The Issue

It is a history book. 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.