast.
M. Paul-Dubois, whom we may summon out of a cloud of witnesses, writes of them as "demagogic orgies with a mixed inspiration of Freemasonry and the Salvation Army." The Twelfth of July is, or rather was, for its fine furies are now much abated, a savage carnival comparable only to the corroborees of certain primitive tribes.
"A monster procession," continues M. Paul-Dubois, "marches through Belfast, as through every town and village of Orange Ulster, ending up with a vast meeting at which the glories of William of Orange and the reverses of James II. are celebrated in song.... Each 'lodge' sends its delegation to the procession with banners and drums.
These are the factors in the Wyndham Act which have made M. Paul-Dubois declare of it that "Emaneé d'un gouvernment, ami des landlords, elle cache mal, sous un apparence d'impartialité d'adroits efforts pour faire aux landlords de la part belle pour hausser en leur faveur le prix de la terre."
The difference between the attitude of the judiciary in England and in Ireland is to be seen from the fact that M. Paul-Dubois, after quoting with approval the Comte de Franqueville's tribute to the fact that the summing up of a judge in England is a model of impartiality, goes on to say that in Ireland, "c'est trop souvent un acte d'accusation."
"the relations of Ireland with England have been, for so many centuries, those of a captive with his jailer, those of a victim with his torturer." I pass over De Beaumont, Von Raumer, Perraud, Paul-Dubois, Filon, Bonn. The considerations already adduced ought to be enough to lead the English reader to certain conclusions which are fundamental.
"Les uns comme les autres," says a French writer, M. Paul-Dubois, "ils n'ont vu dans la terre Irlandaise qu'une affaire, et non une patrie. Ils sont restés conquérants en pays de conquête. De l
The ridiculous situation which was allowed by successive Governments to persist in the Gaelic-speaking districts of the West until a few years ago, in which teachers were appointed to the schools without any knowledge of the only language spoken by the children whom they purported to educate, is well illustrated by the statement on the part of one of their number to the effect that it took two years to extirpate, to "wring" the Irish speech out of the children and replace it, one must suppose, by English, and this process, it must be remembered, was gone through with the children of a peasantry whom a distinguished French publicist M.L. Paul-Dubois has described as perhaps the most intellectual in Europe.
"From whatever point of view we envisage the English Government in Ireland," writes Mr Paul-Dubois, "we are confronted with the same appearance of constitutional forms masking a state of things which is a compound of autocracy, oppression, and corruption." Such a system does not possess within itself the seed of continuance.
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