L. G. Redmond-Howard. Dublin: Hodges & Figgis.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
MINDS AND MEN
In considering any sudden yet organized popular movement, such as a
revolution, the most important things to examine are the minds and the
men that directed it, for it is only by means of these forces that
simmering discontents take definite shape and concrete determination.
But it often happens that the characters of the leaders themselves and
even the objective remedies they propose are quite out of keeping with
the solution of the real grievances they complain of.
Once given leadership, and confidence, fidelity, and sincerity follow
among the rank and file as naturally as water flows from a spring--being
the common factor of humanity--and this seems to have been the case in
the Sinn Fein rebellion of 1916.
On the whole they had no reason to be ashamed of their leaders, though
they might have questioned their wisdom. Now, wickedness in the
political sense connotes the revolt against the organized authority of
the State--political foolishness, the utter impossibility of realizing a
practical aim. Naturally, therefore, the law was officially bound to
look upon them as a species of criminal lunatics. Public men, moreover,
were forced by the very theory of government to denounce them, in
consequence, as enemies, and call for the sternest penalties of
retribution known to the Constitution, in order that the individual's
fate might become an object-lesson to the mass.
Once having granted this, however, the civilian mind is free to make the
inquiry--whether from morbid, scientific, dramatic, or emotional reasons
matters little--as to what manner of men these leaders were, and what
manner of minds gave the revolt its psychological aspect: but in that
inquiry no criterion of loyalty except that of fidelity to their own
personal convictions must be allowed to enter. Probably the most serious
mistake usually made by Irish politicians is that of classing successive
rebellions as the acts of traitors or martyrs, according to their
respective points of view, and certainly statesmen and thinkers could
make no greater error in diagnosing the present one.
Rebellions are not the outcome of innate perversity of race, but purely
scientific phenomena with objective causes. First, then, let us examine
the men themselves who led the revolt, before we pass on to the
literature that informed and inspired it.
Sir Roger Casement was not the founder of "Sinn Fein," nor was he the
originator of the Labour Movement in Ireland: he found both ready-made
and used them to serve his own ideals for the future of Ireland and thus
can be termed a leader.
Sir Roger Casement is an Ulsterman of the old type that was the backbone
of the Rebellion of '98, when the Presbyterians of the North tried to
emulate those English and Irish exiles who, persecuted out of their
native shores by High Church tyranny, had laid the foundations of
American liberty under Washington.
That he is a man of character, and not the "bounder and scoundrel" the
Press now makes him out to be, goes without saying, or otherwise he
would not have received the honour of a title at the hands of a grateful
country: in fact, until his entrance into the troubled waters of Irish
politics he was one of the most universally respected of our civil
servants.
For ten years, from 1895 to 1905, for example, he was in the wilds of
Africa, for the greater portion of his sojourn as Consul in Portuguese
West Africa and then later in the Congo Free State.
After this he was sent to South America, and in 1909 he was appointed
Consul-General at Rio de Janeiro. So trusted was he that when the
British Government wished to investigate the labour atrocities on the
Indians in the rubber forests of Peru, they chose Sir Roger Casement;
and when his report was printed in 1912 it caused the profoundest stir,
not merely in England, but throughout the civilized world.
This was surely a man of character and above the ordinary temptations of
bribery, or else he would not in 1905 have received the C.M.G. and in
1911 knighthood--moreover, he was a man who may be said to have had
ample opportunity of getting outside the narrow groove of Irish politics
and seeing something of the Empire.
Yet while Irish politics had been moving with tremendous rapidity during
his absence--the fateful years between 1895-1905--Sir Roger Casement
seems never to have got beyond the Ulster of 1798--which I need hardly
remind anyone conversant with history was as rebellious to England as
was Wexford under Cromwell.
This _idée fixe_ began to appear at once upon his return to Ireland in
the year 1913, when he found politics in a chaos of ferment, and seeing
Sir Edward Carson preparing to appeal to arms and his supporters to
Germany, he too "began to indulge in treason in the same spirit as
Carson and the Curragh crew," as he himself described his attitude of
that time.
Possibly Germany was equally willing to sell her old rifles to both
parties, but the war precipitated matters.
Autumn 1914 found Sir Roger (who, as we have already seen, had founded a
body of volunteers in Ireland) in Berlin, where he was not only received
at the German Foreign Office, but, in answer to an inquiry regarding the
Kaiser's attitude to Ireland, was assured by the Foreign Department and
the Imperial Chancellor that "Germany would never invade Ireland with
the object of conquering it," and that, "supposing the fortune of war
should ever bring German troops to Ireland's coasts, they would land as
the forces of a Government inspired by goodwill towards a land and a
people for whom Germany only wishes national welfare and national
freedom." That he was not acting in any way as the representative of the
nation whose ambassador he was supposed to be was amply proved by his
repudiation after this adventure by the Irish leaders at home and such
bodies as the Council of the United Irish League in America.
Such was the dream or delusion, however, which changed one of the most
respected of British Consuls into a rebel traitor to the Empire. There
is no need to insinuate selfishness or vilify his character, for he must
have known his effort was bound to fail and counted the cost beforehand.
The great point to remember is that the Irish people were free to make
their choice and use their judgment, and they decided against him, not
personally, but on the merits of the case he put before them, and there
was nothing to do but to pay the penalty; and it is better on the whole
for Englishmen to accept Ireland's own verdict upon Sir Roger Casement
than to place him in the same rank as those who really represented
Ireland against England, failed, and paid the price only too willingly.
The same might apply equally well to P. H. Pearse and James Connolly,
neither of whom was by nature militant nor, indeed, "Separatist," save
as a protest against not so much the theory as the reality of what went
by the name of "Unionism." There seems a certain tendency among the
middle classes and the mediocrities of mind in Ireland to class, ever
since the days of Jim Larkin, the whole Labour Movement in Ireland as a
species of hooliganism, though, strange to say, no one ever appealed
more successfully or was received with more genuine enthusiasm in
England than the socialist leader when he was pleading the cause of the
children of the Dublin slums.
When Jim Larkin went to America, his mantle fell upon his right-hand
man, James Connolly, and it is impossible to understand the rebellion
without understanding the man who was a far more important, and will be
a far more lasting, factor in the movement than Sir Roger Casement.
Casement used the magic hope of German help, but it was Connolly who
pointed to the concrete grievances that would make any rebellion welcome
to the workers.
Yet there was nothing of the wild dreamer or the hysterical patriot
about James Connolly, the Ulster organizer of the Transport Union, much
less anything of the hooligan.
His proper place should have been within the ranks of the Parliamentary
Party, like so many of the other leaders, especially the Sinn Feiners;
and it is a very significant fact that, in spite of their national
claims, two of the greatest economic movements Ireland has seen since
Parnell should have failed to be assimilated by the politicians--but it
reflects as much upon one as the other.
Probably when he wrote his last work, a pamphlet entitled "The
Reconquest of Ireland," which was printed at Liberty Hall early in 1915,
he had no idea that it would mean anything more than an upward economic
struggle of the submerged classes.
"The Labour Movement of Ireland," he wrote, "must set itself the
Reconquest of Ireland as its final aim," and by the word "reconquest" of
Ireland he means "the taking possession of the entire country, all its
powers of wealth, production, and its natural resources, and organizing
these on a co-operative basis for the good of all."
It is significant that there is no religious or political bigotry: the
movement is right outside both Carsonism and Redmondism, as indeed their
new flag, with its significant colours--green, white, and
orange--symbolizes; and he repeats the hope of the United Irishmen at
the end of the eighteenth century, "that our animosities were buried
with the bones of our ancestors and that we could unite as citizens and
claim the rights of man"--the first of which is to be able to live
freely, that is, with the means of life no longer the property of a
class.
He had, in fact, realized "that the old lines of political demarcation
no longer served to express any reality in the lives of the people." If
anything, the new movement was antagonistic to them all, for in the
summing-up he had observed: "In the great Dublin lock-out of 1913-14,
the manner in which the Dublin employers, overwhelmingly Unionist,
received the enthusiastic and unscrupulous support of the entire Home
Rule Press was a foretaste of the possibilities of the new combinations
with which Labour in Ireland will have to reckon."
As I read all this once again during the height of the rebellion, with
the rattle of the maxims playing upon Boland's mills immediately behind
me, where a couple of hundred of the men he had described were now
fighting Labour's first war under the name of an Irish Republic, at once
the whole aspect of the rebellion changed.
I still wondered, however, why it was that he had left the company of
Wells and Webb and Booth, who were but his English counterparts after
all, and the general policy of Fabianism, when I suddenly discovered the
key not only to the man but to the movement as well, in his definition
of prophecy: "The only true prophets are they who carve out the future
which they announce."
This, then, was the key to it all. Every dreamer should also be a man of
action, every soldier a volunteer to his own idealism; and at once I
understood that strange combination between the "intellectuals" and the
"workers" which formed such a unique feature of the rebellion, and which
the prosperous citizens of Dublin--penned up in their houses for the
first time hungry, and for the first time aware of the reality of life's
struggle--could only blindly mass together under the name of "criminal
lunatics," like the anarchists of Sidney Street in London some years
before.
Much less could the pink-faced Derby boys understand--and so I suppose
thought, because the crisis had synchronized with the European war and
was aimed at a state of things tolerated by English rule, it was
therefore only another indication of Ireland's double dose of original
sin, which always drove her to disloyalty to her benefactor.
Dr. O'Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick, one of the ablest as well as the most
independent thinkers in Ireland, has been mentioned as one of the forces
of the rebellion--in fact, he was generally supposed to be one of the
marked men of the Fein programme of suppression, being considered more
dangerous to the realm than Connolly--in a word, he was looked upon as a
red-hot Sinn Feiner. Yet if his famous Lenten pastoral be examined one
will find it merely the broad Christian aspect of the war--nor would the
cynical diplomatist, if we could get him to be candid, say he was far
wrong in his facts.
Thus, for example, speaking of the only possible result of the
prolongation of the war to final victory for either party, he says:--
"No one can foresee even the smallest part of the consequences of this
war. One thing, however, is certain, that it will leave the world in a
condition of the direst poverty. The destruction of capital is enormous,
not in one country, but in all of them. If the war ceased to-morrow it
would have impoverished all Europe beyond recovery for generations, but
that poverty, by itself, will probably be the least of its evils. It
will mean the paralysis of industry, the restriction of commerce,
unemployment on a scale that has never been known before, and it is an
anxious question how a hitherto powerful, well-paid, well-organized
population of workers will submit to the altered state of things. We
have had, from time to time, some ugly threatenings of socialism, but we
may fear that they are no more than the first mutterings of the storm
which will burst upon European society as soon as this war is over.
"This terrible danger, which may be on us within the next three or four
years, may well be worse than the war itself, and deluge Europe again in
blood. If anyone thinks that millions of working men, trained to arms in
every country in Europe, will settle down peaceably to starvation in
order to help to re-amass fortunes for their 'betters,' he may have a
rude awakening."
It is his attitude towards England, however, that has brought him into
conflict with the recruiting authorities--yet what is the following
passage, taken from his famous Lenten pastoral, but the purely Catholic
attitude of a bishop who looks to the head of his Church for guidance,
and seeing the Papacy neutral on the chaos, tries to keep the war fever
from spreading to his own flock, for, after all, he spoke as a
Churchman, not as a politician.
I think it is now universally admitted that Belgium was not the sole
reason of our entrance, as it will not be the sole reason of our
continuance, in the war; in a word, that it is really "British
interests" that are at stake.
The learned Irish Bishop merely puts the case in so many words--had we
not been engaged, the _Times_ might have said, "with the impartiality of
the blunt, plain-speaking Englishman."
He writes: "Then see the case of the small nationalities on whose
behalf many people have believed that the war is being waged.
"What good has it done for them? What part have they played in it except
that of catspaws for the larger nations that used them? Belgium delayed
the German advance for two weeks and gave time to the English and French
armies to rally. For her pains she has been conquered and ruined. Servia
began the war by an atrocious crime, and as reparation for it might
weaken Russia's aims in the Balkans, she was encouraged to resist. She,
too, has played her temporary rôle and has followed in the wake of
Belgium. Montenegro is the next to go; and it would seem that the great
belligerent nations look to themselves only, and use their weaker
neighbours for their own purposes. This war is not waged by any of the
great Powers as a quixotic enterprise for lofty ideals. 'Small
nationalities' and other such sentimental pretexts are good enough for
platform addresses to an imaginative but uninformed people, but they do
not reveal the true inwardness of this war. All the belligerents have
had practical and substantial aims in view. France wants her lost
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine; Russia wants Constantinople; England
wants the undisputed supremacy of the sea and riddance from German
commercial rivalry; Austria wants domination in the Balkans and an
outlet on the Ægean; Italy wants Trieste and what is called _Italia
irredenta_; Germany wants a colonial empire and a powerful navy; and all
these Powers have formed alliances and laid their plans for many a day,
simply for the realization of their respective purposes.
"They planned and schemed solely for the sake of power and material
gain. All the talk about righteousness is simply the cloak for ambition,
and the worst of it is, that some of the belligerents have gone on
repeating the profession of their disinterestedness until they have come
to believe it themselves.
"Truth, and right, and justice have had very little to say to this war,
which is an outbreak of materialism and irreligion. The peoples did not
want this war; there is no hatred of one another amongst them: but the
governing cliques in each country have led or driven them like sheep to
the slaughter. God has been ignored; His law has been put aside;
Christianity is not allowed to govern the relations of nations. And now
the retribution is on them all. The fair dreams of victory and expanded
empire and increased wealth and prosperity with which they set out have
vanished long ago, and there is not a Government amongst them but is
trembling for the day when it shall have to answer for its stewardship
to its own people. If they knew as much in July 1914 as they do now,
which of them would have plunged into war? And probably if the war goes
on for another year they will curse the cowardice which kept them from
manfully facing the problem of peace, for which every principle of
religion and humanity, every interest, social, material, and political,
of their countries, calls aloud."
All this, of course, goes to disprove that the Bishop of Limerick was a
Sinn Feiner, but it also goes to prove that one cannot shake the
foundations of international relations without stirring internal
conditions to their very depths.
The clergy, however, were upon the whole, as they always are, with the
Government, as was instanced in a hundred different cases during the
rebellion.
Two of the leaders were typical of the old Fenians of darker days. One
was Thomas Clarke, who earned his living by running a newsagent's and
tobacconist's shop, but who was also engaged a lot in writing for many
of the minor newspapers which were responsible for much of the
propaganda which prepared the way for the rising.
The other--better known especially in the days of the South African War,
when he was, like Colonel Lynch, one of the Nationalist heroes--was
"Major" John McBride, who had actually raised an Irish Brigade to fight
for the Boers against the British, and who must consequently have felt a
very kindred spirit in Sir Roger Casement, who was merely repeating his
tactics.
It shows how much Irish politics have progressed, however, that while
all Nationalist Ireland is now watching the trial for high treason of
Sir Roger Casement with indifference, the Nationalists of those days
nominated McBride as Parliamentary candidate for South Mayo when a
vacancy occurred by the resignation of Mr. Davitt.
He was at the time of the rising engaged as an official of the Dublin
Corporation, and had been married to--and divorced from--Miss Maud
Gonne, a patriot of much the same type as the Countess Markievicz.
It was he who had conducted the fight at Jacobs's factory.
McBride was really the one link between the two wars--the Anglo-Boer and
the Anglo-German War, to use a Sinn Fein phrase--and if his later
attitude was now impracticable, it was certainly logical and consistent
with itself.
The main difference, however, was in the circumstances, and these he,
like many others, refused to admit had changed.
Thus ten years before he had gone to Paris as one of the delegates from
the Irish Transvaal Committee to ex-President Kruger, who told him that
"he would never forget how the Irish Brigade stood by the men of the
Transvaal in their hour of need."
Captain William Redmond, M.P., now in the trenches with the British
Army, had also been a delegate from Ireland, and had seen Oom Paul at
the Hague in much the same spirit of sympathy; but then Home Rule was
not upon the Statute Book, and if that "scrap of paper" bound England,
it was certainly no less binding upon Ireland, in that it had been
freely entered into by her constitutional representatives.
Probably McBride thought of the motto inscribed upon the flag that the
Irish Brigade had used (later presented him by one of the officials of
the Boer Republic), which ran:--
"'Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all."
In any case his attitude remained exactly what it had been in 1909, when
at the Manchester Martyr celebration he had appealed to his audience
never to degrade themselves by entering the British Army, telling them
that if ever they wished to fight they ought to wait for the prospect of
a German invasion of Ireland.
One of the strangest figures in the rebel ranks was that of the famous
Countess Markievicz--formerly a Miss Gore-Booth, daughter of Sir H. W.
Gore-Booth, the head of a well-known and respected Sligo family of
Cromwellian descent.
It was while in Paris as an art student some fifteen years ago that she
imbibed those extreme principles of democracy--almost, one might say,
anarchy--with which her name became associated on her return to Dublin
after her marriage with a young Polish artist named Count Marckievicz.
Presented at Court, she was not fond of the conventional "society"
circles of the Irish capital, and lived for the most part a Bohemian
life of her own, becoming notorious by her extreme socialistic opinions.
During the Larkin crisis, when the transport workers and dockers went
out on strike, she opened a "soup kitchen" at Liberty Hall.
She was also responsible for the organization of the "National Boy
Scouts," an Irish replica of the English original, with a political
bias, of course; and these soon attracted hundreds of Dublin lads, and
from time to time the Countess would give them lectures and hold reviews
and inspections.
These formed a considerable portion of the Citizen Army, and were
probably the most violent of those elements in the Republic who
disgraced the otherwise remarkable "military" combat.
One remark of the Countess's is very typical of both her temper and her
temperament, and in a way prophetic.
It was supposed to have been said to a local Dundalk man, and was to the
effect that if she could only shoot one British soldier she would die
happy--a wish she must certainly have realized, for she was continually
seen with a small rifle in her hand, and, according to a rumour,
actually did shoot one on Stephen's Green.
Eoin McNeill, the able editor of the _Irish Volunteer_, is another
interesting character, not only in view of the part he had taken to
raise the revolutionary army, but also for the way, to use the words of
John Dillon, "he broke its back" when he found out that they were to
rise on that fatal Easter Monday--though this did not save him from the
vengeance of the law.
In striking contrast to the rather vapid sentimentalism and abstract
theorizing of many of the periodicals controlled by the Sinn Feiners was
his own sheet, the _Irish Volunteer_. It was the most practical of all
the periodicals, and, beyond ordinary editorials and topical articles,
always contained "Orders for the Week," which included night classes and
lectures and drills, while diagrams of trenches and earthworks appeared
which covered the whole of Ireland.
It is only when looking back over past numbers, with their articles on
night operations, local guides, reconnoitring, organization of
transports, reserves, signalling, and so forth, that one sees how it is
that they were able to hold up Dublin for a solid week; but Eoin McNeill
owed his inspiration entirely to the men of Ulster.