task of all. It was introduced by the short preface, dated 31st March,
1916, "This pamphlet concludes the examination of the Irish definition of
freedom which I promised in 'Ghosts.' For my part I have no more to say."
It is told that he entreated the printer to have it published at once: he
wished his last words, the final manifesto of his party, to be in the
hands of the public before he went into the Rising. The tract is an
attempt to establish, on the basis of the writings of James Fintan Lalor,
the thesis that the independence claimed for Ireland is of a republican
and democratic type. He expressed his views clearly and unequivocally upon
such questions as the rights of private property, the individual ownership
of the material resources of the community, and universal suffrage.
Pearse's views as expressed in this pamphlet are seen to be practically
identical with those of James Connolly, and there is little doubt that it
was upon the basis of some such understanding that Pearse's followers and
those of Connolly joined forces at the last. "The nation's sovereignty,"
the exposition runs, "extends not only to all the men and women of the
nation, but to all the material possessions of the nation, the nation's
soil and all its resources, all wealth and all wealth-producing processes
within the nation. In other words, no private right to property is good as
against the public right of the nation. But the nation is under a moral
obligation so to exercise its public right as to secure strictly equal
rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation.... No class
in the nation has rights inferior to those of any other class. No class in
the nation is entitled to privileges superior to those of any other
class.... To insist upon the sovereign control of the nation over all the
property within the nation is not to disallow the right to private
property. It is for the nation to determine to what extent private
property may be held by its members and in what items of the nation's
material resources private property may be allowed. A nation may, for
instance, determine, as the free Irish nation determined and enforced for
many centuries, that private ownership shall not exist in land, that the
whole of a nation's soil is the public property of the nation.... There is
nothing divine or sacrosanct in any of these arrangements; they are
matters of purely human concern, matters for discussion and adjustment
between the members of a nation, matters to be decided on finally by the
nation as a whole; and matters in which the nation as a whole can revise
or reverse its decision whenever it seems good in the common interests to
do so.... In order that the people may be able to choose as a legislation
and as a government men and women really and fully representative of
themselves, they will keep the choice actually or virtually in the hands
of the whole people ... they will, if wise, adopt the widest possible
franchise--give a vote to every adult man and woman of sound mind. To
restrict the franchise in any respect is to prepare the way for some
future usurpation of the rights of the sovereign people. The people, that
is the whole people, must remain sovereign not only in theory but in
fact.... It is in fact true that the repositories of the Irish tradition,
as well the spiritual tradition of nationality as the kindred tradition of
stubborn physical resistance to England, have been the great, faithful,
splendid, common people, that dumb multitudinous throng which sorrowed
during the penal night, which bled in '98, which starved in the Famine;
and which is here still--what is left of it--unbought and unterrified. Let
no man be mistaken as to who will be lord in Ireland, when Ireland is
free. The people will be lord and master." These theses are enforced by
quotations from Lalor, the most outspoken Democrat and Radical in the
tradition of Irish nationalism. The pamphlet concludes with a defence of
John Mitchel (who adopted Lalor's teaching) against the charge of hating
the English people. "Mitchel, the least apologetic of men, was at pains to
explain that his hate was not of English men and women, but of the English
thing which called itself a government in Ireland, of the English Empire,
of English commercialism supported by English militarism, a thing wholly
evil, perhaps the most evil thing that there has ever been in the world."
On Palm Sunday, 1916, the Union of Irish Labour and Irish Nationality was
proclaimed in a striking fashion. In the evening of that day Connolly
hoisted over Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army, the Irish
tricolour of orange, white and green, the flag designed by the Young
Irelanders in 1848 to symbolise the union of the Orange and Green by the
white bond of a common brotherhood. On Easter Monday the Irish Republic
was proclaimed in arms in Dublin.
AFTER THE RISING.
There are many interesting topics of enquiry in connection with the Easter
Rising: but they relate to points of detail or affect the responsibility
of individuals; they do not concern the history of Sinn Fein. The Rising
was the work not of Sinn Fein, but of the leaders of the Republican Party
in the Irish Volunteers and of the Citizen Army. Of the signatories to the
proclamation of the Republic only one had any sort of connection with Sinn
Fein and he had been a reforming, rather than an orthodox, Sinn Feiner.
But the general public, some from mere instinct, others from a desire to
discredit a movement which they disliked and feared, persisted in calling
the Rising by the name of the "Sinn Fein Rebellion," and substituted "Sinn
Fein" for "Irish" in speaking of the Volunteers. In truth it would have
been impossible for Sinn Fein, even if it had wished to do so, to
repudiate all responsibility for the Rising. It had from the beginning
proclaimed the independence of Ireland, not (it is true) in the form of an
Irish Republic, but in the form of a National Constitution free from any
subordination to the Parliament of England: it had renounced the idea of
an appeal to arms in view of the certain failure of an armed rising: but
it had not repudiated revolution upon principle and it had admitted that
in certain contingencies Ireland might with propriety appeal to arms to
secure its independence. The only criticism it could make upon the Rising
would have been that it was a well-intentioned error of judgment, the
error of men who had mistaken their means and their opportunity for
accomplishing an object good in itself. It is highly improbable that any
such criticism would under the circumstances have been made in public by
the leaders of Sinn Fein: in any case they were not afforded the
opportunity to make it, for they were arrested and deported as part of the
measures of repression taken after the Rising had collapsed.
At the time of the Rising Ireland was still far from being either Sinn
Fein or Republican. The prestige of parliamentarianism had been shaken and
its strength impaired: expectations had been disappointed, but the reasons
for the failure were still the subject of keen discussion, and the Sinn
Fein explanation was by no means universally accepted. Convinced
Republicans were a minority, insignificant except for their ability and
fervour. The mass of Nationalists felt disturbed and uneasy. It was plain
that their cause was losing ground, and that mere pre-occupation with the
war was not the sole reason for the growing indifference of England to the
government of Ireland. Nationalist Ireland was represented (by people who
affected to speak more in sorrow than in anger) as having disowned the
patriotic lead of Mr. Redmond and as failing in its duty, and this view
was clearly becoming the prevalent view in England. The policy pursued by
the War Office towards Nationalist recruits (a policy described by a
member of the War Cabinet as "malignant") was slowly killing recruiting,
and the decline of recruiting was claimed to be a justification of the
policy that produced it, and that by people perfectly well aware of the
facts. The favour shown to the Ulster Volunteers had not induced them to
go in a body to the war: but while they were reported to have done
magnificently, the National Volunteers were held to have done little and
to have done it with a bad grace. The advent of the Coalition Government,
which included some of the bitterest enemies of Irish Nationalism, did not
mend matters. Mr. Redmond, it is true, was offered a seat in the Coalition
Cabinet and declined the offer. It seemed to many Irishmen at the time
that Mr. Redmond might very well have accepted it: that having stretched a
point in promising Irish assistance in the war out of gratitude for a
coming recognition of Irish claims, it was a mere standing upon ceremony
to refuse to stretch another point and enter an English Ministry. But Mr.
Redmond decided in view of the state of feeling in Ireland that he had
gone as far as was prudent. His generous enthusiasm had received a shock,
first in the hints of Irish disapproval at his failure to take full
advantage of his opportunity, secondly when he came into contact with the
cold hostility of the War Office. His slowly waning influence in Ireland
might have vanished if he had advanced farther on the path of
unconditional co-operation. It had been for years a maxim--the maxim--of
the Nationalist Party to accept no office under the Union Constitution,
and no office under the Crown until the claims of Ireland had been
conceded. These claims had not been conceded, and the prospect that they
would ever be conceded was growing fainter. Had he represented Ireland
under an Irish Constitution, even a Provisional Constitution, the case
would have been different: Nationalist Ireland would have followed him, as
England then followed Mr. Asquith: but to enter the Cabinet under the
circumstances as the representative of Ireland seemed to be merely to
forfeit by his entry the only ground upon which he had a claim to enter
it. His decision left the way open to the almost unfettered activities of
the opponents of his policy both in England and in Ireland. The strength
of England in time of war, the readiness of her public men to subordinate,
within limits, the strife of parties to the interests of the Commonwealth,
meant the weakness of Ireland in the end. It was loudly proclaimed in
England that the happy co-operation of days of stress must not be allowed
to be broken up when peace dawned: that the strife of parties must be
mitigated when war was over: but Ireland knew that she had been in later
years their chief battleground, and that any mitigation of their quarrel,
while it might be to the advantage of English public life, could only be
brought about at the expense of her national hopes. And in Ireland the
Executive, pursuing a fixed anti-national policy, tempered only by the
prudence, the theoretical liberalism, or the bland indifference of
successive Chief Secretaries, could henceforth count on the steady backing
of friends in power over the water.
The Rising came like a flash of lightning in an evening twilight,
illuminating and terrifying. It was not entirely unexpected: those whose
duty and those whose pleasure it is to suspect everything had been uneasy
for some time. The few people who were in touch with the inner circles of
the Irish Volunteers had long known that something was in progress. But
the authorities had nothing definite to go upon, and the majority of
Irishmen knew nothing definite about it. When news came that Dublin had
been seized, that an Irish Republic had been proclaimed, and that troops
were hurrying across from England, the prevailing feeling was one of
stupefaction. Even the Unionist newspapers, never at a loss before in
pointing the Irish moral, were stunned for the moment. When the facts
began to be realized, Unionist and Nationalist joined in a common
condemnation of the Rising, which, unable to accomplish its professed aim,
could have no real effect beyond that of hampering the Allied cause. Later
on Nationalists began to fear and Unionists to hope that it meant the
death of Home Rule, or at least its postponement to an indefinite future.
When the Rising was crushed and the leaders and their followers had
surrendered it is questionable whether the fortunes of Republicanism in
Ireland had ever been at so low an ebb. All their plans had miscarried;
their very counsels had been contradictory and confused. German assistance
had disappointed them; the country had not supported them; and the army
had made an end of their resistance and had brought their strongholds
about their heads: their leaders were in custody, not even as prisoners of
war: all of their followers who had shown that they could be counted on
were either dead or in gaol. There was no district in Ireland that had not
sent men to the war: many of them had died at the hands of the Germans to
whom the Republican leaders had looked for aid, many of them were risking
their lives every hour; it was not from the friends and neighbours of
these men that sympathy for the Rising could have been expected. Sinn Fein
was involved in the general feeling; if it had not fomented the Rising,
what had it done to discourage it? Was it not the stimulus which had
spurred more daring spirits into action?
A bruised reed never seemed less difficult to break or less worth the
breaking. It was decided to break it _ad majorem cautelam_.
Four days after the surrender Pearse and two others after a secret trial
were shot in the morning: the next day and the next others were shot.
There was a pause of three days, and the shooting was resumed till
thirteen had paid the penalty. After the thirteenth execution, a
proclamation was issued that the General Officer Commanding in Chief had
"found it imperative" to inflict these punishments, which it was hoped
would act as a deterrent and show that such proceedings as those of the
Rising could not be tolerated. Two more executions followed, that of James
Connolly and another. At the same time arrests took place all over the
country. Three thousand prisoners who had taken no part in the Rising were
collected, many of them as innocent of any complicity in the affair as the
Prime Minister. To have been at any time a member of the Irish Volunteers
was sufficient cause for arrest and deportation. They were taken through
the streets in lorries and in furniture vans at the dead of night and
shipped for unknown destinations.
In a normally governed country, a strong Government enjoying the support
of the community has a comparatively easy task in dealing with an
unsuccessful rebellion, if a rebellion should occur. It can shoot the
leaders, if it thinks them worth shooting, or do practically what it
pleases with them, and gain nothing but credit for its firmness or
clemency (as the case may be). But in a country not normally governed (and
no one either inside or outside Ireland considered the Irish government to
be normal) the matter is more intricate. If the Government is united, has
clean hands and unlimited force, and is prepared to employ force
indefinitely, it may do as it pleases: but few Governments are in this
position and those which are not have to pick their steps. In the case of
the Easter Rising the Government began by going forward with great
confidence beyond the point whence retreat was possible and then
determined very carefully to pick its steps back again. At first it acted
"with vigour and firmness": it handed the situation over to the care of a
competent and tried officer, who proceeded to treat it as a mere matter of
departmental routine. He was alert, prompt and businesslike. He did not
hesitate to take what seemed "necessary steps" or to speak out where
speaking plainly seemed called for. He let it be known that he had come to
act and he did what he had come for.
During the week of the executions an almost unbroken silence reigned in
Ireland. The first hint that anything was wrong came on the cables from
America. The men who were shot in Dublin had been accorded a public
funeral in New York. Empty hearses followed by a throng of mourners had
passed through streets crowded with sympathisers standing with bared
heads. Anxious messages from British agents warned the Government that a
demonstration like this could not be disregarded. The executions were
over, but the Prime Minister decided to go to Ireland to enquire into the
situation on the spot. When he landed the tide of Irish feeling had
already turned.
The catastrophic change of feeling in Ireland is not difficult to explain.
The Rising had occurred suddenly and had ended in a sudden and hopeless
failure. The leaders and their followers had surrendered, and the
authorities held them at their absolute disposal. The utter hopelessness
of any attempt to establish a Republic, or effect any other change in the
government of Ireland by armed force, especially at such a time, had been
clearly demonstrated. England held Ireland in the hollow of its hand.
After four days' cool deliberation it was decided to shoot the leaders.
They were not brought to open trial on the charge of high treason or on
any other charge: the authorities who carried out the sentence were those
who passed judgment upon their guilt and the only people who ever heard or
saw the evidence upon which the judgment was based. They were shot in
batches: for days the lesson was hammered home in stroke after stroke that
these men were entitled neither to open trial and proof of their guilt
before execution, nor to the treatment of captured enemies. The conclusion
drawn by Nationalist Ireland was that if they had been Englishmen they
would have been tried by English courts and sentenced by the judgment of
their countrymen: that if they had been Germans or Turks they would have
been treated as prisoners of war: but that being Irishmen they were in a
class apart, members of a subject race, the mere property of a
courtmartial. The applause of Parliament when the Prime Minister announced
the executions was taken to represent the official sanction of the English
people and their agreement with this attitude towards Ireland. It was
resented in Ireland with a fierce and sudden passion: a tongue of flame
seemed to devour the work of long years in a single night. After the
execution of Pearse it would have been vain to argue against him that he
had appealed to Germany for aid and invited to Ireland hands red with the
blood of Irish soldiers: the reply would have been that he might have done
so or he might not; that it had never been proved what he did; that he had
acted for the best; that
What matters it, if he was Ireland's friend?
There are but two great parties in the end.
The Prime Minister, less than a month after the Rising, spent a week in
Ireland prosecuting enquiries: they resulted in two conclusions, one that
"the existing machinery of Irish government" had broken down, the other
that a unique opportunity had offered itself for a settlement.
Negotiations for the desired settlement were, on the Prime Minister's
invitation, begun by Mr. Lloyd George. He contented himself with taking up
the first settlement that came to hand, the old proposal for partition;
but during the negotiations he left the idea in the mind of the
Nationalist leader that the partition proposed was only temporary and in
the mind of the Unionist leader that it was to be permanent. Each asserted
that Mr. Lloyd George had been explicit in his statement, and the
unexplained discrepancy wrecked the negotiations. Even had they succeeded
between the parties principally concerned, they would never have led to
anything; for the Unionist members of the Coalition when there seemed to
be a risk of agreement, declared that they would have no settlement at
all. The Prime Minister and his deputy yielded and reconstituted "the
existing machinery of Irish government" by reappointing the former Viceroy
and replacing the Liberal Chief Secretary by a Unionist. Apparently their
chief object was not so much to make the Government in Ireland acceptable
to Irishmen as to make it less objectionable to Unionists. The result in
Ireland was what might have been foreseen. Any idea there may have been
that the English Government was really desirous of establishing peace and
justice in Ireland vanished like smoke. Mr. Redmond warned the Government
of the consequences of their "inaction" (if any policy which was steadily
producing the most profound revulsion in Irish feeling could be described
by that word) but the Government was obdurate. It refused to release the
interned suspects, it refused to treat them as political prisoners, it
refused to mitigate the application of martial law: and gave as its reason
the fact that the state of the country still "gave cause for anxiety." The
only party that had no cause for "anxiety" as to its future was Sinn Fein.
The resentment at the execution of the leaders of the Rising had not
confined itself to the indulgence of feelings of rage and sorrow. It had
led to an eager inquiry into what it was that had caused these men to do
what they did. People who had hardly heard of Sinn Fein before wanted to
know precisely what it was and what it taught: people who had not known
Pearse and Connolly when they were alive were full of curiosity about
them, their principles and their writings. Much of this curiosity was
morbid and led nowhere: but a great deal of it led large numbers of people
very far indeed. Sinn Fein pamphlets began to be in demand: a month after
the Rising it was hardly possible to procure a single one of them. But if
they could not be bought, thumbed and tattered copies were passed from
hand to hand: their teachings and the doctrines of Sinn Fein were
discussed all over Ireland. The (to many) surprising fact became known
that the Rising was not an attempt to help Germany or to put Ireland into
German possession, but to free Ireland from all foreign influence: that
the leaders proclaimed themselves followers of Tone and Mitchel and Davis
and Parnell, that they claimed that Irish Nationalism meant according to
these exponents (and no man in Ireland ventured to question their
authority) Irish independence, nothing less and nothing more. The instinct
for freedom, the feeling that the existing Government of Ireland had not
for a hundred years fulfilled the primary functions of government, became
a reasoned and rooted conviction that something more was needed to mend it
than mere Home Rule. The price that Ireland had been asked to pay for Home
Rule, that it was still pertinaciously pressed to agree to, the partition
of Ireland, seemed an unforgivable treachery beside the fair prospect of
an Ireland one and indivisible, in which Orange and Green, Protestant and
Catholic were united in the love and service of a common country. The
policies of the past, barren as they now seemed of content and substance,
were abandoned for the new promise of a commonwealth in which all Irishmen
should be equal, in which the worker saw a prospect of a better and a
fuller life than without it he could hope to have. This had been the ideal
of the Rising; but it was the bitter truth that the Rising had not brought
it any nearer, and that no Rising seemed likely to be any more successful.
Sinn Fein with its policy of self-reliance, of refusing to recognize what
it hoped by so doing to bring to nothing, of distrust of all policies of
reaching freedom by an acknowledgment of subjection offered the means of
realizing what the Rising had failed to bring nearer. But Sinn Fein could
not be accepted as it stood: offering the Constitution of 1782 it had
failed to carry with it more than a few doctrinaire enthusiasts: agreeing
to the constitution which the leaders of the Rising died for it might (and
did) carry the country with it.
All this was going on under the operation of martial law. Members of
Parliament did not know it: the Competent Military Authority had no
suspicion of it. It was believed that all that was required to "appease"
the country, to restore confidence in the Government, to bring back the
happy days when Ireland was "the one bright spot" was to release the
prisoners and resume negotiations for a "settlement." In December, 1916,
the Asquith Ministry fell. According to its successors it had carried the
art of doing nothing to its highest perfection: they were going to do
everything at once. The new Prime Minister made vague promises of an
attempt to settle the Irish question in the immediate future, and finally
on Christmas Eve all the interned prisoners except those undergoing penal
servitude, were sent back to Ireland. They were received with an
enthusiasm which must have proved disquieting to the believers in
compromise and negotiation.