Michael Davitt to John Ogilvy, 9th July 1901. IE TCD MS 9376/1028

IE TCD MS 9376/1028: Letter from Michael Davitt, Dalkey, Co. Dublin, Ireland to John Ogilvy Esq., Liberal Association Dundee, Scotland, 9th July 1901: "I am almost on the point of starting for America - at least I will be so busy until the date of sailing that I have very little time at my disposal in which to deal with the questions you refer to in your very interesting letter. Mr. T.W. Russell's Ulster Land Purchase Agitation has already done much good & will I believe, affect a great deal more in convincing the Protestant farming classes of the North of Ireland, that the great Land for the People movement, is in no way mixed up with sectarian feeling, or in any manner concerned with the miserable troubles which arise in this country on certain anniversaries throughout the year. Mr. Russell is making it that the Land Commission is not administered by the agents of the Pope, but by the nominees of the landlords and that all the harm which the Catholics of Ireland wished to inflict upon their Protestant fellow countrymen in Ulster, is to help to make them, on fair terms, the owners of their own holdings. If Home Rule for Ireland is endangered, or virtually lost, through our attitude towards the Boer Cause, all I can say is, that our people will stand to gain much more moral credit for the sacrifice they have thus made, than the Jingo authors of one of the meanest and greatest crimes in history are likely to gain over the infamous transaction, when once the British people awake from their hypnotised dreams of conquest and realize all which the policy of Lord Milner and Mr. Chamberlain is going to cost both the British Empire and the British taxpayer before the Boers are beaten. In the final accounting I am convinced that those who opposed this abominable and unnecessary war on its merits will be blessed and not cursed in all right thinking minds; and that those who have supported it in a willful blindness to the real purpose of its promoters will not think of the last two years struggle to put down a little Bible-reading, Protestant nation, which has been guilty of no crime against any country on Earth, with happy thoughts or untroubled hearts. I suppose I feel that Ireland, largely Catholic as she is, could not make a sacrifice in a better or a nobler cause than in standing up for a people, who are not of her race or faith, but who are manfully fighting for the independence of their country, against a power so absolutely in the wrong as jingo England is in this conflict. The Protestant Dutchman of South-Africa will know at any rate, that Catholic Ireland, has had no hand in the killing of the two little Calvinistic Republics of the Transvaal Free State. That crime will belong exclusively to the Defender of the Protestant Faith - England as long as grass is green or water runs..." Recovered by Mrs. Mary Davitt.