so ridiculously unworkable that the only practical purpose of any kind it could serve would be to throw dust in the eyes of the American people and to keep President Wilson in good humour.
Sir, the essence of the Government's first proposal is Partition in a more insidious form. Its essence is a renewal of the intolerable insult that Ireland is not one nation but two. Whether our country is to be mutilated county by county, or by what, in the language of the butchers, is called the clean cut, the result would be to split Ireland asunder as surely as if what the Prime Minister proposed to us was to fight another battle of the Boyne.
Sir, we had no difficulty in telling you four years ago, as we are telling you now, that the Irish Nation will never submit to any such scheme as long as grass grows and water runs. What would be your own feelings if the Germans proposed to you as a condition of peace that you should cede to them—I won't say six of the richest counties on your southern coast, but that you should cede to them even temporarily as you say—even for five years—the smallest parcel of the sacred soil of England—say Westminster Abbey. Mr. Speaker, Westminster Abbey does not contain an ounce of dust more sacred for you than do for us the shrines and graves and battlefields which we are asked to surrender to an Orange Free State as a visible symbol that the integrity of Ireland as a nation has ceased to exist. No, sir—better, as Cardinal Logue said, better let us wait for fifty years longer, and I tell you you will have to wait for fifty centuries longer before you will ever get the Irish nation to cut up the land of their fathers either by the clean cut or county by county, under some preposterous system of a majority of two or three hundred jerrymandered or corrupted votes.
6
