place," wrote Mr. Birrell to the Prime Minister on January 25th.
"Loyalty in Ireland is of slow growth, and the soil is uncongenial. The
plant grows slowly. Landlords, grand juries, loyalist magistrates, have
all gone; yet the plant grows, though slowly."
Her patriotism, on the other hand, is almost necessarily a matter of
internal administration; and for this she fights with all the spirit
that animated her in the past against Dane and Saxon. Hence it is quite
easy for an economic grievance at once to assume the proportions of a
national movement, and once it becomes resisted as such, the spirit of
nationality becomes rekindled again, and it was this latter that
prompted the final efforts in the evolution of the Republic.
America and Germany both contributed to intensify the spirit of
nationality and gave material assistance that made the attempt at
"Separatism" a practicable ideal, but it was only made possible because
of the internal troubles in Ireland herself.
So long as a constitutional outlet is not afforded for such grievances,
so long must unconstitutional means be appealed to; but the question
which the breakdown of the old regime suggests seriously to all thinkers
is whether there are not ample means within the Constitution, and I
think it is the universal opinion of the more moderate that there is;
and it is just these moderates whose views will be the more welcome
because of the failure not merely of the Sinn Feiners to establish a
Republic, but of Sir Edward Carson and John Redmond to come to an
understanding that would have placed them in a position to have
controlled it in time, and, which is more important still, to be able to
deal with any repetition of a similar character in the future.
Probably no analysis of the remoter causes of the rebellion, however, is
more accurate than the psychological origin given by George Bernard Shaw
in a letter to the _Daily News_ on May 10th.
"The relation of Ireland to Dublin Castle is in this respect precisely
that of the Balkan States to Turkey, of Belgium or the city of Lille to
the Kaiser, and of the United States to Great Britain.
"Until Dublin Castle is superseded by a National Parliament and Ireland
voluntarily incorporated with the British Empire, as Canada,
Australasia, and South Africa have been incorporated, an Irishman
resorting to arms to achieve the independence of his country is doing
only what Englishmen will do if it be their misfortune to be invaded and
conquered by the Germans in the course of the present war. Further, such
an Irishman is as much in order morally in accepting assistance from the
Germans in this struggle with England as England is in accepting the
assistance of Russia in her struggle with Germany. The fact that he
knows that his enemies will not respect his rights if they catch him,
and that he must, therefore, fight with a rope round his neck, increases
his risk, but adds in the same measure to his glory in the eyes of his
compatriots and of the disinterested admirers of patriotism throughout
the world. It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this
position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day
before the rising he may have been only a minor poet. The shot Irishmen
will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in
Ireland, and beside the heroes or Poland and Serbia and Belgium in
Europe; and nothing in heaven or on earth can prevent it."
FOOTNOTE:
[3] I give the well-known letter in its entirety, but I cannot vouch for
such passages, and I know that in many cases officers were particularly
distressed at having to fight Irishmen instead of Germans.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
REFLECTIONS TOWARDS RECONSTRUCTION
One of the most gratifying things about the terrible catastrophe through
which we have been passing during the last few weeks is the spirit of
hope which has taken the place of the spirit of despair which
immediately followed the outbreak.
Ireland has ever been more of a problem suited to statesmen than to
soldiers; indeed, the soldier has more often than not come in to spoil
the work of the statesman, and Mr. Asquith's hurried visit to Dublin,
Cork, and Belfast after John Dillon's speech was chiefly undertaken in
order to prevent any repetition of the old mistake.
The need for conciliation, everybody will admit, was exceedingly urgent,
for it was the admitted intention of the Sinn Feiners to put the matter
to the test as to whether England held Ireland by her own free
constitutional consent, or whether it was merely a permanent military
occupation, like Belgium and Poland. "England is not the champion of
small nations," they said. "She never was and never will be, and while
she is masquerading before the world as such it is our intention, in
Ireland's name, to give her the lie--yes, even though it be in our own
blood."
Indeed, as I have already said, there appears to have been a belief
among the Sinn Feiners that if only they could hold the capital for
twelve days by force of arms they would have a sort of claim to be
mentioned at the Peace Conference along with Poland and Belgium.
Now, it matters very little whether such a suggestion came from Berlin
or Washington, or whether the whole thing was a fable, for the grand
fact remains that England now stands before Europe with the point of
Ireland's loyalty openly questioned, and she has only two courses open:
she must either neglect Irish opinion and proclaim that she holds the
sister isle by right of conquest--when, of course, the fate of Belgium
is sealed as far as England's ethical pleading is concerned--or she may
make such a final compact with Ireland that she can afterwards maintain
before the whole world, without fear of contradiction, that Ireland is
freely one with England without the help of a single soldier.
It's really more important than winning the war, if Englishmen could
only realize it--for the psychology of Ireland is the psychology of
every one of the constituent nations of our common Empire; and the late
Mr. Stead used to say to me, "A blunder in Irish government is a blunder
in Imperial government"; but I never realized this so much as when I
learnt with what an intense interest the Indian students present in
Dublin had followed the whole case.
When the Irish leader, therefore, in the acuteness of the moment
expressed the hope that no party would be allowed to make capital out of
the event, he expressed a hope which was re-echoed in every Irish
breast; but it would have been far more effective if he had instead
expressed the hope that each party should bear its proper share in the
guilt of the catastrophe.
For the danger is the making of the Sinn Feiners into a national
scapegoat for the faults of all.
For in a sense all were responsible. True, neither Redmondites nor
Carsonites took any part in it--and it is very lucky they did not, for
it would have meant civil war and fearful bloodshed from one end of the
country to the other--but in neither case was it out of any love for
England, for both of them fully realized that they might have been in
the position of the Sinn Feiners themselves, and both were equally
determined to rid Ireland of English meddlers.
It might almost be called a "tragedy of errors," for there was nothing
but blundering all round. England should never have allowed Carson to
arm, nor should Redmond have followed suit if he wished to play the
constitutional game to the end; but once both had appealed to the
principle of physical force, neither had a right to censure the methods
of a third party which had arisen out of their own incapacity to keep
the country in hand.
England was in principle perfectly justified in employing force against
the whole three of them, and hastened to take full advantage of the
situation by handing the reins of government over to the military--but
that was the greatest blunder of the lot.
For there can be no doubt that to the rank and file of the Sinn Feiners,
as to the rank and file of the Orangemen, physical force was not an end
in itself: it was only the protest of conscientious objectors which was
being lashed into activity under continual provocation--the provocation
of being threatened with the loss of everything they held most dear in
life, and eminently admired by Englishmen for that very fact.
Normally Sinn Feiners and Orangemen were men of peace, the one
economists, the other business men, who might indeed have been easily
pacified had they been openly and sympathetically treated with, instead
of being galled into fury by the taunt of bluff or cowardice, and such
epithets as insignificant, negligible minorities.
In an orgy of majority government both stood out for the sanctity of
minorities, especially when those minorities represented inviolable
principles of vital import to the majority.
It was the method of suppression that really did most of the mischief,
for in addition to casualties and damages there was also considerable
distress, and it at once became necessary to organize a system of food
distribution and relief for the sufferers.
This was largely undertaken by the St. Vincent de Paul Society, under
Sir Henry Robinson, Vice-President of the Local Government Board, and
with the help of the military authorities, who lent motor-lorries and
money, food was distributed to over one hundred thousand persons.
House-to-house visitations were made, and these revealed all forms of
distress, from lack of food, which, of course, it had been impossible to
obtain as long as the city was in a state of siege, down to absolute
ruination of whole families.
In places the city looked like Antwerp during the siege, or London upon
the arrival of the Belgian refugees.
No one has yet been able to estimate the full extent of the material
damage sustained by the reckless bombardment of the city--for no other
word can be used; and though Captain Purcell, the chief of the Dublin
Fire Brigade, gave the rough figure of £2,500,000, this must be taken as
a mere minimum of the extent covered by the conflagrations.
It cannot represent the loss of business, employment, goodwill, trade,
and the thousand and one other losses inseparable from such a
catastrophe.
Take, for example, the loss of the Royal Hibernian Academy, with
thousands of pounds of pictures. No price can repay these, for they
represented perhaps the culminating point, or at least the turning
point, in careers which had had years of hard struggles, and which had
set perhaps a lifetime's hopes upon a single canvas.
From all accounts, too, it was the merest chance that the whole northern
portion of the town did not fall a victim to the devouring flames, and
it is hard to understand the psychology of the military mind which could
risk even the mere possibility of such an event, as it is hard to
understand why the firemen were fired on by the rebels when trying to
extinguish the flames.
The hardest part of it all was, moreover, that the blow fell almost
entirely upon the shoulders of the innocent, viz. the merchants,
tradesmen, shopkeepers, and employees, who were thus ruined at a single
stroke within the space of a few hours without even a chance of a
protest.
People began to ask seriously whether it had really been necessary at
all, and the verdict was not always complimentary to the authorities.
Mr. Healy raised the question in the House whether any such measures had
ever been really necessary, considering that the rebels held such few
positions, and these could have been isolated by the municipal water
supply being cut off. It certainly seems plausible that some less brutal
methods could have been adopted, considering the way Cork was saved from
a similar catastrophe by the tact of the clergy, who would only have
been too willing, and undoubtedly would have had the power, to act as
mediators between the rebels and military in the name of the civil
authorities and in the interests of the inhabitants principally and
Ireland generally.
A very cute suggestion I heard from Mr. George Atkinson, the well-known
Dublin artist, as we were preparing the cover of the present volume in
his studio, struck me as particularly plausible.
"As long as the rebels were in their strongholds untouched," he said,
"they were practically powerless, and could only have covered themselves
with contempt and ridicule if they had been left alone.
"These men were asking for martyrdom and the glory of battle: why on
earth give them their admitted object?
"They were in possession of the Post Office. Very well, but they could
not have run the postal service. They were in possession of the
railways. Well and good, but they would not have been able to conduct
the train service. They had assumed the reins of government, but would
the people of Ireland have acknowledged them? Certainly not. They had
taken over the management of the capital, but were they able to police
it even, or protect private property? Why, from the very first moment of
their victory--if victory it could be called--the whole place had been
at the mercy of the mob.
"Again, they issued receipts in the name of the Irish Republic's
exchequer, but what financier would have honoured their bills? Could
they have even taken the gold from the banks they could not have got
credit or cash for any further transactions. They had assumed sole
authority over the people of Ireland, yet they could not have commanded
enough votes to secure a single constituency.
"These men, left to themselves, in fact, and treated with a sense of
humour, were on the highroad to the greatest political fiasco the world
had ever seen, and could only have made themselves ridiculous and
contemptible in the eyes of their own countrymen and others throughout
the world.
"They had appealed to Germany: very well; let them look to German help
for assistance, and in the meanwhile let them know that Casement had
been captured already, before the rising, and the phantom Prussian
armada had been sunk to the bottom of the sea.
"What could have happened? You say 'Pillage and murder.' They were not
out for that, in the first place, nor were they that type; and it may be
questioned whether, had they set about it with deliberate purpose, they
would have worked such havoc as the military and naval artillery wrought
in that fatal week."
The theory is certainly one which would have had no precedent to
recommend it, but to my mind it was just this that was its best
recommendation; in fact, what was most needed was to avoid a repetition
of the old fatal precedents which had turned so many futile revolts into
glorious outbursts of patriotism.
Just imagine the situation. England would first of all have told them
she wished for no bloodshed beyond the punishment of those who had
actually shot defenceless men or whose orders had led to these murders.
It would have redounded entirely to the credit of the Englishman.
England would then have asked the politicians and people alike if they
in any way sympathized with such a revolt, and let the penalties be
known--the immediate erasure of Home Rule from the Statute Book and the
cessation of land purchase, as well as the stoppage of all commercial or
financial transactions.
Finally, if these failed and the people of Ireland really wished for war
in its full reality, they could have it, but they must not ever
afterward appeal as constitutional partners in the Empire, but merely as
a conquered race: mercy they might have, rights they would have
forfeited by conquest.
Had such a course been followed, there would not only have been an
opportunity upon the part of the nation at large to disown the usurpers,
who would then have had not even the vestige of a grievance upon which
to establish their preposterous claims to continuance in the position
they had taken up.
In a word, the English would have made fools of them, or rather allowed
the Irish to make fools of them. Instead of this, all the old fatal,
discredited methods were employed with the same fatal results, and they
became national heroes, whose suppression by force could only give them
greater power.
The whole thing would have taken no longer than the campaign; no further
blood would have been spilt, and time would have been allowed for the
great adventure to reveal itself in the true grotesqueness of cold
reality.
Possibly it was looked upon as _infra dig._ to treat with rebels, but it
was so obviously a mental case that it is hard to see how anything could
possibly have been _infra dig._ under such circumstances.
On Monday and Tuesday the Republic was no more representative of the
people of Ireland than the tailors of Tooley Street were the people of
England, but upon the old Grecian principle that the sufferings of one
citizen are the sufferings of the whole State, it became national from
the moment the national sentiment had been aroused by the indiscriminate
shedding of blood.
It was in their defeat that the Sinn Feiners won their great victory,
and they knew it. They had been scoffed at, derided, denounced by the
official party almost to--in fact, actually to--a state of desperation,
and an act of despair became their last resort. The Statute Book indeed
proclaimed Ireland a nation once again, but the Government treated
Ireland more like a province than ever, and her own representatives
seemed to acquiesce; so, as Mrs. Pearse, the mother of the "President,"
told me afterwards, "there was nothing left for them but to accomplish
the sacrifice demanded to save the soul of Ireland and proclaim her on
the scaffold once again unconquered and unconquerable."
It was an act of folly, if you like, to try to set up a republic,
especially during such a crisis as this war, but since the death of the
leaders brought out their true character, it has ceased to be looked
upon as a piece of knavery, for these men, according to all accounts of
the priests, died the death of saints, not scoundrels; so that we now
realize the old, old story of the tragedy of misunderstanding, as much,
indeed, by their own countrymen as by the Englishman.
If it was to illustrate in one dramatic coup that misunderstanding
which has been growing between all parties in Ireland, then they have
not died in vain, for every party must feel to a certain extent
responsible for the catastrophe. Several things, however, seem to stand
out prominently amidst the chaos.
Castle government is dead as Queen Anne and Home Rule as natural and as
inevitable as the morrow's sunrise; Unionism, in the English sense of
Empire, survives: everyone is a Unionist now; but what still remains
inexorable is the attitude of Sir Edward Carson, whose "Unionism" is
merely a euphemism for "bureaucracy," and who, with the Ulster
Volunteers still in arms, equally prepared to resist constitutional
government, whether from Westminster or from Dublin, is the greatest
Home Ruler of us all--or should we say Sinn Feiner?
Personally, I have always thought, and still think, that the Orangeman
has more to gain in an Irish Parliament than anyone else as representing
the layman, the business man; but I, for one, should be sorry to see
Home Rule at the cost of a single Ulster Volunteer's life.
Mr. William O'Brien has for years, as a species of political outcast,
been preaching the doctrine of conciliation, and has suffered in
consequence, but his successful opponents have not gained the victory,
for we are now rapidly drifting towards the total exclusion of several
counties--the thing of all things they most wished to avoid.
All the while people are wondering whether it is the people themselves
or the politicians who are responsible for the antagonism, and three of
the greatest national movements since the days of tenant grievances
stare us in the face as outside, if not politics, at least outside the
ordinary conventional politicians--I mean Sir Horace Plunkett's
Co-operative Movement, Larkin-Connolly's Labour Movement, and Sinn Fein.
Surely something is wrong if such movements cannot be assimilated by
either of the great political parties, as they should have been if those
parties were together completely representative of the nation.
All our greatest men were isolated--Redmond, Carson, Plunkett, O'Brien,
Connolly, W. M. Murphy, the Lord-Lieutenant--all appealing to or
threatening the unfortunate Premier, already sufficiently occupied with
the intricacies of English politics, let alone European.
The step must come from the Englishman in his own defence: English
politics must no longer be dominated by the votes or the threats of any
Irishman, and some method must be found, while safeguarding the Imperial
link, to force Irishmen to meet each other and settle with each other:
for the only result of ruling Tipperary from Downing Street is that
Westminster is ruled from Dublin or Belfast.
According to the "political correspondent" of the _Manchester Guardian_,
the tendency is towards an Irish Coalition. "The question," he writes,
"is not whether there will be a change. The old and anarchic system of
Dublin Castle seems to be definitely doomed. The question is rather what
the change will be. Speculation, which may or may not be partially
informed, concentrates upon the scheme of a new Irish Advisory Council.
I may offer a more detailed sketch of this scheme, of which I will only
say that some responsible Irish members think it is very likely to be
near the mark. An Irish Council, if created now, would probably be an
advisory body, resembling the Viceroy's Council in India. The
Lord-Lieutenant, who ought to be an active and energetic administrator,
would no doubt preside over it. As to the membership, it would have to
consist of representatives of both Irish Parties. It is thought possible
that some Nationalist and Ulster Unionist members of the House of
Commons would be on it, and would, of course, sit with it in Dublin. In
addition there might be responsible Irish public men (like, for example,
Sir Horace Plunkett), both Home Rulers and Unionists, who are not
members of the House of Commons or officially attached to a party. There
might also, in view of the educational problem of Ireland, be one or two
representatives of the Churches. This would form what is talked of as
the Irish Coalition, in which it is assumed both Mr. Redmond's Party and
Sir Edward Carson's would join."
The tribute which Mr. Birrell paid to the Irish Literary Revival and its
influence upon Irish life is worth quoting, for it indicates one of the
sources whence much may be hoped in the work of reconstruction.
"This period," he said, referring to the period immediately preceding
the rebellion, "was also marked by a genuine literary Irish revival, in
prose, poetry, and the drama, which has produced remarkable books and
plays, and a school of acting, all characterized by originality and
independence of thought and expression, quite divorced from any
political party, and all tending towards and feeding latent desires for
some kind of separate Irish national existence. It was a curious
situation to watch, but there was nothing in it suggestive of revolt or
rebellion, except in the realm of thought. Indeed, it was quite the
other way. The Abbey Theatre made merciless fun of mad political
enterprise, and lashed with savage satire some historical aspects of the
Irish revolutionary. I was often amazed at the literary detachment and
courage of the playwright, the relentless audacity of the actors and
actresses, and the patience and comprehension of the audience. This new
critical tone and temper, noticeable everywhere, penetrating everything,
and influencing many minds in all ranks, whilst having its
disintegrating effects upon old-fashioned political beliefs and worn-out
controversial phrases, was the deadly foe of that wild sentimental
passion which has once more led so many brave young fellows to a certain
doom, in the belief that in Ireland any revolution is better than none.
A little more time, and, but for the outbreak of the war, this new
critical temper would, in my belief, have finally prevailed, not indeed
to destroy national sentiment (for that is immortal), but to kill by
ridicule insensate revolt. But this was not to be."