Marx-Engels Correspondence 1881
Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 331;
Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.
It is a very fine trick of Gladstone — only the “stupid party” does not understand it — to offer at a moment when landed property in Ireland (as in England) will be depreciated by the import of corn and cattle from the U.St. — to offer them at that very moment the public Exchequer where they can sell that property at a price it does no longer possess!
The real intricacies of the Irish land problem — which indeed are not especially Irish — are so great that the only true way to solve it would be to give the Irish Home Rule and thus force them to solve it themselves. But John Bull is too stupid to understand this.