IRELAND’S DISEASE.
IRELAND’S DISEASE
NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS
BY
PHILIPPE DARYL
THE AUTHOR’S ENGLISH VERSION
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL
GLASGOW AND NEW YORK
1888
LONDON
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
These pages were first published in theshape of letters addressed from Ireland toLe Temps, during the summer months of 1886and 1887.
A few extracts from those letters having foundtheir way to the columns of the leading Britishpapers, they became the occasion of somewhatpremature, and, it seemed to the author, somewhatunfair conclusions, as to their generalpurport and bearing.
A fiery correspondent of a London eveningpaper, in particular, who boldly signed“J. J. M.” for his name, went so far as todenounce the author as “an ally of the Times,in the congenial task of vilifying the Irish[vi]people by grotesque and ridiculous caricatures,”which charge was then summarily metas follows:—
To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.
Sir,—
Let me hope, for the sake of “J. J. M.’s” mental condition,that he never set eyes upon my Irish sketches inLe Temps, about which he volunteers an opinion. If, however,he has actually seen my prose in the flesh, and he stillclings to his hobby that I am hostile to the Irish cause orunsympathetic with the Irish race, why then I can only urgeupon his friends the advisability of a strait waistcoat, abrace of mad doctors, and an early berth in a lunatic asylum.I never heard in my life of a sadder case of raving delusion.
Yours obediently,
PHILIPPE DARYL.
Paris, September 18, 1887.
Thus ended the controversy. There was noreply.
Allowance should be made, of course, for thenatural sensitiveness of Irishmen on everythingthat relates to their noble and unhappy country.But, what! Do they entertain, for one moment,the idea that everything is right and normal in[vii]it? In that case there can be no cause ofcomplaint for them, and things ought to remainas they are. All right-minded people willunderstand, on the contrary, that the redressof Irish wrongs can only come out of a sincereand assiduous exposure of the real state ofaffairs, which is not healthy but pathological,and, as such, manifests itself by peculiar symptoms.
However it may be, a natural though perhapsmorbid desire of submitting the case tothe English-reading public was the consequenceof those exceedingly brief and abortivepolemics.
The Author was already engaged in the notover-congenial task of putting his own Frenchinto English, or what he hoped might do duty assuch, when Messrs. George Routledge & Sons,the London publishers of his Public Lifein England, kindly proposed to introduceIreland’s Disease to British so