WAS RESISTANCE JUSTIFIABLE?
A story is told of Queen Victoria that in her youthful days, when
studying constitutional history, she once asked Lord Melbourne whether
under any circumstances citizens were justified in resisting legal
authority; to which the old courtier replied: "When asked that question
by a Sovereign of the House of Hanover I feel bound to answer in the
affirmative." If one can imagine a similar question being asked of an
Ulsterman by Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, or Sir Edward Grey, in 1912,
the reply would surely have been that such a question asked by a
statesman claiming to be a guardian of Liberal principles and of the
Whig tradition could only be answered in the affirmative. This, at all
events, was the view of the late Duke of Devonshire, who more than any
other statesman of our time could claim to be a representative in his
own person of the Whig tradition handed down from 1688.[41] Passive
obedience has, indeed, been preached as a political dogma in the course
of English history, but never by apostles of Liberalism. Forcible
resistance to legally constituted authority, even when it involved
repudiation of existing allegiance, has often, both in our own and in
foreign countries, won the approval and sympathy of English Liberals. A
long line of illustrious names, from Cromwell and Lord Halifax in
England to Kossuth and Mazzini on the Continent, might be quoted in
support of such a proposition if anyone were likely to challenge it.
When, then, Liberals professed to be unutterably shocked by Ulster's
declared intention to resist Home Rule both actively and passively, they
could not have based their attitude on the principle that under no
circumstances could such resistance be morally justified. Indeed, in
the case in question, there were circumstances that would have made the
condemnation of Ulster by the English Liberal Party not a little
hypocritical if referred to any general ethical principle. For that
party had itself been for a generation in the closest political alliance
with Irishmen whose leader had boasted that they were as much rebels as
their fathers were in 1798, and whose power in Ireland had been built up
by long-sustained and systematic defiance of the law. Yet the same
politicians who had excused, if they had not applauded, the "Plan of
Campaign," and the organised boycotting and cattle-driving which had for
years characterised the agitation for Home Rule, were unspeakably
shocked when Ulster formed a disciplined Volunteer force which never
committed an outrage, and prepared to set up a Provisional Government
rather than be ruled by an assembly of cattle-drivers in Dublin.
Moreover, many of Mr. Asquith's supporters, and one at least of his most
distinguished colleagues in the Cabinet of 1912, had themselves
organised resistance to an Education Act which they disliked but had
been unable to defeat in Parliament.
Nevertheless, it must, of course, be freely admitted that the question
as to what conditions justify resistance to the legal authority in the
State--or rebellion, if the more blunt expression be preferred--is an
exceedingly difficult one to answer. It would sound cynical to say,
though Carlyle hardly shrinks from maintaining, that success, and
success alone, redeems rebellion from wickedness and folly. Yet it would
be difficult to explain on any other principle why posterity has
applauded the Parliamentarians of 1643 and the Whigs of 1688, while
condemning Monmouth and Charles Edward; or why Mr. Gladstone sympathised
with Jefferson Davis when he looked like winning and withdrew that
sympathy when he had lost. But if success is not the test, what is? Is
it the aim of the men who resist? The aim that appears honourable and
heroic to one onlooker appears quite the opposite to another, and so the
test resolves itself into a matter of personal partisanship.
That is probably as near as one can get to a solution of the question.
Those who happen to agree with the purpose for which a rebellion takes
place think the rebels in the right; those who disagree think them in
the wrong. As Mr. Winston Churchill succinctly puts it when commenting
on the strictures passed on his father for "inciting" Ulster to resist
Home Rule, "Constitutional authorities will measure their censures
according to their political opinions." He reminds us, moreover, that
when Lord Randolph was denounced as a "rebel in the skin of a Tory," the
latter "was able to cite the authority of Lord Althorp, Sir Robert Peel,
Mr. Morley, and the Prime Minister (Gladstone) himself, in support of
the contention that circumstances might justify morally, if not
technically, violent resistance and even civil war."[42]
To this distinguished catalogue of authorities an Ulster apologist might
have added the name of the Chief Secretary for Ireland in Mr. Asquith's
own Cabinet, who admitted in 1912 that "if the religion of the
Protestants were oppressed or their property despoiled they would be
right to fight[43];" which meant that Mr. Birrell did not condemn
fighting in itself, provided he were allowed to decide when the occasion
for it had arisen. Greater authorities than Mr. Birrell held that the
Ulster case for resistance was a good and valid one as it stood. No
English statesman of the last half-century has deservedly enjoyed a
higher reputation for political probity, combined with sound common
sense, than the eighth Duke of Devonshire. As long ago as 1893, when
this same issue had already been raised in circumstances much less
favourable to Ulster than after the passing of the Parliament Act in
1911, the Duke of Devonshire said:
"The people of Ulster believe, rightly or wrongly, that under a
Government responsible to an Imperial Parliament they possess at
present the fullest security which they can possess of their
personal freedom, their liberties, and their right to transact
their own business in their own way. You have no right to offer
them any inferior security to that; and if, after weighing the
character of the Government which it is sought to impose upon them,
they resolve that they are no longer bound to obey a law which does
not give them equal and just protection with their fellow subjects,
who can say--how at all events can the descendants of those who
resisted King James II say, that they have not a right, if they
think fit, to resist, if they think they have the power, the
imposition of a Government put upon them by force?"[44]
All the same, there never was a community on the face of the earth to
whom "rebellion" in any real sense of the word was more hateful than to
the people of Ulster. They traditionally were the champions of "law and
order" in Ireland; they prided themselves above all things on their
"loyalty" to their King and to the British flag. And they never
entertained the idea that the movement which they started at Craigavon
in 1911, and to which they solemnly pledged themselves by their Covenant
in the following year, was in the slightest degree a departure from
their cherished "loyalty"--on the contrary, it was an emphatic assertion
of it. They held firmly, as Mr. Bonar Law and the whole Unionist party
in Great Britain held also, that Mr. Asquith and his Government were
forcing Home Rule upon them by unconstitutional methods. They did not
believe that loyalty in the best sense--loyalty to the Sovereign, to the
Empire, to the majesty of the law--required of them passive obedience to
an Act of Parliament placed by such means on the Statute-book, which
they were convinced, moreover, was wholly repugnant to the great
majority of the British people.
This aspect of the matter was admirably and soberly presented by _The
Times_ in one of the many weighty articles in which that great journal
gave undeviating support to the Ulster cause.
"A free community cannot justly, or even constitutionally, be
deprived of its privileges or its position in the realm by any
measure that is not stamped with the considered and unquestionable
approval of the great body of electors of the United Kingdom. Any
attempt so to deprive them is a fraud upon their fundamental
rights, which they are justified in resisting, as an act of
violence, by any means in their power. This is elementary doctrine,
borne out by the whole course of English history."[45]
That the position was paradoxical calls for no denial; but the pith of
the paradox lay in the fact that a movement denounced as "rebellious" by
its political opponents was warmly supported not only by large masses,
probably by the majority, of the people of this country, but by numbers
of individuals of the highest character, occupying stations of great
responsibility. Whatever may be thought of men engaged in actual
political conflict, whom some people appear to think capable of any
wickedness, no one can seriously suggest that men like Lord Macnaghten,
like the late and present Primates of Ireland, like the late Provost of
Trinity, like many other sober thinkers who supported Ulster, were men
who would lightly lend themselves to "rebellion," or any other wild and
irresponsible adventure. As _The Times_ very truly observed in a leading
article in 1912:
"We remember no precedent in our domestic history since the
Revolution of 1688 for a movement among citizens, law-abiding by
temperament and habit, which resembles the present movement of the
Ulster Protestants. It is no rabble who have undertaken it. It is
the work of orderly, prosperous, and deeply religious men."[46]
Nor did the paradox end there. If the Ulster Movement was "rebellious,"
its purpose was as paradoxical as its circumstances. It had in it no
subversive element. In this respect it stands (so far as the writer's
knowledge goes) without precedent, a solitary instance in the history of
mankind. The world has witnessed rebellions without number, designed to
bring about many different results--to emancipate a people from
oppression, to upset an obnoxious form of Government, to expel or to
restore a rival dynasty, to transfer allegiance from one Sovereign or
one State to another. But has there ever been a "rebellion" the object
of which was to maintain the _status quo_? Yet that was the sole purpose
of the Ulstermen in all they did from 1911 to 1914. That fact, which
distinguished their movement from every rebellion or revolution in
history, placed them on a far more solid ground of reasonable
justification than the excuse offered by Mr. Churchill for their
bellicose attitude in his father's day. Although he is no doubt right in
saying that "When men are sufficiently in earnest they will back their
words with more than votes," it is a plea that would cover alike the
conduct of Halifax and the other Whigs who resisted the legal authority
of James II, of the Jacobites who fought for his grandson, and of the
contrivers of many another bloody or bloodless Revolution. But there was
nothing revolutionary in the Ulster Movement. It was resistance to the
transfer of a people's allegiance without their consent; to their
forcible expulsion from a Constitution with which they were content and
their forcible inclusion in a Constitution which they detested. This was
the very antithesis of Revolution. English Radical writers and
politicians might argue that no "transfer of allegiance" was
contemplated; but Ulstermen thought they knew better, and the later
development of the Irish question proved how right they were. Even had
they been proved wrong instead of right in their conviction that the
true aim of Irish Nationalism (a term in which Sinn Fein is included)
was essentially separatist, they knew better than Englishmen how little
reality there was in the theory that under the proposed Home Rule their
allegiance would be unaffected and their political _status_ suffer no
degradation. They claimed to occupy a position similar to that of the
North in the American Civil War--with this difference, which, so far as
it went, told in their favour, that whereas Lincoln took up arms to
resist secession, they were prepared to do so to resist expulsion, the
purpose in both cases, however, being to preserve union. The practical
view of the question, as it would appear in the eyes of ordinary men,
was well expressed by Lord Curzon in the House of Lords, when he said:
"The people of this country will be very loth to condemn those
whose only disloyalty it will be to have been excessive in their
loyalty to the King. Do not suppose that the people of this country
will call those 'rebels' whose only form of rebellion is to insist
on remaining under the Imperial Parliament."[47]
Of course, men like Sir Edward Carson, Lord Londonderry, Mr. Thomas
Sinclair, and other Ulster leaders were too far-seeing not to realise
that the course they were taking would expose them to the accusation of
having set a bad example which others without the same grounds of
justification might follow in very different circumstances. But this was
a risk they had to shoulder, as have all who are not prepared to
subscribe to the dogma of Passive Obedience without limit. They accepted
it as the less of two evils. But there was something humorous in the
pretence put forward in 1916 and afterwards that the violence to which
the adherents of Sinn Fein had recourse was merely copying Ulster. As if
Irish Nationalism in its extreme form required precedent for
insurrection! Even the leader of "Constitutional Nationalism" himself
had traced his political pedigree to convicted rebels like Tone and
Emmet, and since the date of those heroes there had been at least two
armed risings in Ireland against the British Crown and Government. If
the taunt flung at Ulstermen had been that they had at last thrown
overboard law and order and had stolen the Nationalist policy of active
resistance, there would at least have been superficial plausibility in
it. But when it was suggested or implied that the Ulster example was
actually responsible in any degree whatever for violent outbreaks in the
other provinces, a supercilious smile was the only possible retort from
the lips of representatives of Ulster.
But what caused them some perplexity was the disposition manifested in
certain quarters in England to look upon the two parties in Ireland in
regard to "rebellion" as "six of one and half a dozen of the other." It
has always, unhappily, been characteristic of a certain type of
Englishman to see no difference between the friends and the enemies of
his country, and, if he has a preference at all, to give it to the
latter. Apart from all other circumstances which in the eyes of
Ulstermen justified them up to the hilt in the policy they pursued,
apart from everything that distinguished them historically and morally
from Irish "rebels," there was the patent and all-important fact that
the motive of their opponents was hostility to England, whereas their
own motive was friendliness and loyalty to England. In that respect they
never wavered. If the course of events had ever led to the employment of
British troops to crush the resistance of Ulster to Home Rule, the
extraordinary spectacle would have been presented to the wondering world
of the King's soldiers shooting down men marching under the British flag
and singing "God save the King."
It was no doubt because this was very generally understood in England
that the sympathies of large masses of law-loving people were never for
a moment alienated from the men of Ulster by all the striving of their
enemies to brand them as rebels. Constitutional authorities may, as Mr.
Churchill says, "measure their censures according to their political
opinions," but the generality of men, who are not constitutional
authorities, whose political opinions, if they have any, are
fluctuating, and who care little for "juridical niceties," will measure
their censures according to their instinctive sympathies. And the sound
instinct of Englishmen forbade them to blame men who, if rebels in law,
were their firm friends in fact, for taking exceptional and even illegal
measures, when all others failed, to preserve the full unity which they
regarded as the fruit of that friendship.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] See _Life of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire,_ by Bernard Holland,
ii, pp. 249-51.
[42] _Life of Lord Randolph Churchill_, vol. ii, p. 65.
[43] _Annual Register_, 1912, p. 82.
[44] Bernard Holland's _Life of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire_, ii, 250.
[45] _The Times_, July 14th, 1913.
[46] Ibid., August 22nd, 1912.
[47] _Parliamentary Debates_ (House of Lords), July 15th, 1913.