Feeling rather lonely because almost everybody had entered for the
great Irish Problem Competition in the morning and evening press
except myself, I sat down and wrote the following solution, which
I posted immediately to the Editors of _The Times_ and of _The
Westminster Gazette_:--
"SIR"--I began indignantly, for I noticed all the best competitors
begin like that. In these Bolshevistic days I should have preferred of
course to have started off with "Comrade" or "Brother," or even, since
I was writing from the heart of the country, have opened with
"Eh bor," as people do in dialect novels, but, fearing I might be
disqualified, I began, as I say, "Sir," and went on, much as the other
statesmen did:--
"In all the lengthy annals of this Government, vacillation between
weakness and tyranny has never proved so disastrous as it is proving
in Ireland to-day, and the conduct of that unhappy country's affairs
is now plunged in a chaos so profoundly chaotic that it has become a
gross misuse of language to call them affairs at all. Out of all this
welter and confusion two salient facts are seen to emerge:--
"(1) No two Englishmen are agreed upon a settlement that will at the
same time satisfy the just aspirations of Ireland and preserve the
integrity of the British Empire.
"(2) No two Irishmen are either.
"At the same time the number of sane and carefully considered plans
for the government of Ireland was never so great as it is to-day. When
will our incompetent Cabinet perceive that the only way of warding
off the stain of perfidy which dogs their footsteps and threatens to
overwhelm them is to make use of all these plans? I put aside for the
moment the most violent proposals of the extremists on either side,
such as that of the annexation of England by the Sinn Fein Empire and
that of the deportation of all Irishmen to the Andaman Islands and the
re-colonisation of the country with correspondents to the daily press;
but between these two extremes there surely lie innumerable solutions
which both can and ought to be employed. I will only name here a few
of them:--
ASQUITH autonomy.
Dominion Home Rule.
DUNRAVEN autonomy.
GREY autonomy.
Red autonomy.
Government by Dhail Eireann.
Government by Dhail Ymaill.
Administration by the L.C.C.
Clan warfare.
"And there are infinite shades and variations of all these.
"Every one of the policies I have named, and as many more as possible,
should now be adopted at once, one after the other, I suggest, for
quarterly periods and in alphabetical order.
"But let there be no mistake. They must be strictly enforced. It must
be impossible for Irishmen to come to England in the future and say
to her, as they have so often said in the past, 'You made us promises
which, when we leant on them, proved a broken reed and turned to dust
and ashes in our mouths.'
"One of the bitterest reproaches that is hurled, and hurled justly, at
British maladministration is that through all the seeming variations
of misgovernment there has been in fact no change. Dublin Castle
remains where it did. This must be altered at once. _The site of
Dublin Castle must be moved every three months._ There must be
infinite change, and it must be infinitely thorough and infinitely
systematic, so that, side by side with the continuous grievances of
all dissatisfied parties, will be the certain assurance that those
grievances will in strict rotation be remedied.
"The objection will, of course, be raised that these continual changes
of government will involve a certain amount of disorder; that one
system will scarcely be working before it is superseded by another;
that the rapid alterations in the _personnel_ of the judicature, civil
service and police will be inconvenient; that everything, in fact,
will be in a muddle. But by how much is not well-organised muddle to
be preferred to unsystematic anarchy? And as each type of government
recurs in due course will it not be found to work more simply and
satisfactorily?
"To those who shrug their shoulders and say that a series of
kaleidoscopic changes in Irish administration would never be approved
by the good sense of the British electorate I can only urge that it is
precisely this attitude of intolerance towards and ignorance of Irish
psychology which has rendered our behaviour to Ireland for so many
centuries a by-word not only throughout Europe but the whole civilised
world and the United States of America.
"I am, Sir, yours, etc."
Through some accident or other, either because I have not followed
exactly the prescribed rules of the competition, such as writing on
one side of the paper only, or addressing it from the National Liberal
Club, or obtaining the signature of five witnesses, my solution
has not yet appeared in _The Times_ or in _The Westminster Gazette_
either. Feeling it a pity, however, that any helpful suggestion should
be lost at a time when never in the annals of Irish misgovernment
has vacillation vacillated so vacillatingly as it does to-day, I have
repeated my strong but simple proposals here.