after the dispute with Mr. Redmond had withdrawn a large majority of their
original numbers: indeed some authorities go so far as to say that
immediately after the formation of the National Volunteers, the original
committee could not count upon a following of more than 10,000 or 12,000
men. Be this as it may, the arrest and deportation of several of their
organizers, the constant supervision over their proceedings exercised by
the police authorities and the sure drift of Nationalist opinion away from
the Parliamentarians and their policy, not (it is true) so marked then as
to cause serious official misgiving, tended to increase their prestige and
popularity. The funds had for the most part gone with the National
Volunteers, but the Irish in America, who sided not with Mr. Redmond but
with the Irish Volunteers, supplied large sums of money for equipment and
organization. The report of the Second Annual Convention held in November,
1915, contains a speech by the President on the history and aims of the
movement which concluded: "Further I will only say that we ought all to
adhere faithfully and strictly to the objects, the constitution and the
policy which we have adopted. We will not be diverted from our work by
tactics of provocation. We will not give way to irritation or excitement.
Our business is not to make a show or indulge in demonstrations. We
started out on a course of constructive work requiring a long period of
patient and tenacious exertion. When things were going most easily for
us, I never shrank from telling my comrades that success might require
years of steady perseverance--a prospect sometimes harder to face than an
enemy in the field.... Great progress has been made, more must be made.
The one thing we must look to is that there shall be no stopping and no
turning back." There were at this time over 200 corps of the Irish
Volunteers in active training and the movement was spreading, if not
rapidly, yet quietly and surely. The leaders waited for time to do its
work, to bring fully home to Irish Nationalists the difference between a
policy in which the necessities of Empire held the first place and one in
which the claims of Ireland were supreme: meanwhile it was intended that
the Volunteers should act as "a national defence force for Ireland, for
all Ireland and for Ireland only," ready to ward off any assault upon
Irish liberty, but resolved not to provoke or to invite attack.
But in spite of official policies and intentions there had slowly been
formed a small but determined minority in Ireland who looked to revolution
as the only sure and manly policy for a nation pledged to freedom. This,
the creed of the Fenians, had not been openly avowed in Ireland for almost
half a century: Nationalists had come to regard it either as a forlorn
hope, a gallant but hopeless adventure, or as a policy out of harmony with
modern civilization and progress. Here and there a lonely but picturesque
figure might be seen, "an old Fenian," in the world but not of it, who
spoke with a resigned contempt of the new men and the new methods, an
inspiration but hardly an example to the younger generation. There was
still in existence the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an obscure and
elusive body, mysterious as the Rosicrucians and to all outward
appearances of hardly any more political importance. A secret but
apparently innocuous correspondence was understood to be kept up by them
with America where, among an important and influential section of the
expatriated Irish, the hope was more widely and more openly cherished of a
day when Ireland would shake off the lethargy of a generation and revert
to the age-long claim for independence. For a short time it seemed as if
the prospect of the grant of Home Rule would quench the last embers of the
revolutionary fire, as if the English democracy had at last stretched out
a friendly hand and that the rest would be the work of time. Ulster's
appeal to arms quickened the embers to a flame; in less than two years'
time a revolution was spoken of more openly than had been the case for
fifty years. No man in Ireland would have taken up arms to secure Home
Rule: it was a "concession" which to some Nationalists seemed the greatest
that could be obtained, to others (and perhaps the majority) to be a step
upon the road to a larger independence: both sections were agreed that it
should be sought by constitutional methods. But force might be the only
means of retaining what it had been proper to secure without it, and the
Irish Volunteers were prepared to fight those who attempted to take from
the people of Ireland any right which they had been able to secure.
But it was not to be expected that the purely defensive policy of the
Volunteers would commend itself to all sections of Nationalist opinion nor
could the formula of their association produce more than an outward and
seeming unity. So much had been true before the war; and when Europe was
involved in strife, when the issue between England with her Allies and the
Central Powers seemed to hang in the balance, a purely defensive and
waiting policy seemed to be a criminal neglect of the opportunity offered
by Providence. Mitchel's prophecy of the fortune that a continental war
might bring to Ireland seemed about to be fulfilled, unless the arm of
Ireland should prove nerveless and impotent. Not alone in Ireland were
voices raised to point the lesson: the Irish in America who still
professed the Fenian faith urged insistently the use of the opportunity.
Two books written by James K. Maguire and printed by the Wolfe Tone
Publishing Co. of New York, "What Could Germany do for Ireland?" and "The
King, the Kaiser and Irish Freedom" had a considerable circulation in
Ireland during 1915 and 1916. Written by an Irish-American who had been
educated at a German school in Syracuse, and was well known for his German
sympathies, they boldly announced that in a German victory lay the only
hope for the establishment of an Irish Republic. They asserted not only
that Germany would establish and guarantee the independence of Ireland,
but that she would help Ireland to develop her industries and commerce,
her resources in coal, metals and peat, which still after a hundred years
of the Union were no further developed than they had been in the middle of
the eighteenth century. To most Irishmen the panegyric of German
disinterestedness was an idle tale, and Sinn Fein had been proclaiming
(not without success) for nearly a score of years that the development of
Ireland must not be expected from outsiders but from Irishmen themselves.
But there were those who thought that the power to raise the heavy hand of
England must be found, not in the slow efforts of a painful and hampered
self-reliance, but in a hand heavier still: and it was assumed that German
aid once given to free and re-establish Ireland would be withdrawn before
it became tutelage and exploitation. No one dreamed of an Ireland that
should exchange the penurious restraint of the Union for the prosperous
servitude of a German Province: the end of all endeavour was the sovereign
independence of Ireland.
The German Foreign Office, with the sanction of the Imperial Chancellor,
had quite early in the war, on the motion of Roger Casement, given what
was taken for an unequivocal assurance on this point. "The Imperial
Government," the statement ran, "declares formally that Germany would not
invade Ireland with any intentions of conquest or of the destruction of
any institutions. If, in the course of this war, which Germany did not
seek, the fortunes of arms should ever bring German troops to the coast of
Ireland, they would land there, not as an army of invaders coming to rob
or destroy, but as the fighting forces of a Government inspired by
goodwill toward a land and a people for whom Germany only wishes national
prosperity and national freedom." Even a slight acquaintance with methods
of imperial expansion would point to the necessity for a rigorous scrutiny
of the terms of such a declaration and no such scrutiny would pronounce
this declaration to be even moderately satisfactory: even if it stood the
test it would not (so mysterious are the ways of State policy) have been
worth the paper it was written on. But "cows over the water have long
horns"--the German promise was an anchor sure and steadfast.
Whatever aid might be expected from Germany to secure the success of a
revolution, nothing could be done without a party in Ireland united in its
aims and able to take advantage of any aid that might be sent. No single
party in Ireland could have been said to fulfil the conditions. The only
Nationalist section which could have combined with an outside
expeditionary force landing in Ireland was the Irish Volunteers, but not
one of them was, by virtue of his Volunteer pledge, in any way bound to do
so. Nor was there any guarantee that their views as to the ultimate form
which a free Irish constitution should assume were identical: in fact it
was known that they were not. Official Sinn Fein still found the
independence of Ireland in the Constitution of 1782: the Republicans would
have nothing but a "true Republican Freedom." The Citizen Army was
Republican in its teaching but it was openly hostile to both sections of
the Volunteers. To it Sinn Fein and many of the Republicans seemed a
bourgeois party, from which the workers need expect nothing. To James
Connolly, their leader, the vaunted prosperity reached under the
independent Irish Parliament was the prosperity of a class and not of the
community, and he could point to the writings of Arthur O'Connor, ignored
by orthodox Sinn Feiners, in proof of his contention. To establish the
political ideals of Sinn Fein the Citizen Army was not prepared to raise
its little finger. The Republicans might have seemed more sympathetic and
congenial allies; but many even of them seemed too remote and formal in
their ideals, too much wrapped up in visions of a future Ireland, free and
indivisible, to have time to spare for the formulation of the means by
which all Irishmen might really be free. But there were not wanting men on
both sides who saw the necessity of union in the face of a common danger
for the furtherance of a common purpose, who taught that if Labour should
pledge itself to Ireland, Ireland should also pledge itself to Labour.
This union when it came about was mainly due to James Connolly and P. H.
Pearse.
James Connolly had been for several years the acknowledged leader of Irish
Socialism. His book on _Labour in Irish History_ written in 1910 is
recognized as a standard work: his _Reconquest of Ireland_, his pamphlet
_The New Evangel_, and his articles in _The Irish Worker_ were widely read
and had great influence among Irish Nationalists who belonged to the
Labour movement. His attitude to the two main Irish parties was one of
hostility: he was hostile to the Unionists as representing the party of
tyranny and privilege, to the Home Rulers as the followers of a policy
which was "but a cloak for the designs of the middle-class desirous of
making terms with the Imperial Government it pretends to dislike." To
ardent and vague talk about "Ireland" and "freedom" he opposed the cool
and critical temper of one who was accustomed to look stern facts in the
face: "Ireland as distinct from her people," he wrote, "is nothing to me;
and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for 'Ireland,'
and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and
the suffering, the shame and the degradation brought upon the people of
Ireland--aye, brought by Irishmen upon Irish men and women--without
burning to end it, is in my opinion a fraud and a liar in his heart, no
matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements he is pleased to
call 'Ireland'." Connolly believed in Irish Nationality, but he would not
have been satisfied with the right to wear the badges of independence; a
national flag, a national parliament, a national culture were in
themselves nothing; but if they meant the right of the common men and
women of Ireland to control their own lives and their own destinies then
they meant everything in the world to him. Like Wolfe Tone he believed in
"that numerous and respectable class, the men of no property"; to secure
their rights in Ireland he was ready for anything. The national mould in
which his Socialism came to be cast did not always appeal to his followers
and associates: they regretted his increasing devotion to Irish
Nationalism and his apparent indifference to pure Socialism; as one said
later, "The high creed of Irish Nationalism became his daily rosary, while
the higher creed of international humanity that had so long bubbled from
his eloquent lips was silent for ever." As a matter of fact he tested
alike theoretical Nationalism and theoretical Socialism by the facts;
Nationalism, to be worth anything, must secure the rights of the common
men and women who make up the bulk of the nation: Socialism, to be worth
anything, must secure the rights not of "humanity" but of the human beings
which compose it, and the principal human beings whose destiny an Irish
Socialist could influence were the Irish. Connolly had never shared the
extreme hostility to the Irish Volunteers which was characteristic of the
bulk of the Citizen Army: while he championed the rights of his class he
recognized that they formed, along with others, an Irish nation and that
their surest charter of freedom would be the charter of freedom of their
country. But it must be a real, universal and effective freedom if it were
to be worth the winning. Under his guidance and influence the ideals of
the Citizen Army began to approximate more closely to those of the Irish
Volunteers.
The Irish Volunteers on the other hand were learning under other guidance
to examine more closely the implications of the phrase "the independence
of Ireland." Their guide was P. H. Pearse, a man of great gifts, a high
and austere spirit filled with a great purpose. Through all his work, both
in English and in Irish, plays, poems and stories, runs the thread of an
ardent devotion to goodness and beauty, to spiritual freedom, to the faith
that tries to move mountains and is crushed beneath them. For many years
his life seems to have been passed in the grave shadow of the sacrifice he
felt that he was called upon to make for Ireland: he believed that he was
appointed to tread the path that Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone had trodden
before him, and his life was shaped so that it might be worthy of its end.
To Pearse the ideal Irishman was Wolfe Tone, and it is significant that
one of the first occasions upon which the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen
Army held a joint demonstration was a pilgrimage to Tone's grave at
Bodenstown. It was here that Pearse in 1913 delivered an eloquent and
memorable address in which he proclaimed his belief that Wolfe Tone was
the greatest Irishman who had ever lived. "We have come," his speech
began, "to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place
where Patrick sleeps in Down. Patrick brought us life, but this man died
for us." Pearse saw in Tone the greatest of all Irishmen because he saw
in him the most complete incarnation of the Irish race, of its passion for
freedom, its gallantry, its essential tolerance: and he urged his hearers
not to let Tone's work and example perish. Quoting Tone's famous
declaration of his objects and his means, of breaking the connection with
England by uniting the whole people of Ireland, Pearse concluded: "I find
here implicit all the philosophy of Irish Nationalism, all the teaching of
the Gaelic League, and the later prophets. Ireland one and Ireland
free--is not this the definition of Ireland a Nation? To that definition
and to that programme we declare our adhesion anew; pledging ourselves as
Tone pledged himself--and in this sacred place, by this graveside, let us
not pledge ourselves unless we mean to keep our pledge--we pledge
ourselves to follow in the steps of Tone, never to rest, either by day or
by night, until his work be accomplished, deeming it to be the proudest of
all privileges to fight for freedom, to fight not in despondency but in
great joy, hoping for the victory in our day, but fighting on whether
victory seem near or far, never lowering our ideal, never bartering one
jot or tittle of our birthright, holding faith to the memory and the
inspiration of Tone, and accounting ourselves base as long as we endure
the evil thing against which he testified with his blood."
To show that Wolfe Tone was a revolutionary, that he aimed at the complete
overthrow of English ascendancy in Ireland and at the severing of all
political connection between the two countries, that he believed in an
Ireland in which the designations of Catholic and Protestant should be
swallowed up in the common bonds of nationhood--all this needed no
proving, for it was matter of common knowledge with all to whom Tone's
name was known. But it was necessary to do more than this. Pearse had to
show in the first place that Tone might be taken as the normal and
classical representative of the Irish national ideal, and in the second
place that he was no mere ordinary constitution-monger but a teacher of a
philosophy of nationality, valid not for his own age only, but always,
capable of furnishing guidance in the just and orderly upbuilding of a
modern community, of satisfying at once the claims of the nation and the
claims of its humblest member. To this task he gave the last months of his
life: the last four "Tracts for the Times" were from his pen: the first
was written at the end of 1915, the last in March, 1916, a fortnight
before the Rising. The first of these four pamphlets was entitled
"Ghosts," a title borrowed from Ibsen. It is an exposition of the national
teaching of five Irish leaders, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, James Fintan
Lalor, John Mitchel and Charles Stewart Parnell, all of whom held and
taught that the national claim of Ireland was for independence and
separation; their ghosts haunt the generation which has disowned them,
they will not be appeased till their authority is again acknowledged. A
few sentences will make the thesis of this tract (and to some extent of
the following tracts) clear. "There has been nothing more terrible in
Irish history than the failure of the last generation. Other generations
have failed in Ireland, but they have failed nobly; or, failing ignobly,
some man among them has redeemed them from infamy by the splendour of his
protest. But the failure of the last generation has been mean and
shameful, and no man has arisen from it to do a splendid thing in virtue
of which it shall be forgiven. The whole episode is squalid. It will
remain the one sickening chapter in a story which, gallant or sorrowful,
has everywhere else some exaltation of pride.... Even had the men
themselves been less base, their failure would have been inevitable. When
one thinks over the matter for a little one sees that they have built upon
an untruth. They have conceived of nationality as a material thing whereas
it is a spiritual thing.... Hence, the nation to them is not all holy, a
thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that a man dare not sell or
dishonour on pain of eternal perdition. They have thought of nationality
as a thing to be negotiated about as men negotiate about a tariff or about
a trade route.... I make the contention that the national demand of
Ireland is fixed and determined; that that demand has been made by every
generation; that we of this generation receive it as a trust from our
fathers; that we are bound by it; that we have not the right to alter it
or to abate it by one jot or tittle; and that any undertaking made in the
name of Ireland to accept in full satisfaction of Ireland's claim
anything less than the generations of Ireland have stood for is null and
void.... The man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a "final
settlement" anything less by one fraction of an iota than separation from
England will be repudiated by the new generation as surely as O'Connell
was repudiated by the generation that came after him. The man who in
return for the promise of a thing which is not merely less than separation
but which denies separation and declares the Union perpetual, the man who
in return for this declares peace between England and Ireland and
sacrifices to England as a peace-holocaust the blood of 50,000 Irishmen is
guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish
nation, that one can only say of him that it were better for that man (as
it were certainly better for his country) that he had not been born." The
pamphlet concludes with a historic retrospect of the Irish struggle for
independence till the end of the seventeenth century, of the Anglo-Irish
claim for independence in the eighteenth century, and with quotations from
the five great Irish leaders since the last decade of that century joining
in the same claim.
The next tract, "The Separatist Idea," was a detailed study of Wolfe
Tone's political teaching. Tone was not merely a "heroic soul," he
possessed an "austere and piercing intellect," which, "dominating Irish
political thought for over a century," had given Ireland "its political
definitions and values." Tone had written in his _Autobiography_, "I made
speedily [in 1790] what was to me a great discovery, though I might have
found it in Swift or Molyneux, that the influence of England was the
radical vice of our Government, and that consequently Ireland would never
be either free, prosperous or happy until she was independent and that
independence was unattainable whilst the connection with England existed."
In a pamphlet called "An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland"
Tone (signing himself "A Northern Whig") had tried to convince the
Dissenters "that they and the Catholics had but one common interest and
one common enemy: that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced
and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them, and that,
consequently, to assert the independence of their country, and their own
individual liberties, it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to
consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation and to form for the
future but one people." In his earlier years Tone had not been a
Republican, but Republicanism was the creed which he finally professed. He
defined the aim of an Irish Constitution as the promotion of "The Rights
of Man in Ireland." To secure this end reliance must be had not on a
section of the nation but on the nation as a whole. "If the men of
property will not support us," he said, "they must fall: we can support
ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the
community--the men of no property." "In this glorious appeal to Caesar,"
comments Pearse, "modern Irish democracy has its origin." Tone then was
not merely a Republican and a Separatist but a Democrat prepared for a
democratic and revolutionary policy.
In his next tract "The Spiritual Nation" Pearse analyzed the national
teaching of Thomas Davis, who was to him the embodiment of the idea of the
spiritual side of nationality. Davis was a Separatist (Pearse puts this,
by quotation from his writings, beyond reasonable doubt) but he laid
stress more upon the spiritual than upon the material side of Irish
independence. He saw in nationality "the sum of the facts, spiritual and
intellectual, which mark off one nation from another," the language, the
folklore, the literature, the music, the art, the social customs. "The
insistence on the spiritual fact of nationality is Davis's distinctive
contribution to political thought in Ireland, but it is not the whole of
Davis." To secure spiritual independence, material freedom is necessary,
and such freedom can only be found in political independence. One
rhetorical paragraph of Davis's makes his attitude clear. "Now,
Englishmen, listen to us. Though you were to-morrow to give us the best
tenures on earth--though you were to equalise Presbyterian, Catholic and
Episcopalian--though you were to give us the amplest representation in
your Senate--though you were to restore our absentees, disencumber us of
your debt, and redress every one of our fiscal wrongs--and though, in
addition to all this, you plundered the treasuries of the world to lay
gold at our feet and exhausted the resources of your genius to do us
worship and honour--still we tell you--we tell you in the name of liberty
and country--we tell you in the name of enthusiastic hearts, thoughtful
souls and fearless spirits--we tell you by the past, the present and the
future, we would spurn your gifts if the condition were that Ireland
should remain a province. We tell you and all whom it may concern, come
what may--bribery or deceit, justice, policy or war--we tell you, in the
name of Ireland, that Ireland shall be a nation."