one, for example, could be more the antithesis of the revolutionary in
real life than P. H. Pearse, President and Commander-in-Chief of the
Republican Army. Indeed, according to one account he was to have
replaced Dr. Mahaffy as Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in the event
of the rising proving successful. Pearse was not even an Irishman, being
the son of an English convert to Catholicism who had emigrated to
Ireland, but he was an enthusiastic Gaelic scholar, and there was
nothing he loved better than wandering among the peasantry of Galway and
Connemara, while in his own establishment all the servants spoke Irish
fluently.
Though he had at one time intended taking up journalism, and was even
called to the Bar, he was both by profession and inclination an
educationalist, being especially keen on the study of continental
methods of education, such as those of Belgium and Germany.
He conducted a secondary boarding school for boys, where all the walls
were decorated with the works of modern Irish artists, such as Jack
Yeats and George W. Russell. He later, in order to give vent to his
views, developed a gift for oratory, his oration at the grave of
O'Donovan Rossa having stirred all Ireland. He was also the author of a
charming little volume of short stories entitled "Josagan," or "Little
Jesus," while his translations of Irish folk-lore and cradle songs were
equally delicate.
Crowds of the victims, in fact, were men of character, talent, and
eminence--numerous writers, journalists, poets, authors, professors; but
all were classed in the same category of felons.
Indeed, it has been said that the blow was aimed as much at the freedom
of the Press and the liberty of thought as the actual rising in arms;
but as the majority of the sentiments maintained were but repetitions of
the muzzled grievances of labour and thought in England, the effect will
undoubtedly react through British democracy upon the heads of those who
took advantage of the racial prejudice to crush out of opposition.
Thus John MacDermot, one of the signatories of the rebel proclamation,
was editor of a paper called _Freedom_, and had already served a term of
imprisonment for speeches which had been interpreted as prejudicial to
recruiting. Edward de Valera, who commanded at Boland's mill, and who
was sentenced to penal servitude for life, had been a professor in
Blackrock College. W. O'Clery Curtis, who was deported, was a
journalist, and Arthur Griffiths the able editor of the _Irish
Year-book_.
Then came the disciples of the muses. Thomas MacDonagh seems to have
been always more or less haunted with the vision of revolution, and as
early as eight years ago produced a play entitled "When the Dawn is
Come," though the insurrection it foretold was placed fifty years hence.
He, too, wrote poetry, like Pearse, under whom he was at school, but he
was better known and his verse of a higher standard. He seems almost to
have had an inkling of his future fate, and might also be said to have
deliberately chosen the lost cause of his heart, for, in one of his
earlier poems, entitled "The War Legacy," we find the following:
Far better War's battering breeze than the Peace that barters the
Past,
Better the fear of our fathers' God than friendship false with
their foe:
And better anointed Death than the Nation's damnation at last,
And the crawling of craven limbs in life and the curse of the
coward below.
Among his publications are "Songs of Myself" (Hodges, Figgis & Co.),
"Thomas Campion" (Hodges, Figgis & Co.), and a larger volume of "Lyrical
Poems," reprinted by the _Irish Review_.
At the time of his death he was Lecturer in English Literature at the
National University.
Probably one of the most pathetic figures of the whole revolt was that
of young Joseph Plunkett, the son of Count Plunkett, whose marriage upon
the morn of his execution sent such a thrill of romance through the
English-speaking world when it became announced.
He too was a poet, and at one time the editor of the _Irish Review_, now
no more, and he was also a contributor to the _Academy_ and the _Dublin
Review_.
A little volume entitled "The Circle and the Sword," published by
Maunsel, is dedicated to his fellow-rebel, Thomas MacDonagh.
One poem among them is especially significant and is entitled "1867,"
but one feels inclined to call it 1916, for it might have been written
yesterday, as he blindfold faced the levelled rifles:--
All our best ye have branded
When the people were choosing them.
When 'twas death they demanded,
Ye laughed! ye were losing them.
But the blood that ye spilt in the night
Crieth loudly to God,
And their name hath the strength and the might
Of a sword for the sod.
* * * * *
In the days of our doom and our dread
Ye were cruel and callous.
Grim Death with our fighters ye fed
Through the jaws of your gallows.
But a blasting and blight was the fee
For which ye had bartered them.
And we smite with the sword that from ye
We had gained when ye martyred them!
It is probably by the romance of his last hours, however, that he will
be most remembered.
"Late on Wednesday night," as Mr. Stoker, the Grafton Street jeweller
already mentioned, told me the story, "just as I was about to go home,
suddenly a taxi stopped at the shop door, and a beautiful young woman
stepped out and asked me to show her some wedding-rings--'the best,' as
she put it, 'that money could buy.'
"She had a thick veil, but I could see that her eyes were red with
weeping, and, noticing continued convulsive sobs as she spoke, I
ventured to ask her the reason.
"It was then that she revealed the terrible tragedy she was about to
suffer.
"'I am poor Joe Plunkett's--the rebel's--fiancée,' she said, 'and we are
to be married in prison to-morrow morning, an hour before his
execution.'
"I tell you it was the most pathetic thing I had ever heard in my life,"
continued the jeweller; "and I felt inclined to break down myself when
she added: 'Oh! I can't tell you how I love him and how he loves me; we
belong to each other, and even if we are only to be together for a
single hour I mean to marry him in spite of everybody, in order to bear
his name through life.'"
The young woman at once stepped into the same category as Sarah Curran,
poor Robert Emmet's sweetheart, in the heart of everyone in Dublin as
the story went round like lightning, but no one knew who she was until
the next day, when we heard that she was Grace Gifford, the beautiful
and gifted young art student whose portrait by William Orpen, entitled
"Young Ireland," had won the admiration of all London a few years
before.
Not all the character and talent and romance of these leaders, however,
would have been sufficient to launch Ireland into open rebellion had
there not been some concrete grievance as well which gave their words
objective worth.
Style alone makes no martyrs, and the best way to understand the
influence these men had upon their followers is to study the concrete
grievances which they preached in season and out of season, making
revolution not only sound plausible but actually practicable; and for
this we must turn to the literature, which explains the remoter home
causes of the rebellion.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
REMOTER CAUSES OF THE REBELLION
Those who think they can explain away the Sinn Fein rising of 1916 by
the factor of German gold make much the same mistake as those who were
so anxious to explain away the Home Rule movement by American dollars.
The fact of the matter is, great movements and national uprisings should
not be explained away: they should be, on the contrary, amplified,
emphasized, and deeply studied.
I remember on one occasion the late W. T. Stead, when he was helping me
with the biography of my uncle, Mr. John Redmond, emphasizing upon me
the tremendous importance of the study of Irish problems to an Empire
like ours, where nearly every one of its component nations is a
repetition of Ireland.
"We have made every mistake we could possibly make as a ruling race in
our government of you Irish," he said to me, "and we cannot, as we love
and wish to keep our Empire, continue to perpetuate them.
"We can keep Ireland down if we like by force of arms, but we shall
never be able to keep our Empire by the same means, and that is why it
is so important that with such an object-lesson at our very doors we
should be ever prepared to study how conquered or incorporated nations
look upon our rule.
"That rule may be a protection, and it should be, but our stupidity can
make it a yoke; yet of this we can be certain, that what fails to win
friendship and respect in Ireland will fail to win security for our
Empire when we employ those methods on nations who have it in their
power to say us nay."
In other words, as long as the suppression has only been a military
suppression it has been no suppression at all; any more than a delirious
patient who is drugged or held down by force by a couple of hospital
porters is cured by that expedient.
Moreover, all such expedients are necessarily merely temporary, and what
we want to get at are the root causes of the complaint.
We must therefore fully diagnose those grievances of which the rebellion
was only the outward symptom, and against which the Republic was more,
after all, a symbolic protest than anything else; it was no more really
intended to establish a Celtic Commonwealth than Sir Edward Carson's
army was to change a Province into a Kingdom. Both were _façons de
parler_, and the word "provisional" saved them from ridicule they would
otherwise have deserved.
I remember speaking to a prominent Sinn Feiner only a couple of days
before the revolt with a view to writing an article on the Volunteers,
and this is what he said:--
"It would be very difficult for anyone to write anything just at
present, for things are trembling in the balance. There is a most
tremendous battle going on at the present moment at the Castle, we
understand, between General Friend and Augustine Birrell--in other
words, between the military and the civil authorities--and everything
depends upon that issue.
"They want to take away our arms, for example, and not those of Redmond
or Carson, and the latter will stand by and see it done without a word;
but we know that's only the thin end of the wedge of the complete
subjugation of Ireland to the soldier, as in the days of Cromwell, and
even if we stand alone we will stop that.
"They don't half of them know a tenth of our power; even people in
Ireland don't realize it. We are completely organized and perfectly
equipped, far better even than the Ulster Volunteers are, and they will
find out their mistake when they try.
"They've made two attempts already, in a hole-and-corner sort of way, at
the Gaelic Press and at Liberty Hall, and the police found themselves
looking into the barrels of revolvers each time. Well, all I can say is,
when the day comes and they determine to strike--and we'll get wind of
it--you may depend upon it the whole world will get a surprise; it will
be like nothing else in Irish history for seven hundred years.
"We have our supplies at regular intervals, and our local commanders,
with each province fully organized under them, and a complete system of
code messages which never go through the post, but are distributed by
means of secret dispatch-riders, and if the signal went forth to-night,
to-morrow morning the whole of Ireland would be up in arms."
All of which, I need hardly say, I took--as everyone in my place would
have taken it--_cum grano salis_, but it all came back to me the moment
I heard the first shot. Especially did it flash across my mind when,
bringing back to Dun's Hospital a dead Sinn Feiner, the famous document
fell out of his pocket, which is strikingly similar in thought to my
friend's prognostications.
According to Alderman Kelly, speaking on the Thursday before the
outbreak in the Dublin Corporation, some such order had been "recently
addressed to and was on the files of Dublin Castle," according to which
the arrest of all the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, together with the
members of the Sinn Fein Council, the Executive Committee of the
National (Redmondite) Volunteers, and the Executive Committee of the
Gaelic League, had been sanctioned.
Probably, however, the best diagnosis of the situation immediately
preceding the outbreak was the letter published by the _New Statesman_
of May 6th, that had been written as early as April 7th, and which,
coming from the most eminent victim of the danger so clearly foreseen by
him, must have special force at the present moment.
It was from no less than F. Sheehy Skeffington.
"SIR,--The situation in Ireland is extremely grave. Thanks to the
silence of the daily Press, the military authorities are pursuing their
Prussian plans in Ireland unobserved by the British public; and, when
the explosion which they have provoked occurs, they will endeavour to
delude the British public as to where the responsibility lies. I write
in the hope that, despite war-fever, there may be enough sanity and
common sense left to restrain the militarists while there is yet time.
"I will not take up your space by recounting the events that have led up
to the present situation--the two years' immunity accorded to Sir Edward
Carson's Volunteers in their defiant illegalities, the systematic
persecution of the Irish Volunteers _from the moment of their formation_
(_nine months before the war_), the militarist provocations, raids on
printing offices, arbitrary deportations, and savage sentences which
have punctuated Mr. Redmond's recruiting appeals for the past eighteen
months. As a result of this recent series of events, Irish Nationalist
and Labour opinion is now in a state of extreme exasperation. Recruiting
for the British Army is dead; recruiting for the Irish Volunteers has,
for the moment, almost reached the mark of one thousand per week--which
is Lord Wimborne's demand for the British Army. A special stimulus has
been given to the Irish Volunteer movement by the arrest and threatened
forcible deportation (at the moment of writing it is still uncertain
whether the threat will be carried out) of two of its most active
organizers.
"There are two distinct danger-points in the position. In the first
place, the Irish Volunteers are prepared, if any attempt is made
forcibly to disarm them, to resist, and to defend their rifles with
their lives. In the second place, the Irish Citizen Army (the Labour
Volunteers) are prepared to offer similar resistance, not only to
disarmament, but to any attack upon the Press which turns out the
_Workers' Republic_--successor to the suppressed _Irish Worker_--which
is printed in Liberty Hall.
"There is no bluff in either case. That was shown (1) in Tullamore on
March 20th, when an attempt at disarming the small local corps of Irish
Volunteers was met with revolver shots and a policeman was
wounded--fortunately not seriously; (2) in Dublin, on March 24th and
following days, when, at the rumour of an intended raid on the _Workers'
Republic_, the Irish Citizen Army stood guard night and day in Liberty
Hall--many of them having thrown up their jobs to answer promptly the
mobilization order--armed and prepared to sell their lives dearly. The
British military authorities in Ireland know perfectly well that the
members of both these organizations are earnest, determined men. If,
knowing this, General Friend and his subordinate militarists proceed
either to disarm the Volunteers or to raid the Labour Press, it can only
be because they _want_ bloodshed--because they want to provoke another
'98, and to get an excuse for a machine-gun massacre.
"Irish pacifists who have watched the situation closely are convinced
that this is precisely what the militarists do want. The younger English
officers in Dublin make no secret of their eagerness 'to have a whack at
the Sinn Feiners'; they would much rather fight them than the
Germans.[3] They are spurred on by the Carson-Northcliffe
conscriptionist gang in London. On April 5th the _Morning Post_
vehemently demanded the suppression of the _Workers' Republic_; on April
6th a question was put down in the House of Commons urging Mr. Birrell
to disarm the Irish Volunteers. These gentry know well the precise
points where a pogrom can most easily be started.
"Twice already General Friend has been on the point of setting Ireland
in a blaze--once last November, when he had a warrant made out for the
arrest of Bishop O'Dwyer, of Limerick; once on March 25th, when he had a
detachment of soldiers with machine guns in readiness to raid Liberty
Hall. In both cases Mr. Birrell intervened in the nick of time, and
decisively vetoed the militarist plans. But some day Mr. Birrell may be
overborne or may intervene too late. Then, once bloodshed is started in
Ireland, who can say where or how it will end?
"In the midst of world-wide carnage, bloodshed in our little island may
seem a trivial thing. The wiping out of all the Irish Nationalist and
Labour Volunteers would hardly involve as much slaughter as the single
battle of Loos. Doubtless that is the military calculation--that their
crime may be overlooked in a world of criminals. Accordingly, the nearer
peace comes, the more eager will they be to force a conflict before
their chance vanishes. Is there in Great Britain enough real sympathy
with Small Nationalities, enough real hatred of militarism, to frustrate
this Pogrom Plot of British Militarist Junkerdom?
"Yours, etc.,
"F. SHEEHY SKEFFINGTON."
Personally, I think I can diagnose the rebellion into ten perfectly
distinct factors, but by far the least of them all is Germany. Germany
was the personal note which Sir Roger Casement brought in, and which
left it with his failure. It was accidental and extraneous both to the
Sinn Fein Volunteers and the Citizen Army, though both were willing to
make use of it.
Anyone who has taken the trouble to peruse the literature which fed the
movement will recognize these diverse elements under various forms which
appear in different places, but they are perfectly distinct.
The most immediate cause was the undoubted intention of the authorities
to disarm them--a threat which had been overhanging them for some time,
and which, in view of the well-known leniency of the Government with
regard both to Sir Edward Carson and John Redmond in the same matter,
struck them as particularly unjust, the more so perhaps because both
Sinn Feiners and Larkinites thought that the Nationalists and the
Orangemen would be only too glad to combine with the Government against
them if need be.
Thus, if we take the issue of the _Workers' Republic_ of April 22, 1916,
we find an account, quoted from the _Liverpool Courier_, of how
Connolly, the Commandant of the Citizens' Army, stopped the police raid,
in search of papers, on the shop of the Workers' Co-operative Society at
31, Eden Quay, having been informed of their intention.
"Connolly," says the account, "arrived on the scene just as one of the
police got in behind the counter. Inquiring if the police had any search
warrant, they answered that they had not. On hearing this, Mr. Connolly,
turning to the policeman behind the counter as he had lifted up a
bundle of papers, covered him with an automatic pistol, and quietly
said: 'Then drop those papers, or I'll drop you.' He dropped the papers.
Then he was ordered out from behind the counter, and he cleared. His
fellow-burglar tried to be insolent, and was quickly told that as they
had no search warrant they were doing an illegal act, and the first one
who ventured to touch a paper would be shot like a dog. After some
parley, they slunk away, vowing vengeance."
The story runs on for a column or more, and ends with further
discomfiture for the police. Then one reads:--
"In an hour from the first issue of the summons Liberty Hall was
garrisoned by a hundred and fifty determined armed men, and more were
trooping in every few minutes. It was splendid to see the enthusiasm of
the men, and when in the course of the evening all the Women's Ambulance
Corps trooped in, closely followed by the Boy Scouts, excitement and
longing for battle was running high in all our veins. The Irish
Volunteers were also on the alert, and stood, we are informed, until
after 2 a.m. on Saturday morning. Since then the hall has been guarded
day and night."
The paper then goes on to speak of how "the heroic fighting at Suvla
Bay, and even the valorous defence of Verdun, fades into insignificance
side by side in Dublin by the Citizen Army, and describes how Liberty
Hall is being guarded by day and by night," and then goes on to point
out the danger which such open disregard of authority may lead to
eventually.
Then follow two significant quotations, one from the _Irish Volunteer_
and the other from _The Spark_. The latter is an open boast of the
efficacy of arms, and runs:--
"A few thousand Irishmen, who took the precaution or providing
themselves with lethal weapons of one kind or another, have, without
contesting a constituency and without sending a man to Westminster,
compelled the Westminster Parliament to admit publicly that it dared not
pass any legislation which they, the armed men, did not choose to
permit."
Eoin MacNeill's threat is hardly less significant:--
"If our arms are demanded from us, we shall refuse to surrender them.
If force is used to take them from us, we shall make the most effective
resistance in our power. Let there be no mistake or misunderstanding on
that point.... We shall defend our arms with our lives."
Now, whatever may be thought of such sentiments, there can be no doubt
whence they originated, for they are sheer Carsonism through and
through; and it was, as I have repeatedly pointed out, a pure stroke of
luck that it was not Belfast's City Hall instead of Dublin's Post Office
that was burnt to the ground.
This physical force element, therefore, the Sinn Feiners and Larkinites
had in common with the Redmondites and Ulstermen: the fact that they
actually were the first to put the principle into operation is no
difference at all.
In other words, we have to go deeper for a specific distinction, and
that distinction is to be found in the very nature of the parties
themselves who combined to form the provisional Republic.
They were two movements which had grown up outside the two Parliamentary
parties and which refused to believe in Parliamentarianism as much for
the simple reason that their respective watchwords had become more or
less worn-out tags, out of touch with the realities of modern Irish
problems, as because their leaders had, unable to assimilate them, taken
up an attitude of almost personal antipathy to them and their ideals.
It is certainly a most remarkable thing how John Redmond has lost the
old Parnellite grip upon the younger life of the country, and it seems
hardly credible that such an attitude should be due entirely to the
perversity of youth and in no way to the natural consequence of
tradition-loving age; but in any case the broad fact remains, and a tone
of persistent criticism seems to have taken the place of the meek
obedience of other days; and newspapers, dramas, novels, criticism, and
movements on all sides bear witness to it. The same, too, applies to Sir
Edward Carson, whose party has to recruit in England, witness Sir F. E.
Smith.
According to Mr. T. M. Healy, the whole movement was due almost entirely
to the "bankruptcy of Redmondism." No doubt the justice of the
accusation may be questioned, though I hold no brief for any relative,
but there can be no doubt that it was the Sinn Fein attitude, and we
want to see the Sinn Feiners as they saw themselves and as they saw
Redmond.
The Government trusted to Redmond almost entirely, but, as Mr. Healy
continues, they forgot that--
"New crystallizations were taking place. The jobbery of the official
party disgusted all earnest and unselfish minds amongst the youth of
Ireland. The forces of Larkinism were embittered; and the acceptance of
salaries by Irish members, after their formal declaration that they
would not accept them, sank deeply into the hearts of extremists.