THE LATER IRISH PARTY--ITS CHARACTER AND
COMPOSITION
To enable our readers to have a clearer understanding of all that has
gone before and all that is to follow, I think it well at this stage
to give a just impression of the Party, of its personnel, its method
of working and its general character and composition.
The Irish Party, as we know it, was originally the creation of
Parnell, and was, perhaps, his most signal achievement. It became,
under the genius of his leadership, a mighty constitutional
force--disciplined, united, efficient and vigilant. It had the merit
of knowing its own mind. It kept aloof from British Party
entanglements. It was pledged to sit, act and vote together, and its
members loyally observed the pledge both in the spirit and the letter,
and did not claim the right to place their own individual
interpretation upon it. Furthermore, it was a cardinal article of
honour that members of the Party were to seek no favours from British
Ministers, because it needs no argument to demonstrate that the Member
of Parliament who pleads for favours for himself or preferment for his
friends can possess no individual independence. He is shackled in
slavery to the Minister to whom his importunities are addressed. He is
simply a patriot on the make, despised by himself and despised by
those to whom he addresses his subservient appeals. There was no place
for such a one in Parnell's Irish Party, which embodied as nearly as
possible that perfect political cohesion which is the dream of all
great leaders. There were men of varying capacity and, no doubt, of
differing thought in Parnell's Party, but where Ireland's national
interests were concerned it was a united body, an undivided phalanx
which faced the foe. And by the very boldness and directness of
Parnell's policy, he won to his side in the country, not only all the
moral and constitutional forces making for Nationalism, but the
revolutionary forces--who yearned for an Irish Republic--as well. He
was, therefore, not only the leader of a Party; he was much more--he
was the leader of a United Irish nation. His aim was eminently sane
and practical--to obtain the largest possible measure of national
autonomy, and he did not care very much what it was called. But he
made it clear that whatever he might accept in his time and generation
was not to be the last word on the Irish Question. He fought with the
weapons that came to his hand--and he used them with incomparable
skill and judgment--with popular agitation in Ireland, with "direct
action" of a most forcible and audacious kind in Parliament. A great
leader has always the capacity for attracting capable lieutenants to
his side. We need only refer to the example of Napoleon as
overwhelming proof of this. And so out of what would ordinarily seem
humble and unpromising material Parnell brought to his banner a band
of young colleagues who have since imperishably fixed their place in
Irish history. I am not writing the life-story of the members of
Parnell's Party, but if I were it would be easy to show that most of
the colleagues who have come to any measure of greatness since were
men of no antecedent notoriety (I use the word in its better
application), with possibly one exception, and it is somewhat
remarkable that the son of John Blake Dillon, who owed perhaps not a
little to the fact that he was his father's son, should have been the
one who first showed signs of recalcitrancy against Party rule and
discipline when he inveighed against the Land Act of 1881 and betook
himself abroad for three years during the time when the national
movement was locked in bitterest conflict with the Spencer Coercionist
regime. Let it be at once conceded that Parnell's lieutenants were men
whose gifts and talents would have in any circumstances carried them
to eminent heights, but it might be said also they lost nothing from
their early association with so great a personality and from the fact
that he brought them into the gladiatorial arena, where their mental
muscles were, so to speak, trained and tested and extended in combat
with some of the finest minds of the age.
In the days when the later Irish Party had entered upon its
decrepitude some of its leaders sought to maintain a sorry unity by
shouting incessantly from the house-tops, as if it were some sacred
formula which none but the unholy or those predestined to political
damnation dare dispute: "Majority Rule." And a country which they had
reduced to the somnambulistic state by the constant reiteration of
this phrase unfortunately submitted to their quackery, and have had
grave reason to regret it ever since. Parnell had very little respect
for shams--whether they were sham phrases or sham politicians. He was
a member of Butt's Home Rule Party but he was not to be intimidated
from pursuing the course he had mapped out for himself by any foolish
taunts about his "Policy of Exasperation"; he was a flagrant sinner
against the principle of "majority rule," but time has proved him to
be a sinner who was very much in the right. Mr Dillon used to hurl
another name of anathema at our heads--the heads of those of us who
were associated with Mr O'Brien in his policy of national
reconciliation--he used to dub us "Factionists." It was not fair
fighting, nor honest warfare, nor decent politics. It was the base
weapon of a man who had no arguments of reason by which he could
overwhelm an opponent, but who snatched a bludgeon from an armoury of
certain evil associations which he knew would prevail where more
legitimate methods could not.
I entered the Party in May 1901, having defeated their official
candidate at a United Irish League Convention for the selection of a
Parliamentary candidate for Mid-Cork on the death of Dr Tanner. In
those days I was not much of a politician. My heart was with the
neglected labourer and I stood, accordingly, as a Labour candidate, my
programme being the social elevation of the masses, particularly in
the vital matters of housing, employment and wages. I was not even a
member of the United Irish League, being wholly concerned in building
up the Irish Land and Labour Association, which was mainly an
organisation for the benefit, protection and the education in social
and citizen duty of the rural workers. Mr Joseph Devlin was sent down
to the Convention to represent the Party and the League. It was sought
to exclude a considerable number of properly accredited Labour
delegates from the Convention, but after a stiff fight my friends and
myself compelled the admission of a number just barely sufficient to
secure me a majority. This was heralded as a tremendous triumph for
the Labour movement, and it spoke something for the democratic
constitution of the United Irish League, as drafted by Mr O'Brien,
that it was possible for an outsider to beat its official nominee and
thereby to become the officially adopted candidate of the League
himself. In due course I entered the portals of the Irish Party, but
though in it was, to a certain extent, not of it, in that I was more
an observer of its proceedings than an active participant in its work.
My supreme purpose in public life was to make existence tolerable for
a class who had few to espouse their claims and who were in the
deepest depths of poverty, distress and neglect. Hence, except where
Labour questions and the general interests of my constituents were
concerned, I stood more or less aloof from the active labours of the
Party. I was in the position of a looker-on and a critic, and I saw
many things that did not impress me at all too favourably.
In the years immediately following the General Election of 1900 the
Party had a splendid solidarity and a fine enthusiasm. There had been
just sufficient new blood infused into it to counteract the jealous
humours and to minimise the weariness of spirit of those older members
who had served in the halcyon days of Parnell and had gone through all
the squalidness and impotence of the years of the Split. Had the Party
been rightly handled, and led by a man of strong will and inflexible
character, it could have been made the mightiest constitutional power
for Ireland's emancipation. Unfortunately Mr John Redmond was not a
strong leader. He unquestionably possessed many of the attributes of
leadership--a dignified presence, distinguished deportment, a wide
knowledge of affairs, a magnificent mastery of the forms and rules of
the House of Commons, a noble eloquence and a sincere manner, but he
lacked the vital quality of strength of character and energetic
resolve. He was not, as Parnell was, strong enough to impose his will
on others if he found it easier to give way himself. And thus from the
very outset of his career as leader of the reunited Party he allowed
his conduct to be influenced by others--very often, let it be said,
against his own better judgment. Mr Redmond had a matchless faculty
for stating the case of Ireland in sonorous sentences, but too often
he was content to take his marching orders from those powers behind
the throne who were the real manipulators of what passed for an Irish
policy. In the shaping of this policy and in the general ordering of
affairs, the rank and file of the members had very little say--they
were hopelessly invertebrate and pusillanimous. The majority of them
were mere automatons--very honest, very patriotic, exceedingly
respectable, good, ordinary, decent and fairly intelligent Irishmen,
but as Parliamentarians their only utility consisted in their capacity
to find their way into the voting Lobby as they were ordered. To their
meek submission, and to their rather selfish fear of losing their
seats if they asserted an independent opinion, I trace many if not all
of the catastrophes and failures that overtook the Party in later
years. Needless to say, neither the country nor the other parties in
Parliament had the least understanding of the real character and
composition of the Nationalist Party. It had always a dozen or more
capable men who could dress the ranks and hold their own "on the floor
of the House" as against the best intellects and debating power of
either British party. Irish readiness and repartee made question time
an overwhelmingly Irish _divertissement_. Our members had a
unique faculty for bringing about spectacular scenes that read very
well in the newspapers and made the people at home think what fine
fellows they had representing them! All this might be very good
business in its way if it had any special meaning, but I could never
for the life of me see how taking the Sultanate of Morocco under our
wing could by any stretch of the imagination help forward the cause of
Ireland.
The policy of the Party, in the ultimate resort, was supposed to be
controlled by the United Irish League acting through its branches in
Convention assembled. Inasmuch as the Party derived whatever strength
it possessed in Parliament from the virility and force of the
agitation in Ireland, it was in the fitness of things that the country
should have the right of ordering the tune. When he founded the United
Irish League Mr O'Brien unquestionably intended that this should be
the case--that the country should be the master of its own fate and
that the constituencies should be in the position of exercising a
wholesome check on the conduct of their Parliamentary representatives,
who, in addition to the pledge to sit, act and vote with the Party,
also entered into an equally binding undertaking to accept neither
favour nor office from the Government. As the Party was for the
greater part made up of poor men or men of moderate means, members
received an indemnity from a special fund called "The Parliamentary
Fund," which was administered by three trustees. This fund was
specially collected each year, and in principle, if the subscriptions
came from Ireland alone, was an excellent method of making members of
the Party obey the mandate of the people, under the penalty of
forfeiting their allowance. But in practice, most of the subscriptions
were collected in America, and we had in effect the extraordinary
situation of Irish representatives being maintained in Parliament by
the moneys of their American kith and kin. And the situation after
1903 was rendered the more ludicrous by reason of the fact that the
Party could never have dragged along its existence if it had been
dependent upon Irish contributions to its funds. These were largely
withdrawn because the Party was delinquent in adhering to the policy
of Conciliation. It is a phenomenon worth remarking that the Irish
people never failed to contribute generously what Parnell had termed
"the sinews of war" so long as the members of the Party deserved it of
them. But when symptoms of demoralisation set in, or when contentions
distracted their energies, the people cut off the supplies. This would
undoubtedly have been an effective means of control in normal
circumstances, but when the Party, of its own volition, was able to
send "missions" to America and Australia to collect funds, it was no
longer dependent on the popular will, as expressed in terms of
material support, and it became the masters of the people instead of
their servants.
Not that I want for one moment unnecessarily to disparage the
personnel of the Party--it was probably the best that Ireland could
have got in the circumstances--nor do I seek to diminish its
undoubtedly great services to Ireland in the days of Parnell and
during the period that it loyally adopted the policy of Conciliation.
But what I do deplore is that a few men in the Party--not more than
three or four all told--were able, by getting control of "the
machine," to destroy the fairest chance that Ireland ever had of
gaining a large measure of self-government. Knowing all that happened
within the Party in the years of which I am writing, knowing the
methods that were employed, rather unscrupulously and with every
circumstance of pettiness, to bear down any member who showed the
least disposition to exercise legitimately an independent
judgment--knowing how the paid organisers of the League were at once
dispatched to his constituency to intrigue against him and to work up
local enmities, I am not, and never was, surprised at the compelled
submission of the body of the members to the decrees of the secret
Cabinet who controlled policy and directed affairs with an absolute
autocracy that few dared question. One member more courageous than his
fellows, Mr Thomas O'Donnell, B.L., did come upon the platform with Mr
Wm. O'Brien at Tralee, in his own constituency and had the manliness
to declare in favour of the policy of Conciliation, but the tragic
confession was wrung from him: "I know I shall suffer for it." And he
did!
I mention these matters to explain what would otherwise be
inexplicable--how it came to pass that a policy solemnly ratified by
the Party, by the Directory of the League, and by a National
Convention was subsequently repudiated. Whilst Mr O'Brien remained in
the Party there was no question of the allegiance of these men to
correct principle. Mr Joseph Devlin, who later was far and away the
most powerful man in the Party, had not yet "arrived." (It was the
retirement of Mr O'Brien from public life and the resignation of Mr
John O'Donnell from the secretaryship of the United Irish
League--under circumstances which Mr Devlin's admirers will scarcely
care to recall--which gave him his chance.) Mr Dillon was a more or
less negligible figure until Mr O'Brien made way for him by his
retirement. Right up to this there was only one man for the Party and
the country, and that man was William O'Brien. Let me say at once that
in those days I had no attachments and no personal predilections. John
Redmond, William O'Brien and John Dillon were all, as we say in
Ireland, "one and the same to me." If anything, because of my
Parnellite proclivities, I rather leaned to Mr Redmond's side, and his
chairmanship of the Party had certainly my most loyal adherence.
Otherwise I was positively indifferent to personalities, and to a
great extent also to policies, since I was in the Party for one
purpose, and one alone, of pushing the labourers' claims upon the
notice of the leaders and of ventilating their grievances in the House
of Commons whenever occasion offered. Furthermore, I do not think I
ever spoke to Mr O'Brien until after the Cork election in 1904, when,
convinced of the rectitude of his policy and principles, I stood upon
his platform to give such humble support as I could to the cause he
advocated, and thereafter, I am proud to say, never once turned aside,
either in thought or action, from the thorny and difficult path I had
chosen to travel. I take no credit to myself for having taken my stand
on behalf of Mr O'Brien's policy. I knew him in all essential things,
both then and thereafter, to be absolutely in the right. I was aware
that, had he so minded, in 1903, when he was easily the most powerful
man in the Party and the most popular in Ireland, he could have
smashed at one onslaught the conspiracy of "the determined
campaigners" and driven its authors to a well-deserved doom. But the
mistake he made then, as mistake I believe it to be, was that he left
the field to those men, who had no alternative policy of their own to
offer to the country, and who, instead of consolidating the national
organisation for the assertion of Irish right, consolidated it rather
in the interests of their own power and personal position. Thus it
happened that a movement conceived and intended as the adequate
expression of the people's will became, in the course of a short
twelve months, everywhere outside of Munster, a mere machine for
registering the decrees of Mr Dillon and his co-conspirators.
I do not think, if Mr T.M. Healy had been a member of the Party then,
that Mr Dillon would have been able so successfully to entrench
himself in power as he did. Mr Healy knew Mr Dillon inside out and he
had little respect for his qualities. He knew him to be vain,
intractable, small-minded and abnormally ambitious of power. Parnell
once said of him: "Dillon is as vain as a peacock and as jealous as a
schoolgirl." And when he was not included as a member of the Land
Conference I am sure it does him no wrong to say that he made up his
mind that somebody should suffer for the affront put upon him. It is
ever thus. Even the greatest men are human, with human emotions,
feelings, likes and dislikes. And though it is far from my intention
to robe Mr Dillon in any garment of greatness, he was, unfortunately,
put in a position to do irreparable mischief to great principles, as I
conceive, through motives of petty spite. Even if Mr Dillon had stood
alone I do not think he would have counted for very much, supported
though he was by the suave personality of Mr T.P. O'Connor. But he had
won to his side, in the person of Mr Devlin, one of great organising
gifts and considerable eloquence, who had now obtained control of the
United Irish League and all its machinery and who knew how to
manipulate it as no other living person could. Without Mr Devlin's
uncanny genius for organisation Mr Dillon's idiosyncrasies could have
been easily combated. Mr Dillon's diatribes against "the black-blooded
Cromwellians" at a time when the best of the landlord class were
steadily veering in the Nationalist direction, I could never
understand. Mr Devlin's detestation of the implacable spirit of Ulster
Orangemen was a far more comprehensible feeling, but the years have
shown only too thoroughly that both passions, and the pursuit of them,
have had the most disastrous consequences.
Even when Mr Dillon was most powerful in the Party there were many men
in it, to my knowledge, who secretly sympathised with the policy of
Conciliation but who had not sufficient moral courage to come out in
the open in support of it, knowing that if they did they would be
marked down for destruction at the next General Election. It is
evident that from a Party thus dominated and dragooned, and an
organisation which had its resolutions manufactured for it in the
League offices in Dublin, no good fruit could come.
Mr Redmond's position was pitiful in the extreme. Neither his judgment
nor his sense of statesmanship could approve the departure which Mr
Dillon and his accomplices had initiated. He avowed again and again,
publicly to the country and privately in the Party, that he was in
entire agreement with Mr O'Brien up to the date of his resignation;
and it is as morally certain as anything can be in this world that if
he had not crippled his initiative by sanctioning, under his own hand,
the announcement of the 24-1/2 years' purchase terms for his estate,
he would never have allowed himself to be associated with what he
rather wearily and shamefacedly described as "a short-sighted and
unwise policy."
From the time that Mr Dillon and his friends got control of the Party
and the national organisation the country was never allowed to
exercise an independent judgment of its own, for the simple reason
that the facts were carefully kept from its knowledge by a Press
boycott unparalleled in the history of any other nation. Under this
tyranny all independence and honest conviction were sapped. And with a
brutal irony, which must compel a certain amazed admiration on the
part of the disinterested inquirer after truth, the men who set the
Party pledge at defiance, who set themselves to destroy Party unity
and to scoff at majority rule, were the men who at a later date, when
it suited their malevolent purpose, used the catch-cries of "Unity,"
"Majority Rule" and "Factionists" with all their evil memories of the
nine years of the Split to intimidate the people from listening to the
arguments and reasonings of Mr O'Brien and his friends. And when their
kept Press and their subservient Parliamentarians did not prevail,
they did not hesitate to use hired revolver gangs and to employ paid
emissaries to prevent the gospel of Conciliation from being preached
to the people.
With the entrance of false principles and the employment of pernicious
and demoralising influences the _moral_ of the Party began to be
at first vitiated and then utterly destroyed. It lost its independent
character and cohesive force. To a certain extent it became a party of
petty tale-bearers. The men most in favour with the secret Cabinet
were the men who kept them informed of the sayings and doings of their
fellows.
The members of lesser note simply dare not be seen speaking to anyone
suspected of a friendly feeling to Mr O'Brien or his policy. Woe to
them if they were! In the expressive phrase of Mr O'Donnell, they were
"made to suffer for it."
The proud independence and incorruptibility which the Party boasted in
Parnell's day of power now also began to give way. With the accession
of the Liberal Party to office in 1906 the Nationalist members began
to beseech favours. It may be it was only in the first instance that
they sought J.P.-ships for their leading friends and supporters in
their several constituencies. But we all know how the temptation of
patronage grows: it is so fine a thing to be able to do "a good turn"
for one's friend or neighbour by merely inditing a letter to some
condescending Minister. And now, particularly since there was no
censure to be dreaded, it became one of the ordinary functions of the
Nationalist M.P.'s life. It was no secret that prominent leaders were
exercising a similar privilege, and the rank and file saw no reason
why they should not imitate so seductive an example.
I once heard a keen student of personalities in Parliament observe
that Mr Dillon and Mr T.P. O'Connor always appeared to him to be
sounder and more sincere Liberals than they were Irish Nationalists. I
agree, and no doubt much of Ireland's later misfortunes sprang from
this circumstance. I confess I have always thought of Mr Dillon, in my
own mind, as an English Radical first and an Irish Nationalist
afterwards. I believe he was temperamentally incapable of adopting
Parnell's position of independence of either British Party and of
supporting only that Party which undertook to do most for Ireland.
Then, again, Mr Dillon was more of an Internationalist than a
Nationalist. He delighted in mixing himself up in foreign affairs, and
I am much mistaken if he did not take more pride in being regarded as
an authority on the Egyptian rather than on the Irish question. Mr
T.P. O'Connor was so long out of Ireland, and had so completely lost
touch with genuine Irish opinion that much might be forgiven to him.
His ties with Liberalism were the outgrowth of years spent in
connection with the Liberal Press of London and of social associations
which had their natural and inevitable influence on his political
actions.
With Messrs Dillon and O'Connor and--at this time, probably, in a more
secondary sense--Mr Devlin, in control of the Party, it can be well
understood how easy was the descent from an independence of all
parties to an alliance with one. I believe that in all these things Mr
Redmond's judgment was overborne by his more resolute colleagues. I
believe also, as I have already said, that the weakness of his
position was engendered by the unforgettable mistake he made in regard
to the sale of his estate--that he felt this was held over him as a
sword of Damocles, and that he was never able to get away from its
haunting shadow sufficiently to assert his own authority in the manner
of an independent and resolute leader.
I am at pains to set forth these matters to justify the living and, in
some measure, to absolve the dead. I want to place the responsibility
for grievous failures and criminal blunders on the right shoulders. I
seek to make it plain how the country was bamboozled and betrayed by
Party machinations such as have not had their parallel in any other
period of Irish history. I state nothing in malice or for any ulterior
motive, since I have none. But I think it just and right that the
chief events of the past twenty years should be set forth in their
true character so that impartial inquirers may know to what causes can
be traced the overwhelming tragedies of recent times.