Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · January 7, 1868

English Fears and Perils.

THE attempt to blow up the Clerkenwell prison in London to release a Fenian prisoner is but one of a series of events which seem to have aroused a kind of lurking fear in the country remotely akin to that caused by the “Irish night” long ago. It is, however, one of the incidents which illustrate very plainly the character of the present outbreak of the Irish disaffection. Nobody can doubt that there are very earnest enthusiasts among the Irish agitators. There are honest visionaries and scholars, often bearing historic Irish names, who cherish a belief in the final emancipation of Ireland from England, which is suggestive in its romantic intensity of the devotion to these dreams of the older English Republicans.

Such men do not suppose that a liberating army is likely to march through Ireland. They do not propose to array the Irish population against the trained troops of England. Against foreign foes England is armed. The assault of such foes is a rain of blows upon a shield. But an internal, immeasurable, mysterious conspiracy, intrenched in race and religion, and every where dispersed, is a poison in the blood. It is an immediate and perennial peril. The empire becomes weakened by demoralization, and the speculative enthusiasts would look upon it as the decline of England into a lesser, even a secondary power, which would be but the beginning of the end.

Such men see, too, that this movement is strong in England itself; it is not confined to Ireland. Moreover, it is not led by the priests, but seems to be strong despite them. It asserts itself, too, at a time which is remarkable in English history. A remarkable political reform has just been accomplished; a vigorous blow has been struck at class rule; and a total change of the traditional method of the British Government has been effected; in fact a democratic revolution has occurred under the auspices of the Tory party, led by a political adventurer. The most accomplished of British statesmen, the acknowledged Liberal leader, Mr. Gladstone—the most truly popular chief, Mr. Bright—the most brilliant of Conservative Whigs, Mr. Robert Lowe, have all been outstripped by Mr. Disraeli, who is a very different kind of British minister from Walpole, or Chatham, or Pitt, or Canning, or Peel. Indeed, he seems not to be British at all, and yet, at the head of the most peculiarly British party, he not only carries the extraordinary reform in the suffrage, but the Ministry of which he is the master spirit refuses to resign when it is outvoted in the Commons. He merely smiles and says, “If you will not have my way, I will take yours”—a method which retains him permanently in office, and shocks every precedent of the British system.

While England is spell-bound by the brilliant audacity and Mephistophelian acuteness and adroitness of the minister, the Irish question presses more urgently than ever, and the Irish leaders of the kind of which we have spoken, doubtless see in Disraeli’s prominence and power another sign of the essential national decay upon which they count. Their hope, as we said last week, is not reform, but independence. Their cry is Ireland for the Irish. Their argument is, that although conquered centuries ago, Ireland has never been subdued by England, and that in the nature of things there can be no peace until she has her own again. It is impossible to imagine England yielding to such a demand; but if she should yield it is still more impossible, if we might say so, to imagine the consequences.

Whatever, therefore, is now done—whether, as many of the English papers demand, the most rigorous treatment is shown to every troublesome Irishman, or a milder policy prevails, something must be done for Ireland. Disraeli is meditating a plan, and John Bright in a late letter repeats his. In his judgment it is the land-tenure which is “the desperate malady which keeps your country in a state of chronic discontent and insurrection.” He wishes, therefore, to make the Irish farmer an owner, to give him a better national sentiment, and to show him (hic labor!) that England is truly friendly. He would therefore have a parliamentary Commission to buy large Irish estates of English owners and to sell them in existing farms to existing tenants, and upon easy terms. £5,000,000 to begin with would secure instant good results, and the process would go forward rapidly. In five years, he thinks, it would do much; in twenty it would change the aspect of things in Ireland.

Of course the Fenian alarm, which merely exasperates England, makes the adoption of any reasonable policy more difficult; but every nation seems unwilling to move in radical reforms until it is roughly seized and shaken.—Harper’s Weekly.