(DECEMBER 1913)
I was once stranded on a desert island with a single companion. When two
people are stranded on a desert island they naturally converse. We
conversed. We sat on a stony beach and talked for hours. When we had
exhausted all the unimportant subjects either of us could think of, we
commenced to talk about important subjects. (I have observed that even
on a desert island it is not considered good form to talk of important
things while unimportant things remain to be discussed.) We had very
different points of views, and very different temperaments. I was a boy;
my companion was an old man. I was about to enter the most wicked of all
professions; my companion was a priest. Being young, I was serious and
conceited; being old, my companion was gay and humble. In some respects
I was more learned than he: he was trying to spell his way through
Keating’s _Trí Bior-Ghaoithe an Bháis_, and I was able to help him. But
in every respect he was wiser beyond telling than I, for his life had
been stormy and sorrowful, and withal very saintly, so that he had
garnered much of the wisdom both of heaven and of earth; and I had
garnered only the wisdom of the Board of Intermediate Education. We were
thus as singularly ill-assorted a pair as ever sat down together on the
beach of a desert island.
* * * * *
Yet we had one interest in common. There was at the bottom of my heart a
memory which a course of Intermediate education (by some miracle of
God’s) had not altogether obliterated. I had heard in childhood of the
Fenians from one who, although a woman, had shared their hopes and
disappointment. The names of Stephens and O’Donovan Rossa were familiar
to me, and they seemed to me the most gallant of all names: names which
should be put into songs and sung proudly to tramping music. Indeed, my
mother (although she was not old enough to remember the Fenians) used to
sing of them in words learned, I daresay, from that other who had known
them; one of her songs had the lines--
“Because I was O’Donovan Rossa,
And a son of Gráinne Mhaol”;
and although I did not quite know who O’Donovan Rossa was or what his
deed had been, I felt that he must have been a gallant and kingly man
and his deed a man’s deed. Alice Milligan had not yet made the ballad of
“Owen Who Died,” which was to give these heroic names a place in
literature--
“You have heard of O’Donovan Rossa
From nigh Skibbereen;
You have heard o’ the Hawk o’ the Hill-top,
If you have not seen;
You have heard of the Reaper whose reaping
Was of grain half green:
Such were the men among us
In the days that have been.”
None of my school-fellows had ever heard of those names; and if our
masters had heard them they never mentioned them. O’Connell we heard
about; and one day that stands out in my memory, Parnell’s name was
mentioned, for a master came into the room and said: “Well, boys, they
say Parnell is dead--the dirty fellow.” We all grew very still, for we
were all Parnellites; and we wondered why he should be called a dirty
fellow, and thought it a cruel thing. That was before the Juggernaut car
of the Intermediate had rolled over us, and we still retained most of
the decent kindly instincts with which we had been born. Had it happened
four years later we should probably have applauded the master’s
announcement as rather neatly put.
* * * * *
But behold me on the beach of my desert island with my priest beside me.
And my priest, as I found out when we began to talk about serious
things, had known the Fenians, had made something of a stir in Fenian
times, had even been called the Fenian priest! I do not know whether he
had ever been a Fenian; but I know that all the Fenians of a countryside
used to go to confession to him in preference to their own parish
priests; and it was said that he had a Sodality of the Sacred Heart
composed to a man of sworn Fenians: probably an exaggeration. But this I
can vouch for, that he loved the name and fame of the Fenians, and he
spoke to me, till his voice grew husky and his eyes filled with tears,
of their courage, of their loyalty, of their enthusiasm, of their hope,
of their failure. “Stephens should have given the word,” he said; “we’ll
never be as ready as we were the night he escaped from Richmond Prison.
We’ve lost our manhood since.” It was the first year of the Boer War.
“Look at the chance we have now,” he exclaimed: “the British army at the
other end of the earth, and one blow would give us Ireland; but we’ve
neither men nor guns. GOD ALMIGHTY WON’T GO ON GIVING US CHANCES if we
let every chance slip. You can’t expect He’ll give us more chances than
He gave the Jews. He’ll turn His back on us.... And why,” he added,
“should a lot of old women be free, anyhow?” The worthy man had not
considered the Suffragist claim; or perhaps he would have allowed
freedom to _bona fide_ old women and denied it to old-womanlike young
men--in which he would have been right.
* * * * *
For, after all, may it not be said with entire truth that the reason why
Ireland is not free is that Ireland has not deserved to be free? Men who
have ceased to be men cannot claim the rights of men; and men who have
suffered themselves to be deprived of their manhood have suffered the
greatest of all indignities and deserved the most shameful of all
penalties. It has been sung in savage and exultant verse of a fierce
Western clan that its men allowed themselves to be deprived of their
sight by a triumphant foe rather than be deprived of their manhood; and
it was a man’s choice. But modern Irishmen with eyes open have allowed
themselves to be deprived of their manhood; and many of them have
reached the terrible depth of degradation in which a man will boast of
his unmanliness. For in suffering ourselves to be disarmed, in
acquiescing in a perpetual disarmament, in neglecting every chance of
arming, in sneering (as all Nationalists do now) at those who have taken
arms, we in effect abnegate our manhood. Unable to exercise men’s
rights, we do not deserve men’s privileges. We are, in a strict sense,
not fit for freedom; and freedom we shall never attain.
* * * * *
It is not reasonable to expect that the Almighty will repeal all the
laws of His universe in our behalf. The condition on which freedom is
given to men is that they are able to make good their claim to it; and
unarmed men cannot make good their claim to anything which armed men
choose to deny them. One of the sins against faith is presumption, which
is defined as a foolish expectation of salvation without making use of
the necessary means to obtain it: surely it is a sin against national
faith to expect national freedom without adopting the necessary means to
win and keep it. And I know of no other way than the way of the sword:
history records no other, reason and experience suggest no other. When I
say the sword I do not mean necessarily the actual use of the sword: I
mean readiness and ability to use the sword. Which, translated into
terms of modern life, means readiness and ability to shoot.
* * * * *
I regard the armed Orangemen of North-East Ulster as potentially the
most useful body of citizens Ireland possesses. In fact, they are the
only citizens Ireland does possess at this moment: the rest of us for
the most part do not count. A citizen who cannot vindicate his
citizenship is a contradiction in terms. A citizen without arms is like
a priest without religion, like a woman without chastity, like a man
without manhood. The very conception of an unarmed citizen is a purely
modern one, and even in modern times it is chiefly confined to the
populations of the (so-called) British Islands. Most other peoples,
civilised and uncivilised, are armed. This is a truth which we of
Ireland must grasp. We must try to realise that we are collectively and
individually living in a state of degradation as long as we remain
unarmed. I do not content myself with saying in general terms that the
Irish should arm. I say to each one of you who read this that it is YOUR
duty to arm. Until you have armed yourself and made yourself skilful in
the use of your arms you have no right to a voice in any concern of the
Irish Nation, no right to consider yourself a member of the Irish Nation
or of any nation; no right to raise your head among any body of decent
men. Arm. If you cannot arm otherwise than by joining Carson’s
Volunteers, join Carson’s Volunteers. But you can, for instance, start
Volunteers of your own.
* * * * *
My priest on my desert island spoke to me glowingly about the Three who
died at Manchester. He spoke to me, too, of the rescue of Kelly and
Deasy from the prison van and of the ring of armed Fenians keeping the
Englishry at bay. I have often thought that that was the most memorable
moment in recent Irish history: and that that ring of Irishmen spitting
fire from revolver barrels, while an English mob cowered out of range,
might well serve as a symbol of the Ireland that should be; of the
Ireland that shall be. Next Sunday we shall pay homage to them and to
their deed; were it not a fitting day for each of us to resolve that we,
too, will be men.