The phrase Moral Compromise has an evil sound, and it opens out
questions of practical ethics which are very difficult and very
dangerous, but they are questions with which, consciously or
unconsciously, every one is obliged to deal. The contrasts between the
rigidity of theological formulæ and actual life are on this subject very
great, though in practice, and by the many ingenious subtleties that
constitute the science of casuistry, many theologians have attempted to
evade them. A striking passage from the pen of Cardinal Newman will
bring these contrasts into the clearest light. 'The Church holds,' he
writes, 'that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for
the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die
of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes,
than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one
single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no
one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse.'[24]
It is certainly no exaggeration to say that such a doctrine would lead
to consequences absolutely incompatible with any life outside a
hermitage or a monastery. It would strike at the root of all
civilisation, and although many may be prepared to give it their formal
assent, no human being actually believes it with the kind of belief
that becomes a guiding influence in life. I have dwelt on this subject
in another book, and may here repeat a few lines which I then wrote. If
'an undoubted sin, even the most trivial, is a thing in its essence and
its consequences so unspeakably dreadful that rather than it should be
committed it would be better that any amount of calamity which did not
bring with it sin should be endured, even that the whole human race
should perish in agonies, it is manifest that the supreme object of
humanity should be sinlessness, and it is equally manifest that the
means to this end is the absolute suppression of the desires. To expand
the circle of wants is necessarily to multiply temptations and therefore
to increase the number of sins.' No material and intellectual
advantages, no increase of human happiness, no mitigation of the
suffering or dreariness of human life can, according to this theory, be
other than an evil if it adds even in the smallest degree or in the most
incidental manner to the sins that are committed. 'A sovereign, when
calculating the consequences of a war, should reflect that a single sin
occasioned by that war, a single blasphemy of a wounded soldier, the
robbery of a single hen-coop, the violation of the purity of a single
woman is a greater calamity than the ruin of the entire commerce of his
nation, the loss of her most precious provinces, the destruction of all
her power. He must believe that the evil of the increase of unchastity
which invariably results from the formation of an army is an
immeasurably greater calamity than any national or political disasters
that army can possibly avert. He must believe that the most fearful
plagues and famines that desolate his land should be regarded as a
matter of rejoicing if they have but the feeblest and most transient
influence in repressing vice. He must believe that if the agglomeration
of his people in great cities adds but one to the number of their sins,
no possible intellectual or material advantages can prevent the
construction of cities being a fearful calamity. According to this
principle every elaboration of life, every amusement that brings
multitudes together, almost every art, every accession of wealth, that
awakens or stimulates desires is an evil, for all these become the
sources of some sins, and their advantages are for the most part purely
terrestrial.'
Considerations of this kind, if duly realised, bring out clearly the
insincerity and the unreality of much of our professed belief. Hardly
any sane man would desire to suppress Bank Holidays simply because they
are the occasion of a considerable number of cases of drunkenness which
would not otherwise have taken place. No humane legislator would
hesitate to suppress them if they produced an equal number of deaths or
other great physical calamities. This manner of measuring the relative
importance of things is not incompatible with a general acknowledgment
of the fact that there are many amusements which produce an amount of
moral evil that overbalances their advantages as sources of pleasure, or
of the great truth that the moral is the higher and ought to be the
ruling part of our being. But the realities of life cannot be measured
by rigid theological formulæ. Life is a scene in which different kinds
of interest not only blend but also modify and in some degree
counterbalance one another, and it can only be carried on by constant
compromises in which the lines of definition are seldom very clearly
marked, and in which even the highest interest must not altogether
absorb or override the others. We have to deal with good principles that
cannot be pushed to their full logical results; with varying standards
which cannot be brought under inflexible law.
Take, for example, the many untruths which the conventional courtesies
of Society prescribe. Some of these are so purely matter of phraseology
that they deceive no one. Others chiefly serve the purpose of courteous
concealment, as when they enable us to refuse a request or to decline an
invitation or a visit without disclosing whether disinclination or
inability is the cause. Then there are falsehoods for useful purposes.
Few men would shrink from a falsehood which was the only means of saving
a patient from a shock which would probably produce his death. No one, I
suppose, would hesitate to deceive a criminal if by no other means he
could prevent him from accomplishing a crime. There are also cases of
the suppression of what we believe to be true, and of tacit or open
acquiescence in what we believe to be false, when a full and truthful
disclosure of our own beliefs might destroy the happiness of others, or
subvert beliefs which are plainly necessary for their moral well-being.
Cases of this kind will continually occur in life, and a good man who
deals with each case as it arises will probably find no great difficulty
in steering his course. But the vague and fluctuating lines of moral
compromise cannot without grave moral danger be reduced to fixed rules
to be carried out to their full logical consequences. The immortal pages
of Pascal are sufficient to show to what extremes of immorality the
doctrine that the end justifies the means has been pushed by the
casuists of the Church of which Cardinal Newman was so great an
ornament.
A large and difficult field of moral compromise is opened out in the
case of war, which necessarily involves a complete suspension of great
portions of the moral law. This is not merely the case in unjust wars;
it applies also, though in a less degree, to those which are most
necessary and most righteous. War is not, and never can be, a mere
passionless discharge of a painful duty. It is in its essence, and it is
a main condition of its success, to kindle into fierce exercise among
great masses of men the destructive and combative passions--passions as
fierce and as malevolent as that with which the hound hunts the fox to
its death or the tiger springs upon its prey. Destruction is one of its
chief ends. Deception is one of its chief means, and one of the great
arts of skilful generalship is to deceive in order to destroy. Whatever
other elements may mingle with and dignify war, this at least is never
absent; and however reluctantly men may enter into war, however
conscientiously they may endeavour to avoid it, they must know that when
the scene of carnage has once opened these things must be not only
accepted and condoned, but stimulated, encouraged and applauded. It
would be difficult to conceive a disposition more remote from the morals
of ordinary life, not to speak of Christian ideals, than that with which
the soldiers most animated with the fire and passion that lead to
victory rush forward to bayonet the foe.
War indeed, which is absolutely indispensable in our present stage of
civilisation, has its own morals which are very different from those of
peaceful life. Yet there are few fields in which, through the stress of
moral motives, greater changes have been effected. In the early stages
of human history it was simply a question of power. There was no
distinction between piracy and regular war, and incursions into a
neighbouring State without provocation and with the sole purpose of
plunder brought with them no moral blame. To carry the inhabitants of a
conquered country into slavery; to slaughter the whole population of a
besieged town; to destroy over vast tracts every town, village and
house, and to put to death every prisoner, were among the ordinary
incidents of war. These things were done without reproach in the best
periods of Greek and Roman civilisation. In many cases neither age nor
sex was spared![25] In Rome the conquered general was strangled or
starved to death in the Mamertine prison. Tens of thousands of captives
were condemned to perish in gladiatorial shows. Julius Cæsar, whose
clemency has been so greatly extolled, 'executed the whole senate of the
Veneti; permitted a massacre of the Usipetes and Tencteri; sold as
slaves 40,000 natives of Genabum; and cut off the right hands of all the
brave men whose only crime was that they held to the last against him
their town of Uxellodunum.'[26] No slaughter in history is more terrible
than that which took place at Jerusalem under the general who was
called 'the delight of the human race,' and when the last spasm of
resistance had ceased, Titus sent Jewish captives, both male and female,
by thousands to the provincial amphitheatres to be devoured by wild
beasts or slaughtered as gladiators.
Yet from a very early period lines were drawn forming a clear though
somewhat arbitrary code of military morals. In Greece a broad
distinction was made between wars with Greek States and with Barbarians,
the latter being regarded as almost outside the pale of moral
consideration. It is a distinction which in reality was not very widely
different from that which Christian nations have in practice continually
made between wars within the borders of Christendom, and wars with
savage or pagan nations. Greek, and perhaps still more Roman, moralists
have written much on the just causes of war. Many of them condemn all
unjust, aggressive, or even unnecessary wars. Some of them insist on the
duty of States always endeavouring by conferences, or even by
arbitration, to avert war, and although these precepts, like the
corresponding precepts of Christian divines, were often violated, they
were certainly not without some influence on affairs. It is probably not
too much to say that in this respect Roman wars do not compare
unfavourably with those of Christian periods. It is remarkable how large
a part of the best Christian works on the ethics of war is based on the
precepts of pagan moralists, and although in antiquity as in modern
times the real cause of war was often very different from the pretexts,
the sense of justice in war was as clearly marked in Roman as in most
Christian periods.[27]
Great stress was laid upon the duty of a formal declaration of war
preceding hostilities. Polybius mentions the reprobation that was
attached in Greece to the Ætolians for having neglected this custom. It
was universal in Roman times, and during the mediæval period the custom
of sending a challenge to the hostile power was carefully observed. In
modern times formal declaration of war has fallen greatly into
desuetude. The hostilities between England and Spain under Elizabeth,
and the invasion of Germany by Gustavus Adolphus, were begun without any
such declaration, and there have been numerous instances in later
times.[28]
The treatment of prisoners has been profoundly modified. Quarter, it is
true, has been very often refused in modern wars to rebels, to soldiers
in mutiny, to revolted slaves, to savages who themselves give no
quarter. It has been often--perhaps generally--refused to irregular
soldiers like the French Francs-tireurs in the War of 1870, who without
uniforms endeavoured to defend their homes against invasion. It was long
refused to soldiers who, having rejected terms of surrender, continued
to defend an indefensible place, but this severity during the last three
centuries has been generally condemned. But, on the whole, the treatment
of the conquered soldier has steadily improved. At one time he was
killed. At another he was preserved as a slave. Then he was permitted to
free himself by payment of a ransom; now he is simply kept in custody
till he is exchanged or released on parole, or till the termination of
the war. In the latter half of the present century many elaborate and
beneficent regulations for the preservation of hospitals and the good
treatment of the wounded have been sanctioned by international
agreement. The distinction between the civil population and combatants
has been increasingly observed. As a general rule non-combatants, if
they do not obstruct the enemy, are subjected to no further injury than
that of paying war contributions and in other ways providing for the
subsistence of the invaders. The wanton destruction of private property
has been more and more avoided. Such an act as the devastation of the
Palatinate under Louis XIV. would now in a European war be universally
condemned, though the wholesale destruction of villages in our own
Indian frontier wars and the methods employed on both sides in the civil
war in Cuba appear to have borne much resemblance to it. In the
treatment of merchants the rule of reciprocity which was laid down in
Magna Charta is largely observed, and the Conference of Brussels in 1874
pronounced it to be contrary to the laws of war to bombard an
unfortified town. The great Civil War in America probably contributed
not a little to raise the standard of humanity in war; for while few
long wars have been fought with such determination or at the cost of so
many lives, very few have been conducted with such a scrupulous
abstinence from acts of wanton barbarity.
Many restrictive rules also have been accepted tending in a small degree
to mitigate the actual operations of war, and they have had some real
influence in this direction, though it is not possible to justify the
military code on any clear principle either of ethics or logic.
Assassination and the encouragement of assassination; the use of poison
or poisoned weapons; the violation of parole; the deceptive use of a
flag of truce or of the red cross; the slaughter of the wounded; the
infringement of terms of surrender or of other distinct agreements, are
absolutely forbidden, and in 1868 the Representatives of the European
Powers assembled at St. Petersburg agreed to abolish the use in war of
explosive bullets below the weight of 14 ounces, and to forbid the
propagation in an enemy's country of contagious disease as an instrument
of war. It laid down the general principle that the object of war is
confined to disabling the enemy, and that weapons calculated to inflict
unnecessary suffering, beyond what is required for attaining that
object, should be prohibited. At the same time explosive shells,
concealed mines, torpedoes and ambuscades lie fully within the permitted
agencies of war. Starvation may be employed, and the cutting off of the
supply of water, or the destruction of that supply by mixing with it
something not absolutely poisonous which renders it undrinkable. It is
allowable to deceive an enemy by fabricated despatches purporting to
come from his own side; by tampering with telegraph messages; by
spreading false intelligence in newspapers; by sending pretended spies
and deserters to give him untrue reports of the numbers or movements of
the troops; by employing false signals to lure him into an ambuscade. On
the use of the flag and uniform of an enemy for purposes of deception
there has been some controversy, but it is supported by high military
authority.[29] The use of spies is fully authorised, but the spy, if
discovered, is excluded from the rights of war and liable to an
ignominious death.
Apart from the questions I have discussed there is another class of
questions connected with war which present great difficulty. It is the
right of men to abdicate their private judgment by entering into the
military profession. In small nations this question is not of much
importance, for in them wars are of very rare occurrence and are usually
for self-defence. In a great empire it is wholly different. Hardly any
one will be so confident of the virtue of his rulers as to believe that
every war which his country wages in every part of its dominions, with
uncivilised as well as civilised populations, is just and necessary, and
it is certainly _primâ facie_ not in accordance with an ideal morality
that men should bind themselves absolutely for life or for a term of
years to kill without question, at the command of their superiors, those
who have personally done them no wrong. Yet this unquestioning obedience
is the very essence of military discipline, and without it the
efficiency of armies and the safety of nations would be hopelessly
destroyed. It is necessary to the great interests of society, and
therefore it is maintained, strengthened by the obligation of an oath
and still more efficaciously by a code of honour which is one of the
strongest binding influences by which men can be governed.
It is not, however, altogether absolute, and a variety of distinctions
and compromises have been made. There is a difference between the man
who enlists in the army of his own country and a man who enlists in
foreign service either permanently or for the duration of a single war.
If a man unnecessarily takes an active part in a struggle between two
countries other than his own, it may at least be demanded that he should
be actuated, not by a mere spirit of adventure or personal ambition, but
by a strong and reasoned conviction that the cause which he is
supporting is a righteous one. The conduct of a man who enlists in a
foreign army which may possibly be used against his own country, and who
at least binds himself to obey absolutely chiefs who have no natural
authority over him, has been much condemned, but even here special
circumstances must be taken into account. Few persons I suppose would
seriously blame the Irish Catholics of the eighteenth century who filled
the armies of France, Austria, Spain and Naples at a time when
disqualifying laws excluded them, on account of their religion, from the
British army and from almost every path of ambition at home. There is
also perhaps some distinction between the position of a soldier who is
obliged to serve, and a soldier in a country where enlisting is
voluntary, and also between the position of an officer who can throw up
his commission without infringing the law, and a private who cannot
abandon his flag without committing a grave legal offence. At the
beginning of the war of the American Revolution some English officers
left the army rather than serve in a cause which they believed to be
unrighteous. It was in their full power to do so, but probably none of
them would have desired that private soldiers who had no legal choice in
the matter should have followed their example and become deserters from
the ranks.
There are, however, extreme cases in which the violation of the military
oath and disobedience to military discipline are justified. More than
once in French history an usurper or his agent has ordered soldiers to
coerce or fire upon the representatives of the nation. In such cases it
has been said 'the conscience of the soldier is the liberty of the
people,' and the refusal of private soldiers to obey a plainly illegal
order will be generally though not universally applauded. In all such
cases, however, there is much obscurity and inconsistency of judgment.
The rule that the moral responsibility falls exclusively on the person
who gives the order, and that the private has no voice or
responsibility, will even here be maintained by some. Ought a private
soldier to have refused to take part in such an execution as that of the
Duc d'Enghien, or in the _Coup d'État_ of Napoleon III.? Ought he to
refuse to fire on a mob if he doubts the legality of the order of his
superior officer? In such cases there is sometimes a direct conflict
between the civil and the military law, and there have been instances in
which a soldier might be punishable before the first for acts which were
absolutely enforced by the second.[30]
Perhaps the strongest case of justifiable disobedience that can be
alleged is when a soldier is ordered to do something which involves
apostasy from his faith, though even here it would be difficult to show,
in the light of pure reason, that this is a graver thing than to kill
innocent men in an unrighteous cause. In the Early Church there were
some soldier martyrs who suffered death because they believed it
inconsistent with their faith to bear arms, or because they were asked
to do some acts which savoured of idolatry. The story of the Thebæan
legion which was said to have been martyred under Diocletian rests on no
trustworthy authority, but it illustrates the feeling of the Church on
the subject. Josephus tells how Jewish soldiers refused in spite of all
punishments to bring earth with the other soldiers for the reparation of
the Temple of Belus at Babylon. Conflicts between military duty and
religious duty must have not unfrequently arisen during the religious
wars of the sixteenth century, and in our own century and in our own
army there have been instances of soldiers refusing through religious
motives to escort or protect idolatrous processions in India, or to
present arms in Catholic countries when the Host was passing. Quaker
opinions about war are absolutely inconsistent with the compulsory
service which prevails in nearly all European countries, and religious
scruples about conscription have been among the motives that have
brought the Russian Raskolniks into collision with the civil power.
One of the most serious instances of the collision of duties in our time
is furnished by the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. From the days of Clive,
Sepoy soldiers have served under the British flag with an admirable
fidelity, and the Mutiny of Vellore in 1806, which was the one
exception, was due, like that of 1857, to a belief that the British
Government were interfering with their faith. Few things in the history
of the great Mutiny are so touching as the profound belief of the
English commanders of the Sepoy regiments in the unalterable loyalty of
their soldiers. Many of them lost their lives through this belief,
refusing even to the last moment and in spite of all evidence to abandon
it. They were deceived, and, in the fierce outburst of indignation that
followed, the conduct of the Sepoy soldiers was branded as the blackest
and the most unprovoked treachery.
Yet assuredly no charge was less true. Agitators for their own selfish
purposes had indeed acted upon the troops, but recent researches have
fully proved that the real as well as the ostensible cause of the Mutiny
was the greased cartridges. It was believed that the cartridges which
had been recently issued for the Sepoy regiments were smeared with a
mixture of cow's fat and pig's fat, one of these ingredients being
utterly impure in the eyes of the Hindoo, and the other in the eyes of
the Mussulman. To bite these cartridges would destroy the caste of the
Hindoo and carry with it the loss of everything that was most dear and
most sacred to him both in this world and in the next. In the eyes both
of the Moslem and the Hindoo it was the gravest and the most irreparable
of crimes, destroying all hopes in a future world, and yet this crime,
in their belief, was imposed upon them as a matter of military duty by
their officers. It was as if the Puritan soldiers of the seventeenth
century had been ordered by their commanders to abjure their hopes of
salvation and to repudiate and insult the Christian faith.
It is true that the existence of these obnoxious ingredients in the new
cartridges was solemnly denied, but the sincerity of the Sepoy belief is
incontestable, and General Anson, the commander-in-chief, having
examined the cartridges, was compelled to admit that it was very
plausible.[31] 'I am not so much surprised,' he wrote to Lord Canning,
'at their objections to the cartridges, having seen them. I had no idea
they contained, or rather are smeared with such a quantity of grease,
which looks exactly like fat. After ramming down the ball, the muzzle of
the musket is covered with it.'
Unfortunately this is not a complete statement of the case. It is a
shameful and terrible truth that, as far as the fact was concerned, the
Sepoys were perfectly right in their belief. In the words of Lord
Roberts, 'The recent researches of Mr. Forrest in the records of the
Government of India prove that the lubricating mixture used in preparing
the cartridges was actually composed of the objectionable ingredients,
cow's fat and lard, and that incredible disregard of the soldiers'
religious prejudices was displayed in the manufacture of these
cartridges.'[32] This was certainly not due, as the Sepoys imagined, to
any desire on the part of the British authorities to destroy caste or to
prepare the way for the conversion of the Sepoys to Christianity. It was
simply a glaring instance of the indifference, ignorance and incapacity
too often shown by British administrators in dealing with beliefs and
types of character wholly unlike their own. They were unable to realise
that a belief which seemed to them so childish could have any depth, and
they accordingly produced a Mutiny that for a time shook the English
power in India to its very foundation.
The horrors of Cawnpore--which were due to a single man--soon took away
from the British public all power of sanely judging the conflict, and a
struggle in which no quarter was given was naturally marked by extreme
savageness; but in looking back upon it, English writers must
acknowledge with humiliation that, if mutiny is ever justifiable, no
stronger justification could be given than that of the Sepoy troops.
Many of my readers will remember an exquisite little poem called 'The
Forced Recruit,' in which Mrs. Browning has described a young Venetian
soldier who was forced by the conscription to serve against his
fellow-countrymen in the Austrian army at Solferino, and who advanced
cheerfully to die by the Italian guns, holding a musket that had never
been loaded in his hand. Such a figure, such a violation of military
law, will claim the sympathy of all, but a very different judgment
should be passed upon those who, having voluntarily entered an army,
betray their trust and their oath in the name of patriotism. In the
Fenian movement in Ireland, one of the chief objects of the conspirators
was to corrupt the Irish soldiers and break down that high sense of
military honour for which in all times and in many armies the Irish
people have been conspicuous. 'The epidemic' [of disaffection], boasts
a writer who was much mixed in the conspiracies of those times, 'was not
an affair of individuals, but of companies and of whole regiments. To
attempt to impeach all the military Fenians before courts martial would
have been to throw England into a panic, if not to precipitate an
appalling mutiny and invite foreign invasion.'[33]
I do not quote these words as a true statement. They are, I believe, a
gross exaggeration and a gross calumny on the Irish soldiers, nor do I
doubt that most, if not all, the soldiers who may have been induced over
a glass of whiskey, or through the persuasions of some cunning agitator,
to take the Fenian oath would, if an actual conflict had arisen, have
proved perfectly faithful soldiers of the Queen. The perversion of
morals, however, which looks on such violations of military duty as
praiseworthy, has not been confined to writers of the stamp of Mr.
O'Brien. A striking instance of it is furnished by a recent American
biography. Among the early Fenian conspirators was a young man named
John Boyle O'Reilly. He was a genuine enthusiast, with a real vein of
literary talent; in the closing years of his life he won the affection
and admiration of very honourable men, and I should certainly have no
wish to look too harshly on youthful errors which were the result of a
misguided enthusiasm if they had been acknowledged as such. As a matter
of fact, however, he began his career by an act which, according to
every sound principle of morality, religion, and secular honour, was in
the highest degree culpable. Being a sworn Fenian, he entered a regiment
of hussars, assumed the uniform of the Queen, and took the oath of
allegiance for the express purpose of betraying his trust and seducing
the soldiers of his regiment. He was detected and condemned to penal
servitude, and he at last escaped to America, where he took an active
part in the Fenian movement. After his death his biography was written
in a strain of unqualified eulogy, but the biographer has honestly and
fully disclosed the facts which I have related. This book has an
introduction written by Cardinal Gibbons, one of the most prominent
Catholic divines in the United States. The reader may be curious to see
how the act of aggravated treachery and perjury which it revealed was
judged by a personage who occupies all but the highest position in a
Church which professes to be the supreme and inspired teacher of morals.
Not a word in this Introduction implies that O'Reilly had done any act
for which he should be ashamed. He is described as 'a great and good
man,' and the only allusion to his crime is in the following terms: 'In
youth his heart agonises over that saddest and strangest romance in all
history--the wrongs and woes of his motherland--that Niobe of the
Nations. In manhood, because he dared to wish her free, he finds himself
a doomed felon, an exiled convict, in what he calls himself the Nether
World.... The Divine faith implanted in his soul in childhood flourished
there undyingly, pervaded his whole being with its blessed influences,
furnished his noblest ideals of thought and conduct.... The country of
his adoption vies with the land of his birth in testifying to the
uprightness of his life.... With all these voices I blend my own, and in
their name I say that the world is brighter for having possessed
him.'[34]
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Newman's _Anglican Difficulties_, p. 190.
[25] See Grotius, _de Jure_, book iii. ch. iv. On the Jewish notions on
this subject, see Deut. ii. 34; vii. 2, 16; xx. 10-16; Psalm cxxxvii. 9;
1 Sam. xv. 3. I have collected some additional facts on this subject in
my _History of European Morals_.
[26] Tyrrell and Purser's _Correspondence of Cicero_, vol. v. p. xlvii.
[27] See Grotius, _de Jure Belli et Pacis_.
[28] Much information on this subject will be found in a remarkable
pamphlet (said to have been corrected by Pitt) called 'An Enquiry into
the Manner in which the different wars in Europe have commenced during
the last two centuries, by the Author of the History and Foundation of
the Law of Nations in Europe' (1805).
[29] See Tovey's _Martial Law and the Custom of War_, part 2, pp. 13,
29. A striking instance of the deceptive use of a flag occurred in 1781,
when the English, having captured St. Eustatius from the Dutch, allowed
the Dutch flag still to float over its harbour in order that Dutch,
French, Spanish and American ships which were ignorant of the capture
might be decoyed into the harbour and seized as prizes. Some writers on
military law maintain that this was within the rights of war.
[30] See Fitzjames Stephen's _History of the Criminal Law_, i. 205.
[31] Lord Roberts' _Forty-one Years in India_, i. 94.
[32] _Ibid._ p. 431.
[33] _Contemporary Review_, May 1897. Article by William O'Brien, 'Was
Fenianism ever Formidable?'
[34] Roche's _Life of John Boyle O'Reilly_, with introduction by
Cardinal Gibbons. Since the publication of this book Cardinal Gibbons
has written a letter to the _Tablet_ (Dec. 2, 1899), in which he says:
'I feel it due to myself and the interests of truth to declare that till
I read Mr. Lecky's criticism I did not know that Mr. O'Reilly had ever
been a Fenian or a British soldier, or that he had tried to seduce other
soldiers from their allegiance. In fact, up to this moment, I have never
read a line of the biography for which I wrote the introduction.... My
only acquaintance with Mr. O'Reilly's history before he came to America
was the vague information I had that, for some political offence, the
exact nature of which I did not learn, he had been exiled from his
native land to a penal colony, from which he afterwards escaped.'
I gladly accept this assurance of Cardinal Gibbons, though I am
surprised that he should not have even glanced at the book which he
introduced, and that he should have been absolutely ignorant of the most
conspicuous event of the life which, from early youth, he held up to
unqualified admiration. I regret, too, that he has not taken the
opportunity of this letter to reprobate a form of moral perversion which
is widely spread among his Irish co-religionists, and which his own
words are only too likely to strengthen. It is but a short time since an
Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament, being accused of once having
served the Queen as a Volunteer, justified himself by saying that he had
only worn the coat which was worn by Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Boyle
O'Reilly; while another Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament, at a
public meeting in Dublin, and amid the cheers of his audience, expressed
his hope that in the South African war the Irish soldiers under the
British flag would fire on the English instead of on the Boers.