THE RISE OF SIR EDWARD CARSON
"The question I put to myself is this: In the years of failure, where
have we gone wrong? What are the mistakes we have made? What has been
the root cause of our failure? The Lord Chancellor was perfectly frank
so far as the Unionists were concerned. He said, indeed, that he was
still a Unionist, but he had come to the conclusion that the
maintenance of the Union was impossible. What lesson have we who have
been Home Rulers to draw from the past? I think the mistake we made in
the beginning was that we did not sufficiently realise the absolute
necessity of taking into consideration the feeling of Ulster."
These notable words were spoken by Viscount Grey of Falloden in the
debate in the House of Lords on the Partition Bill on 24th November
1920. A more remarkable vindication of All-for-Ireland principles and
a more utter condemnation of the egregious folly of our opponents it
is not possible to imagine, coming especially from so clear and
calm-minded a statesman as the former Liberal Foreign Secretary. The
root principles upon which Mr O'Brien and his friends proceeded from
the start were that success was to be had by making an Irish
settlement depend, in the first place, upon the co-operation of a
million of our Protestant countrymen, and next by enlisting the
co-operation of both British parties, instead of making the Irish
Question the exclusive possession of one English Party. These two
principles are now universally acknowledged to be the wise ones, yet
when we were urging them in the Home Rule debates we could find no
support from the Liberal-Irish cohorts, and although we sedulously
devoted ourselves to urging a non-party programme and the conciliation
of the Protestant minority--about which all parties are now agreed--we
only received vilification and calumny for our portion.
Great play is being made by distinguished converts within the past few
years of Dominion Rule as if they were the discoverers of this blessed
panacea for Ireland's ills, but it is proper to recall that the
All-for-Ireland Party specifically proposed Dominion Home Rule in a
letter to Mr Asquith in 1911 as the wisest of all solutions. Scant
attention was paid to our recommendation then and it is not even
remembered for us by the protagonists of a later time. In all our
efforts to conciliate Ulster and to allay the alarms it undoubtedly
felt owing to the growth and aggressiveness of the Catholic Order of
Orangeism, we never received encouragement or support from the
Government or the Irish Party. On the contrary, they denounced as
treason to Ireland the proposal made by us that for an experimental
term of five years the Ulster Party, which would remain in the
Imperial Parliament, should have the right of appeal as against any
Irish Bill of which they did not approve, the decision to be given
within one month. This, we held, would have been a more effectual
safeguard than any proposed since to satisfy Irish Unionists that
legislative oppression would have been impossible.
Other proposals of a representation in the Irish Parliament
proportioned to their numbers and of guarantees against the
establishment of any Tammany system of spoils in favour of the secret
sectarian association were also submitted. But all our overtures for a
peace based on reasonable concessions were repudiated by the official
Party and contemptuously rejected by them and we were held up to
public obloquy as proposing to subject Ireland to the veto of fourteen
Orangemen.
In the early stages of the opposition to Home Rule, curiously enough
Sir Edward Carson did not count as a figure of any particular power or
malignancy. True, he had his early period of notoriety in Ireland when
he acted as a Crown Prosecutor under the Crimes Act. But when he
transferred his legal and political ambition to England it is alleged
that he was for a season a member of the National Liberal Club and was
thus entitled to be ranked as a Liberal in politics. Whether through
conviction or otherwise, his allegiance appears to have been promptly
and permanently transferred to the Unionist Party, but even then he
was in no sense regarded as an Ulster Member--he is himself a Southern
Irishman by birth--and in the House of Commons comported himself as a
good Unionist, holding office as such. It was only when the Irish
Party set their faces sternly against any concessions to Ulster that
Sir Edward Carson stepped into the breach and came to the front as the
duly elected leader of the Ulster Party. It is the sheerest nonsense
and pure ignorance of the facts to say that Sir Edward Carson created
the Ulster difficulty. It was created by the statesmen and politicians
who, in the words of Viscount Grey, "did not sufficiently realise the
absolute necessity of taking into consideration the feeling of
Ulster." When the full history of this period is written, and when
documents at present confidential are available, I believe it will be
shown that if the concessions and safeguards suggested by the
All-for-Ireland Party had been offered by the Government or the Irish
Party in the earlier stages of the Home Rule controversy they would
have been, in the main, acceptable to Ulster Unionist opinion. I well
remember Mr (now Mr Justice) Moore declaring, from his place on the
Ulster benches:
"My friends and myself have always marvelled at the fatuity of the
Irish Party in throwing over the member for the City of Cork (Mr
William O'Brien) when he had all the cards in his hands."
Where we preached all reasonable concession and conciliation our
opponents proclaimed that Ulster must submit itself unconditionally to
the law and that it must content itself in the knowledge that
"minorities must suffer." And all this while the Board of Erin
Hibernians were consolidating their position as the ascendant
authority in Irish life, from whom the Protestant minority might not,
without some reason, in looking back on their own bad past, expect
that it would be taken out of them when the Catholics got into power.
Thus in very real fear and terror of their disabilities under an Irish
Parliament, which would be elected and dominated by a secret sectarian
organisation, they entered into the famous Ulster Covenant and
solemnly swore to resist Home Rule and to raise a Volunteer Army for
the purpose of giving force and effect to their resistance. The visit
of Mr Winston Churchill to Belfast early in 1912 to address a
Nationalist meeting there was an aggravation of the situation and
there was a time during his progress through the city when his motor
car was in imminent danger of being upset and when it was surrounded
by a howling and enraged mob of Orangemen, who shouted the fiercest
curses and threats at him. As a result of this experience Mr Churchill
was never afterwards a very enthusiastic supporter of what came to be
called "the coercion of Ulster."
Meanwhile Mr Churchill's most ill-advised visit, from the point of
view of political tactics, was just the thing required to raise all
the worst elements of Orangeism and to give its best fillip to the
signing of the Covenant, which proceeded apace, not only in Ulster,
but in Great Britain, even to the extent that the army was said to be
honey-combed with sworn Covenanters, contrary to all the rules and
doctrines of military law and discipline. And in due course, in reply
to the challenge of Mr Churchill's visit the leader of the Unionist
Party, Mr Bonar Law, visited Balmoral, near Belfast, and reviewed from
80,000 to 100,000 Ulster Volunteers, who marched past him in military
order, and saluted. Sir Edward Carson made the meeting repeat after
him the pledge: "We will never in any circumstances submit to Home
Rule."
The Unionist Party was now solidly and assertively on the side of
Ulster in its opposition to Home Rule. They held a demonstration at
Blenheim on 27th July 1912, when some three thousand delegates from
political associations, invited by the Duke of Marlborough, were
present. Mr Bonar Law described the Liberal Ministry as a
revolutionary committee which had seized by fraud on despotic power,
and declared that the Unionist Party would use whatever means seemed
likely to be most effective. He made the declaration that Ireland was
two nations, a theory which, strangely enough, Mr Lloyd George, as
Coalition Premier, advocated eight years later. He went on to say that
the Ulster people would submit to no ascendancy and "he could imagine
no lengths of resistance to which they might go in which he would not
be ready to support them" and in which they would not be supported by
the overwhelming majority of the British people.
In Parliament a few weeks later Mr Asquith described Mr Bonar Law's
speech as a declaration of war against Constitutional Government, but
the Ulstermen went on calmly making their preparations for levying war
and Sir Edward Carson and his friends coolly delivered speeches which
reeked of sedition and treason against the State. Sir Edward Carson
declared (27th July 1912): "We will shortly challenge the Government.
They shall us if they like it is treason. We are prepared to take the
consequences." And again he said (1st October 1912): "The
Attorney-General says that my doctrines and the course I am taking
lead to anarchy. Does he not think I know that?" And that fine
exemplar of constitutional law, Mr F.E. Smith (now Lord Chancellor of
England) said: "Supposing the Government gave such an order the
consequences can only be described in the words of Mr Bonar Law when
he said: 'If they did so it would not be a matter of argument but the
population of London would lynch you on the lamp-posts.'" Ulster
scarcely needed these incitements to encourage it in its definite
purpose of armed resistance to Home Rule. It began to organise and
discipline its army of Volunteers under able military leaders who
subsequently demonstrated their capacity in no uncertain fashion,
under the tests of actual warfare on many fields of battle. With the
knowledge we now possess it seems scarcely believable that Mr Redmond
and his friends should have professed to treat what was happening in
Ulster as "a gigantic game of bluff." They joked pleasantly over the
drilling of the Ulster Volunteers with "wooden guns," and they only
asked that the Government should "Let the police and soldiers stand
aside and make a ring and you will hear no more of the wooden gunmen."
Ribaldry and gibes of this sort in the face of open and avowed treason
was but a poor substitute for that firm statesmanship which should
have grappled with the Ulster difficulty in either of two ways--to
come to terms with it or, in the alternative, beat all unruly
opposition to the ground.
Mr Asquith is blamed because he did not put the law in operation
against Sir Edward Carson, proclaim his illegal organisation of
Volunteers and deal with him and his friends as a people seditious and
disaffected towards the State, who, by their acts and conduct, had
invited and merited the traitors' doom. But Mr Devlin declared not
long after in Parliament that the reason why Mr Asquith did not move
was because he and his friends would not allow him. Whence this
extraordinary tenderness for the man who was thwarting and defying
them at every point, it is not possible to say. No doubt the Ministry
knew themselves in the wrong in that they had not considered the
position of Ulster and had not attempted to legislate for their just
fears. It is beyond question that there were conditions upon which the
consent of Ulster could have been secured. If, these conditions being
offered, this consent was unreasonably withheld, then the Government
would have been absolutely justified in throttling Sir Edward Carson's
preparations for rebellion before they had gained any ground or
effective shape. But the weakness of the Liberal-Irish position was
that they would not bring themselves to admit that the All-for-Ireland
policy of Conciliation and a settlement by Conference and Consent was
right.
Meanwhile, with a weak Irish administration in charge of Mr Birrell as
Chief Secretary--most amiable of _litterateurs_, but most
imbecile of politicians--the Ulster opposition was allowed to harden
into potential violence and civil war. "Engagements" between the
Orangemen and the Hibernians began to form a sort of political
amusement in the north of Ireland. The cries of religious and race
hatred were allowed to devour the sweeter gospel of reconciliation and
the recognition of a common country and that communion of right and
interest between all classes and creeds which was the evangel of Wolfe
Tone and other northern Protestant patriots in sublimer days. Matters
were drifting from bad to worse under the fatal weakness and
irresolution of the Government. So little fear had Sir Edward Carson
of any penal consequences to himself that he declared, on the 7th
September 1913:
"We will set up a Government [of their own as provided for in the
Ulster Covenant]. I am told it will be illegal. Of course it will.
Drilling is illegal. The Government dare not interfere."
And he was right! It did not interfere. And the Ulster Volunteers
began to provide themselves with arms and ammunition and to organise
themselves for actual war conditions. There were no more feeble jokes
about "wooden guns" and "making a free ring"--as if it were to be
only an ordinary pugilistic encounter and of no account. In 1913 the
Ulster Volunteer Force was said to be well armed and probably better
drilled than the northern regiments at the outbreak of the American
War of Secession.
Official nationalism was, though it knew it not, passing through the
gates of disaster. It was still able to maintain its hold on the old
stagers who were grafted on to it for various reasons, and the Board
of Erin was still able to count on the fidelity of those who believed
in the secret sign and watchword as the avenue to place and
preferment.
The Government of Ireland Bill was merrily pursuing its three years'
course through Parliament--passed by the House of Commons and rejected
by the House of Lords after the usual farce and formality of debates
which had very little reality in them. What counted was that Ulster
was in arms and determined to resist and that "the Home Rule
Government" had proved themselves incapable either of conceding or of
resisting. Other things began to count also in Ireland. The young
manhood of Nationalist Ireland, seeing the liberties of their country
menaced by force, decided to organise themselves into a corps of Irish
Volunteers to defend these liberties from wanton aggression. The
Transport Workers' Strike in Dublin, in 1913, under Mr James Larkin,
also showed the existence of a powerful body of organised opinion,
which cared little for ordinary political methods and which was
clearly disaffected to the Party leaders. Forces were being loosed
that had long been held in check by the power of the place-hunting and
sectarian "constitutional" movement asserting and enforcing its
authority, through unscrupulous methods already described, to speak
and act on behalf of the people. If Sir Edward Carson had risen to
power through open and flagrant defiance of all constituted right and
authority, there were others who were not slow to copy his methods.
The Irish Party may denounce him in Parliament as a disloyal subject
of the Crown, but there were young Nationalists in Southern Ireland,
aye, even in Rebel Cork, who sincerely raised cheers for him because
he had shown them, as they believed, the better way "to save Ireland."
The Government could not make one law for the North and another for
the South. If it allowed the Orangemen to drill and arm it could not
well interfere with the Nationalists if they took a leaf out of their
book and proceeded to act in like manner. And thus are the destinies
of people and the fate of nations decided. In preparing for civil war
Sir Edward Carson gave that spur of encouragement to Germany that it
just needed to rush it into a world war. And for how much else he is
responsible in Ireland every faithful student of current history
knows!