Home > Authors Index > Hall Caine > Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days Scenes In The Great War - 1915 > This page
The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days Scenes In The Great War - 1915, a non-fiction book by Hall Caine |
||
"Why Isn't The House Cheering?" |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ Then came our Prime Minister's passionate, fiery, yet dignified and even exalted denunciation of the proposal of Germany that we should trade with her in our neutrality by committing treachery to France and Belgium--("To accept your infamous offer would be to cover the glorious name of England with undying shame"); then the announcement of the ultimatum sent by Great Britain to Germany demanding an assurance that the neutrality of Belgium should be respected; and finally that speech of John Redmond's, which, spoken on the very top of the crisis that had threatened to bring a fratricidal war into Ireland, has been, perhaps, the most thrilling and dramatic utterance yet produced by the war. "I tell the Government they may take every British soldier out of Ireland to meet the enemy of the Empire. Ireland's sons will take care of Ireland. The Catholics of the South will stand shoulder to shoulder with their Protestant fellow-countrymen of the North to fight the common foe." It was another appeal to the gentlemen in the British nation, and in one moment it swept the bitter waters of the Home Rule crisis out of all sight and memory. I have heard a Cabinet Minister say that, as he listened to Redmond's speech, he was surprised at the silence with which it was received. "Why isn't the House cheering?" he had asked himself. But all at once he had felt his eyes swimming and his throat tightening, and then he had understood. _ |
||