A Warning to Belfast: Difference between revisions

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To the editor of the Times.
To the editor of the Times.
[[Image:Goldwin Smith.jpg|right|thumb|British-Canadian historian and journalist Goldwin Smith.]]


Sir, — I have more than once endeavoured to show that while the analogies commonly drawn in the Irish controversy from this side of the water are totally false — neither the relations of the American States or the Canadian provinces to the Federal Government nor that of Canada to the Imperial country bearing any resemblance to the Gladstonian scheme for Ireland — points of real and instructive analogy to the case of Ireland are presented by the French Catholic province of Quebec, the financial exploits of whose Legislature, in the way of plundering taxation and of attempted spoliation of bond-holders, have been attracting the attention of the commercial world. Quebec resembles Ireland in being a country with very limited powers of production, inhabited by a race which, having a low standard of living, multiplies recklessly, the Church enjoining early marriage and re-marriage for the sake of morality, fees, and power. If Quebec were an island, the pressure on the means of subsistence would soon make it a counterpart of Irish distress; but as it is, there is a ready overflow into the United States, to which the French-Canadian emigrate by hundreds of thousands. The over-population of Ireland, owing to the thriftless philoprogenitiveness of its inhabitants and the anti-economical influence of its Church, has always been, and remains, the root of the evil, though no allusion to it is ever made in Gladstonian orations, which constantly assume that an Irish peasant with a family of ten children, on a potato plot, and sunk in superstition, would be happy and enlightened if only he were set free from the Government which, against the will of his priesthood, has given him national education. Quebec has Home Rule in full measure, but this does not prevent over-population and lack of industrial energy from producing their natural effects.
Sir, — I have more than once endeavoured to show that while the analogies commonly drawn in the Irish controversy from this side of the water are totally false — neither the relations of the American States or the Canadian provinces to the Federal Government nor that of Canada to the Imperial country bearing any resemblance to the Gladstonian scheme for Ireland — points of real and instructive analogy to the case of Ireland are presented by the French Catholic province of Quebec, the financial exploits of whose Legislature, in the way of plundering taxation and of attempted spoliation of bond-holders, have been attracting the attention of the commercial world. Quebec resembles Ireland in being a country with very limited powers of production, inhabited by a race which, having a low standard of living, multiplies recklessly, the Church enjoining early marriage and re-marriage for the sake of morality, fees, and power. If Quebec were an island, the pressure on the means of subsistence would soon make it a counterpart of Irish distress; but as it is, there is a ready overflow into the United States, to which the French-Canadian emigrate by hundreds of thousands. The over-population of Ireland, owing to the thriftless philoprogenitiveness of its inhabitants and the anti-economical influence of its Church, has always been, and remains, the root of the evil, though no allusion to it is ever made in Gladstonian orations, which constantly assume that an Irish peasant with a family of ten children, on a potato plot, and sunk in superstition, would be happy and enlightened if only he were set free from the Government which, against the will of his priesthood, has given him national education. Quebec has Home Rule in full measure, but this does not prevent over-population and lack of industrial energy from producing their natural effects.
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