weakening of the tie uniting Ireland to Great Britain. This feeling,
amounting at times almost to the consciousness of a secondary nationality,
found expression in the theory that Protestant Ulster was a separate
"nation." But though the expression of the theory was often absurd, the
feeling which underlay it was genuine. It had not been always there: it
was liable to disappear under the stress of stronger feelings: it had been
subject to revulsions. When the Irish Church Act was passed, the Grand
Orange Lodge of Ireland, the Cardinalate of Ulster Protestantism, had
passed by a majority the following resolution: "That all statements and
provisions in the objects, rules and formularies of the Orange institution
which impose any obligation on its members to maintain the Legislative
Union between Great Britain and Ireland be expunged therefrom." The
resolution was inoperative because a two-thirds majority was required to
alter the rules: but that it could be passed is significant of the fact
that "British" sentiment is not the ruling sentiment in the stronghold of
Ulster Unionism under provocation. Still, though spasmodic and uncertain,
the feeling had to be taken into account, and in the hands of skilful
manipulators was capable of being worked into a factitious fervour.
While Ulster Unionists were of this mind it was not to be expected that
they would acquiesce without protest in the passing of a Home Rule Act:
nor was it to be expected that they would think differently because a
majority of the electors of Great Britain decided that they should. The
only people who could win them were their own countrymen. Sinn Fein saw
this clearly and in its own way tried its best to allay Protestant fears
and Protestant prejudices. _Irish Freedom_ printed a letter from New York
from an old Fenian who said, "The great barrier to Irish success is the
fear of the Protestants--unfounded and unreasonable, but undeniably
there--that their interests would be in danger in a free Ireland. Remove
that fear and the Irish question is solved. It would be of infinitely more
service to Ireland to convert ten Ulster Orangemen to Nationality by
convincing them that their interests would be safe in a free Ireland than
to convince a million Englishmen that the Irish would be loyal to the
king.... We had many ex-Orangemen in Fenianism.... All experience shows
that it is easier to convert an Orangeman to full nationality than to any
form of Home Rule." But for Irish Catholics to convert Irish Orangemen to
anything requires infinite tact, infinite patience, and a long lapse of
time: and it cannot be said that either the Sinn Fein or the Republican
Party properly estimated the difficulty and complexity of the problem. The
attempt to moderate the Ulster resistance by appeals to the principles of
democratic government was, if possible, even less successful. It proved
vain to urge that under democratic rule the will of the majority must
prevail: that every party must expect to be in its turn in a minority and
must learn to take the rough with the smooth: that the very principle and
object of the Act of Union was that people in Ireland should not have the
final say in the Government of Ireland but that the Parliament of the
United Kingdom should decide: that both parties in Ireland had
acknowledged this principle for generations and that for the Nationalists
to act as the Unionists were doing now would have been denounced by the
Unionists themselves as an offence against good government. Appeal was
made to Ulster in the interests of the Empire to allow Home Rule to have
at least a fair trial. It was told that Englishmen were convinced that the
government of Ireland was radically vicious, and that the only way to
amend it was to entrust the internal affairs of Ireland to a strictly
subordinate Parliament: that they felt that to continue in Ireland
indefinitely an indefensible system of administration was to embitter the
internal relations of the three kingdoms and weaken the Empire at the very
centre. It was pointed out that a friendly Ireland would be worth many
divisions of the Fleet and Army in the European struggle which could be
seen to be approaching and the Ulster Unionists were asked to 'sacrifice'
to the Empire what Parliament felt they ought no longer to retain.
Neither argument nor appeal had the least effect: the argument meant
nothing to them and the appeal was supposed to imply that the argument was
known to be unsound. They took their stand upon the Act of Union and
declared that, it having once been passed, no Parliament had any right
whatever to deprive the Unionists of Ulster of "their rights as British
citizens." It was, of course, perfectly clear that, Home Rule or no Home
Rule, everybody in the country was as much a British citizen as ever: and
the idea that Parliament could not, if it pleased, repeal the Act of Union
(which, as a matter of fact, it was very far indeed from proposing to do)
was quite absurd. The fact is that all parties were at cross purposes and
that a great many politicians were using language which meant one thing to
themselves and another thing to everybody else, while a certain number
were using language which they were perfectly well aware did not express
what they really meant. "Loyalty to the Empire" did not mean the same
thing to the Prime Minister and to the Orange orators who held the ear of
Ulster; and when the latter professed sentiments of toleration and good
will to "their Catholic fellow-countrymen" (as they sometimes did) they
must have known that they were using words which they did not mean
literally and strictly. At the bottom of everything was the conviction
that, Protestantism being a superior kind of religion, any measure which
placed Protestants on a footing of permanent equality with Roman
Catholics, a position in which Protestants would (to use a common phrase)
"pull only their own weight," was an offence against first principles, a
measure to be resisted to the utmost, first by any arguments which came to
hand, and in the last resort by other measures. They were "loyal to the
Empire" but they expected loyalty from the Empire to them: placed in
Ireland in a position of superiority guaranteed by the Union, they had
seen the symbols of superiority one by one stripped from their shoulders.
A long series of "concessions" to the Catholics (as successive steps in
the establishment of religious equality were described) had, it was said,
left "the Irish" without any "real grievance." The Irish were free to
vote, to buy and sell, to build their churches, to have their own schools
(which the State paid for), to exercise, in short, all civil rights, with
the one restriction, that in the Parliament which legislated for their
country they were in a permanent minority. This was the one great result,
as it had been the one chief attraction, of the Union, and this it was
determined at all hazards to retain.
Everybody at the time underestimated the extent and the vigour of this
feeling, except those who shared it. Englishmen thought (when they heard
of it) that it was all talk and that a "more reasonable view would
eventually prevail": they never understood that they had rivetted upon
Ireland a system which prevented its upholders from taking a "reasonable"
view of anything and incapacitated them from understanding any point of
view except their own. Irish Nationalists pointed to the long series of
truculent threats with which Orange Ulster had greeted every measure of
Irish reform. They recalled the "gun clubs" which had been the answer to
the establishment of the Board of National Education: the threat to "kick
the Queen's crown into the Boyne" if the Irish Church Act should be
passed; and they confidently expected to see a similar luxuriance of
denunciation wither before the chilling blast of an Act of Parliament.
Sinn Fein and the Republican Party (though they did not grasp the fact
that what the Orange Party feared was not the suppression of their
religion but the loss of its political ascendancy) adopted an attitude
useless to reconcile Ulster to Home Rule but admirably calculated, once
Home Rule were passed in defiance of Ulster, to work upon its feeling of
resentment at the "betrayal" of its interests and exploit its wounded
pride in the interests of the independence of Ireland.
But while Sinn Fein was making its proposals, unheeded (and indeed
unheard) by those to whom they were addressed, to disarm the opposition of
Ulster to the cause of Irish freedom, the Ulster leaders were taking steps
to adopt a policy supposed to have been abandoned in Irish politics since
the failure of the Fenian rising. The staid merchants, the prosperous
professional classes, the sturdy farmers of Ulster, supported by the
Belfast Protestant artizans, had begun to drill. Unionist Clubs were
formed throughout the province: volunteers were enrolled in defiance of
the law, under the pretext of being associations formed for the purpose of
taking "physical exercise," though with a growing feeling of strength and
security this pretext was abandoned. Talk of "guns" and "cold steel"
replaced arguments based upon economic conditions and the stringency of
the "bonds of Empire." A theory of "loyalty" was developed compatible with
a chartered licence to defy the authority of King and Parliament in the
affairs of the United Kingdom. As the inevitable day approached when, by
the provisions of the Parliament Act, the Royal Assent to Home Rule must
be given, the attitude of the Ulster leaders became more and more at
variance with all loyal precedents. The Ulster Volunteer Force was
organized as an army for service in the field: it was provided with
signallers and despatch riders, with ambulance units and army nurses:
hospitals were arranged to receive and tend the expected "casualties":
plans were formed to seize strategic points in the province. A Provisional
Government was constituted which on the day of the passing of the Act was
to assume the government of Ulster and replace the King's Government until
such time as it might be advisable again to restore the dispossessed
monarch to his Ulster dominions. The possibility of outside alliances was
not left to chance. The Volunteers were heartened by the news that "the
greatest Protestant monarch" in Europe had promised his aid: the Emperor
of Germany would not stand idly by while Protestantism in Ireland was put
by a British Government under the heel of Irish Catholics. Rifles were
still lacking, but they were not long in being supplied. They were
imported from Hamburg and landed in Larne; and by means of a perfectly
co-ordinated and admirable piece of organization distributed over Ulster
within twenty-four hours.
All Ireland, as if stunned by the shock, waited breathlessly to see what
would happen. Nothing happened. The Liberal Government, with defiance
shouted in its beard, decided that, no actual breach of the "law" having
been committed, no prosecutions need take place. The Cabinet was of course
in a very difficult position, for it had to reckon not with the Ulster
Party only but with the English Tories as well. The latter had seen from
the first the uses to which the Ulster Party might be put in the English
political struggle. The Conservative party hoped by exploiting "the Ulster
question" to bring about the downfall of the Liberal Government: and the
further the Ulster Party went, the more thoroughly they frightened
moderate people in England by threats of bloodshed, anarchy and civil war,
the better: the more truculent the threats of armed resistance the greater
the probability that they need never be put into force. It was a dangerous
game, but danger added zest to the amusement; and Irish parties, whether
Unionist or Nationalist, were to English politicians persons of
unaccountable vehemence whose ways were past finding out: in any case once
they had served their turn they could quietly be shelved. The Cabinet
seems to have considered that this alliance between the Ulster Party and
the English Tories at once put the breach of the conventions of politics
in Ulster under a kind of sanction and ensured that extreme action would
never be taken in Ireland; for it would be absurd to assume that an
English party would ever consent to the wild scheme of handing over Ulster
interests to the charge of Germany; the rest would be, as it had always
been, a matter of arrangement, of the expedients of which the Mother of
Parliaments was still fertile. For whatever reason, then, the Cabinet
decided to protest against the "unprecedented outrage" and leave the
perpetrators to the judgment of posterity. But Nationalist Ireland was not
inclined to see in the inaction of the Government merely the inertia of
perplexed politicians waiting for an unprecedented problem to point the
way to its own solution. They knew by experience that had _they_ imported
arms, or proclaimed their intention of doing so, or publicly flouted the
meanest of the Irish Executive the Crimes Act would have been put into
operation at once and his Majesty's prisons in Ireland would have been
filled. They saw in the failure even to prosecute the Ulster leaders, to
proclaim their organization, to deprive them of their arms, merely the
traditional tenderness of the British Government to its Irish "friends."
They began to believe that neither English party was really sincere in
anything connected with Ireland except in the desire, whether admitted or
denied, to maintain the privileges and ascendancy of the Protestant
interest. Mr. Redmond was criticised with acrimony and vehemence for
failing to do what he could not have done, and forcing the Cabinet to take
action. When later the importation of arms into Ireland was prohibited by
Order in Council, a proceeding of doubtful legality, this also was
interpreted _in malam partem_: it was aimed not so much at preventing
Ulster from getting more arms as at preventing the rest of Ireland from
getting any. It was a piquant situation. Ulster, which had been for a
century the backbone of the "loyalist" interest in Ireland, whose one
publicly proclaimed panacea for all Irish disorders and complaints had
been "the firm and impartial administration of the law," which had called
for the suppression of every attempt on the part of Nationalist Ireland
even to express its national aspirations, was now openly contemptuous of
the law, loud in its expressions of defiance of the Government and
charging the Cabinet, suspected of some faint determination to do
something to assert itself, with "organizing a pogrom." On the other hand
Nationalist Ireland, the supposed enemy of all law, order and even public
decency, was lifting up its hands in horror at the insult to the majesty
of British law and calling upon its representatives in Parliament to do
something, anything, to ensure respect for it. It called upon the
Government to show itself to be in earnest, the Government being in
reality as much in earnest as anybody. But, perplexed at the prospect of
having to enforce the law in Ireland against the wrong people, the King's
Government continued to eye the Ulster Government, each "willing to wound
and yet afraid to strike." As a matter of fact the Ulster leaders, had
they been put to the pinch, could not have made their authority really
effective even in their own area: but with admirable and consummate
audacity they succeeded in making the fact seem so doubtful that any
attempt to suppress them appeared to be involved in serious risk.
Among the Nationalists the only section which was able to use the
situation to advantage was the Republican Party. To them it seemed
incredible that any Irishman should be willing to fight either for or
against such a measure as Home Rule, which gave Ireland a subordinate and
impoverished parliament and retained the Imperial connection practically
unimpaired. But whatever the merits of the measure in itself it had in
their eyes one wholly admirable result. It had for the first time since
the days of the Fenians roused a section of Irishmen to arm against the
British Government: and it had opened the eyes of all Irish Unionists,
armed or unarmed in opposition to it, to the fact that the interests of
their party, courted and promoted in Ireland for a century in English
interests, were as nothing to an English Government when the exigencies of
party warfare required that they should be sacrificed. Their view was put
forcibly and humorously by P. H. Pearse in an article contributed to
_Irish Freedom_ in 1913. "It is now," he wrote, "the creed of Irish
nationalism (or at least of that Irish nationalism which is vocal on
platforms and in the Press) that the possession of arms and the knowledge
of the use of arms is a fit subject for satire. To have a rifle is as
ridiculous as to have a pimple at the end of your nose, or a bailiff
waiting for you round the corner. To be able to use a rifle is an
accomplishment as futile as to be able to stand on your head or to be
able to wag your ears. This is not the creed of any nationalism that
exists or has ever existed in any community, civilized or uncivilized,
that has ever inhabited the globe. It has never been the creed of Irish
nationalism until this our day. Mitchel and the great confessors of Irish
nationalism would have laughed it to scorn. Mitchel indeed did laugh to
scorn a similar but much less foolish doctrine of O'Connell's; and the
generation that came after O'Connell rejected his doctrine and accepted
Mitchel's. The present generation of Irish Nationalists is not only
unfamiliar with arms but despises all who are familiar with arms. Irish
Nationalists share with certain millionaires the distinction of being the
only people who believe in Universal Peace--here and now.... It is foolish
of an Orangeman to believe that his personal liberty is threatened by Home
Rule: but, granting that he believes that, it is not only in the highest
degree common sense, but it is his clear duty to arm in defence of his
threatened liberty. Personally, I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much
less ridiculous figure than the Nationalist without a rifle; and the
Orangeman who can fire a gun will certainly count for more in the end than
the Nationalist who can do nothing cleverer than make a pun.... I am not
defending the Orangeman; I am only showing that his condemnation does not
lie in the mouth of an unarmed Nationalist.... Negotiations might be
opened with the Orangeman on these lines: You are creating a Provisional
Government of Ulster--make it a Provisional Government of Ireland and we
will recognize and obey it. O'Connell said long ago that he would rather
be ruled by the old Protestant Ascendancy Irish Parliament than by the
Union Parliament; 'and O'Connell was right,' said Mitchel. He certainly
was.... Any six Irishmen would be a better Government of Ireland than the
English Cabinet has been.... Better exploit Ireland for the benefit of
Belfast than exploit her for the benefit of Westminster. A rapprochement
between Orangemen and Nationalists would be difficult. The chief obstacles
are the Orangeman's lack of humour and the Nationalist's lack of guns:
each would be at a disadvantage in a conference. But a sense of humour can
be cultivated, and guns can be purchased. One great source of
misunderstanding has now disappeared: it has become clear within the last
few years that the Orangeman is no more loyal to England than we are. He
wants the Union because he imagines that it secures his prosperity: but he
is ready to fire on the Union flag the moment it threatens his prosperity.
The position is perfectly plain and understandable. Foolish notions of
loyalty to England being eliminated, it is a matter for businesslike
negotiation. A Nationalist mission to North-east Ulster would possibly
effect some good. The case might be put thus: Hitherto England has
governed Ireland through the Orange Lodges: she now proposes to govern
Ireland through the A.O.H. You object: so do we. Why not unite and get
rid of the English? They are the real difficulty; their presence here the
real incongruity." When Pearse wrote this he seemed like a voice crying in
the wilderness: but the echoes answered sooner than anyone expected.
Pearse afterwards confessed that this and other articles contributed by
him at this time to _Irish Freedom_ were written "with the deliberate
intention by argument, invective, and satire, of goading those who shared
my political views to commit themselves definitely to an armed movement."
The armed movement which resulted was that of the Irish Volunteers.
ULSTER AND NATIONALIST IRELAND.