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Title: The Evolution of Sinn Fein

Author: Robert Mitchell Henry

Release date: November 29, 2010 [eBook #34477]

Language: English

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Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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    _MODERN IRELAND IN THE MAKING_


           THE EVOLUTION OF
              SINN FEIN


                  BY
         ROBERT MITCHELL HENRY


      DUBLIN               LONDON
  THE TALBOT PRESS     T. FISHER UNWIN
     (LIMITED)            (LIMITED)
  89 TALBOT STREET     1 ADELPHI TERRACE

                  1920




CONTENTS


                                                  Page

  INTRODUCTORY                                       1

  IRISH NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY       16

  SINN FEIN                                         39

  THE EARLY YEARS OF SINN FEIN                      71

  SINN FEIN AND THE REPUBLICANS                     88

  THE VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT                           106

  ULSTER AND NATIONALIST IRELAND                   128

  SINN FEIN, 1914-1916                             158

  AFTER THE RISING                                 213

  CONCLUSION                                       279




THE EVOLUTION OF SINN FEIN




INTRODUCTORY.


It is almost a commonplace of the political moralists that every failure
on the part of England to satisfy the moderate and constitutional demands
of the Irish people for reform has been followed invariably by a
deplorable outbreak of "extremist" activities in Ireland. Unfortunately
for the moral, that constitutional demands should therefore be promptly
and fully conceded, the statement is almost exactly the reverse of the
truth, if Irish history as a whole be taken as the field for induction.
The Irish Nation cannot be said to have at any period abandoned its claim
to independence. Of the meaning of that claim there was no question from
the Conquest to the fall of Limerick. The whole of that period is occupied
by a long struggle between the English and the Irish peoples for the
effective possession of the island. On neither side was there any
misapprehension of the meaning and object of the contest. The English
Government, whether it employed naked force, intrigue or legal fiction,
aimed (and was understood to aim) at the moral, material and political
subjugation of the Irish: the Irish, whether they fought in the field or
intrigued in the cabinets of Europe, whether allied with France or with
Spain or English royalists, had but one object, the assertion of their
national independence. It was a struggle not merely between two nations
but between two civilizations. Men of English blood who were absorbed by
the Irish nation and who accepted the Irish civilization fought as stoutly
for the independence of their adopted (and adopting) country as did the
descendants of the Milesians. England could never count on the fidelity to
her ideals and policy in Ireland of the second generation of her own
settlers. History cannot produce another instance of a struggle so
prolonged and so pertinacious. Whole counties, stripped by fire and sword
of their aboriginal owners were repeopled within two or three generations
and renewed the struggle. But superior numbers and organization, a more
fortunate star and (it seemed) the designs of Providence, prevailed in the
end; and with the fall of Limerick England might have regarded her task as
at last accomplished. The Irish Nation was prostrate, and chains were
forged for it which, heavier and more galling than any forged for any
nation before, seemed to offer a perpetual guarantee of slavery, misery
and degradation. Ireland was henceforth to be administered as a kind of
convict settlement. The law, in the words of a famous judgment, did not
presume the existence of such a person as a Catholic Irishman; that is to
say, two-thirds of the inhabitants of the country had no legal existence.
Legal existence was the privilege of Protestant Englishmen living in
Ireland and of such Protestant Irishmen as claimed it. But legal existence
in Ireland during the eighteenth century was no prize to be grasped at.
The mere fact of residence in Ireland entailed practical disabilities for
which no mere local ascendancy was an adequate compensation. The
manufactures and trade of Ireland were systematically and ruthlessly
suppressed. Englishmen who settled there found that while they were at
liberty to oppress "the mere Irish" they were subject themselves to a
similar oppression by the English who remained at home. No one might enter
that prison house and remain wholly a man. The "garrison" grumbled,
protested and threatened, but in vain. Constitutionalists appealed to the
policy of the Conquest in support of the independence of the country. It
was argued that the Parliament of Ireland, established by the conquerors
as a symbol of annexation, was and ought to be independent of the
Parliament of England. The claim was held to be baseless and treasonable;
so far from being abandoned or weakened, it was enforced and asserted by
the arms of the Volunteers, and in less than a century after the fall of
Limerick the Renunciation Act of 1783 enacted that the people of Ireland
should be "bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the parliament of
that kingdom in all cases whatever."

But while this was independence, it was independence in the sense of
Molyneux, Swift and Grattan, not in the sense in which it had been
understood by Hugh O'Neill. The American colonies went farther and fared
better, and the descendants of the race of Hugh O'Neill had to be reckoned
with still. Their position under the settlement of 1783 was what it had
been since the Treaty of Limerick was broken by the Penal Laws, and all
that they gained at first was an indirect share in the prosperity which
began for the country with the assertion of its legislative independence.
The population increased; trade, commerce and manufactures flourished and
multiplied; the flag of Ireland began once more to creep forth upon the
seas; but the ancient race was still proscribed in the land of its birth.
But while it was in human nature to invent, it was not in human nature to
continue to administer, a code so diabolical as that of the Penal Laws.
The Volunteers who claimed legislative independence of England asserted
the rights of conscience for their fellow-countrymen. Under the free
Parliament a gradual alleviation took place in the lot of Catholics in
Ireland; in 1793 they were admitted to the franchise and there is a
presumption that had the Irish Parliament really been independent the
Penal Laws would have in time been abolished entirely. But the vigilance
of English policy and English Ministers never ceased; their meddling in
the affairs of Ireland was perpetual and mischievous: the rights of the
Irish Parliament were constantly in danger from the interference of
English Ministers who advised their common Monarch and moulded his Irish
policy through the Viceroy and the Executive. It was but a step from the
admission of Catholics to the franchise to their admission to the House of
Commons, but that step was never taken by the Irish Parliament. The
measures of Parliamentary reform pressed upon them by the popular party
both inside and outside Parliament were constantly rejected, partly
through the mere conservatism of privilege partly through the influence of
the English Cabinet. The United Irishmen, whose aim was to establish a
free and equal representation of all Irishmen irrespective of creed,
despaired of obtaining their object by open agitation and, subjected to
repressive enactments, transformed themselves into a secret association
for the overthrow of the existing government and for complete separation
from England as the only method of securing and maintaining the rights of
Ireland. They were the first Irish Republican Party. They appealed for
assistance to the French Directory, but so jealous were they of their
independence that they seem to have jeopardized the prospect of help by
their insistence that the force sent must not be large enough to threaten
the subjugation of the country. The Government, becoming aware of the
conspiracy, took steps at once to foster it and to crush it. Their agents
went through the country, forming United Irish lodges and then denouncing
the members to the authorities. Under pretence of helping the Irish
Government in its difficulties. English regiments were poured into the
country and, when a sufficient force was assembled, open rebellion was
provoked and crushed with a systematic barbarity which is even now hardly
credible.

To understand the Rebellion and the policy of the Union which followed it,
one must go farther back than the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
The fall of Limerick ended (or seemed to end) the struggle for the
military domination of Ireland. Once it was in the effective possession of
England the period of its commercial subjugation began. Every kind of
manufacture which competed with that of England was suppressed: every
branch of commerce which threatened rivalry with that of England was
forbidden. To ensure at once that military resistance might not be renewed
and that commercial subjugation might be endured the policy was adopted
first (to quote Archbishop Boulter) of "filling the great places with
natives of England" and secondly of perpetuating the animosity between
Protestants and Catholics. It was hoped in this way to form "two nations"
out of one and render the task of government and exploitation easier in
consequence. The remarkable power of absorbing foreign settlers shown by
the Irish Nation since before the Conquest was thus to be nullified and
religion pressed into service against humanity. So clearly was this policy
conceived that Archbishop Boulter could write "The worst of this is that
it tends to unite Protestant with Papist and, whenever that happens,
good-bye to the English interests in Ireland forever." But the agents of
the policy overreached themselves. Irish Protestants turned against a
policy which counted the merit of being a Protestant as less than the
demerit of being Irish. Dean Swift won the favour alike of Irish
Protestant and Irish Catholic by his mordant pamphlets against the English
policy in Ireland and may justly be reckoned as on the whole the most
powerful champion of Irish independence in the sense of the eighteenth
century. The Irish agents of the policy of Protestant Ascendancy
overreached themselves too. Official Irish Protestantism bore almost as
hardly upon Presbyterians as upon Papists, and the United Irishmen at the
end of the century found no support in Ireland warmer than that accorded
them by the best of the Ulster Presbyterians. There is little doubt that
the reversal of the commercial ascendancy by the legislation of 1782 was
regarded by the English Ministry as a merely temporary setback, to be
repaired at the earliest convenient opportunity. In any case the valuable
asset of Protestant Ascendancy, with its possibilities of perpetual
friction and disunion among Irishmen, was still in their hands. When the
rise of the United Irishmen threatened even this, the necessity of
recovering the lost ground and the opportunity of doing so were
immediately recognised. The obstinacy with which the Irish Parliament
opposed Parliamentary reform (an obstinacy directly fostered by the
policy of the English Ministry) drove the United Irish movement into
hostility at once to the English connection and to the existing
constitution of Ireland. They could thus be represented as at once a
menace to England and a menace to Ireland, and it was held to be the duty
of both Governments to combine to crush them. They were crushed by English
troops, but the Irish Parliament was crushed with them. Pitt decided that
direct control by the English Ministry must take the place of indirect
control through an Irish Executive, and the Legislative Union was enacted.
There seemed to be no other permanent or ultimate alternative to the
complete independence and separation of England and Ireland.

Much impressive rhetoric has been expended upon the measures taken to
secure that the members of the Irish Parliament should produce a majority
in favour of the Act of Union. They were bribed and intimidated; they were
offered posts and pensions: some of them were bought with hard cash. But
even a Castlereagh must have been aware that if he should suborn a servant
to betray his master the gravamen of the charge against him would not be
that he had corrupted the morals of the servant by offering him a bribe.
Ordinary morality may not apply to politics, but if it does, Pitt and
Castlereagh were guilty of a far greater crime than that of bribing a few
scores of venal Irishmen; and the members of the Irish Parliament who took
their money were guilty not of corruption but of treason. For the Act of
Union was intended to accomplish the destruction of the national
existence. The members of Parliament who voted against it, knew this: the
Irish people who petitioned against it, knew this: Pitt and Castlereagh
knew it: the men they paid to vote for it, knew it too.

The politics of Ireland during the nineteenth century would have been
tangled enough at the best, but the Act of Union introduced a confusion
which has often seemed to make the situation inexplicable to a normal
mind. But, to leave details aside, the main lines of the problem are clear
enough. The Act of Union was designed to end the separate national
existence of Ireland by incorporating its legislative and administrative
machinery with that of England. To secure control to the "Predominant
Partner" (as the incorporating body has since been called) the
representation of Ireland in the Imperial Parliament was fixed at a total
which at the time of the Act was less than half that to which it was
entitled on the basis of the population. While the intention of the
authors of the measure (as their published correspondence makes perfectly
clear) was to subordinate Irish national interests to those of England,
the measure was presented to Parliament as one designed to further the
mutual interests of the two kingdoms. But to Protestant waverers it was
commended in private as a necessary means of securing the Protestant
interest, while to the Catholics hopes were held out that the removal of
the Catholic disabilities maintained by the Protestant ascendancy in
Ireland might be hoped for from the more liberal Parliament in England.
There is no doubt that many Catholics, especially among the nobility and
higher clergy, were induced at least to discourage resistance to the
measure, partly for this reason, partly out of fear of the republican
sympathies and aims of the reforming United Irishmen. The extreme
Protestants, such as the Orangemen who helped to suppress the rebellion,
viewed the measure with a certain suspicion, if not with definite
hostility. They looked forward, now that the rebellion was crushed, to a
prolonged tenure of unchallenged ascendancy. But the bulk of the more
liberal Protestants were against it, and the wiser Catholics. They
foretold the ruin of trade, the burden of increased taxation, the loss of
all real independence and freedom that were bound to, and did, result. But
they were neither consulted nor listened to and the measure was passed
after free speech had been bought over in Parliament and suppressed by
military force outside.

The measure once passed brought about an unnatural shifting of parties in
Ireland. Many of those who had opposed the measure before it became law,
now decided to make the best of what could no longer be prevented. The
orators of the Patriot Party passed over to the English Parliament and
were practically lost to Ireland. The aristocracy who had upheld the Irish
Parliament gravitated towards the new seat of Government and abandoned a
capital deserted by the Parliament of their pride. They sent their
children to be educated in England, and in the second generation they
began to call themselves not Irishmen but Englishmen. The representatives
of both these parties became in time convinced upholders of the Union and
their influence in Ireland was thrown in favour of the maintenance of the
_status quo_. To this "Unionist" party must be added the Orange party who
stood for Protestant ascendancy. Much as they disliked the Union to begin
with they came to see in the end that, unaided, they could not stand for
long against the claim of their Catholic fellow-countrymen for political
equality. The one thing that reconciled them to the Union was its
possibilities in securing the Protestant interest. To this attitude they
have remained faithful ever since, and in the course of the century they
were joined by the majority of the Protestants of Ireland. Ulster, at one
time the chief strength of the United Irishmen, became the headquarters of
extreme and even fanatical support of the Union. Here "the Protestant
interest," carefully fostered as an instrument of English influence in
Ireland, founded its citadel, the rallying point of opposition to "Irish"
claims. After Connaught, the most definitely "Celtic" portion of Ireland
(in spite of the Ulster Plantations), its extreme Protestant sympathies,
carefully fostered by the Protestant clergy into a bigotry that has become
grotesque, converted the dominions of the O'Neills and the O'Donnells into
a desperate and apparently irreconcilable antagonist of Irish national
interests. Besides, Ulster suffered less than the rest of Ireland from the
economic effects of the Union. Though the population of Ulster has been
almost halved as the result of it, the "Ulster custom" saved the tenants
from some of the worst abuses of the land system of the other provinces,
and the prosperity of the linen trade, never endangered by collision with
English interests, did not suffer by the measure; while the greater wealth
of the manufacturing districts made the burden of unfair taxation (which
repressed commercial and industrial enterprise in the rest of Ireland)
less felt than it might have been. A mistaken view of their own interests,
and an equally mistaken view of the real aims of the rest of their
countrymen (a mistake sometimes encouraged by the tactics of their
opponents) converted Protestant Ulster into an attitude which ignorance
has represented as a consciousness of a racial difference between itself
and the rest of Ireland. But even in Ulster there still remain many
Protestant Irishmen to whom the recollection of the days of the United
Irishmen is like the recollection of the Golden Age. Still faithful to the
doctrines of equality, fraternity and freedom they are the last links of
the chain which once bound Ulster to the cause of Ireland.

On the other hand Catholic Ireland as a whole, and especially its leaders,
ecclesiastical and other, viewed the enactment of the legislative Union
with a kind of apathetic despair. Nothing apparently was to be hoped from
the Irish Parliament in the direction of real religious equality or
reform of the franchise: nothing more could be expected from armed
resistance after the signal failure of the rebellion. The country was
occupied by an English army and, whatever they thought, they must think in
silence. Hopes were held out that the Union might bring Catholic
Emancipation, that the Catholic clergy might receive a State subsidy
similar to that given to the Presbyterian ministers. They were to find
that Catholic Emancipation was no more to the taste of England than to
that of the Irish Parliament and that a State subsidy to the Catholic
Church would only be granted at the price which Castlereagh desired the
Presbyterian ministers to pay for the _Regium Donum_. But for the moment
they did nothing and there was nothing that could be done. Entitled to
vote but not to sit in Parliament, but half-emancipated from the bondage,
material and moral, of the Penal Laws, they had no effective weapon at
their disposal within the constitution, and the only other weapon that
they had had broken in their hands. They were forced into a position of
silent and half-hearted protest, and have ever since been at the
disadvantage of having to appear as the disturbers of the existing order.
The hopes held out by the promoters of the Union were not realized without
prolonged and violent agitation, and the cause of Ireland appeared doubly
alien, clothed in the garb of a Church alien to the legislators to whom
appeal was made. That the national cause was first identified with the
claims of Irish Catholics to religious equality is the _damnosa hereditas_
of Irish Nationalism in the nineteenth century. The music of "the Pope's
Brass Band" drowns the voice of orator and poet. The demand that the
nation as a whole should no longer be compelled to support the
establishment of the Church of a minority was represented as a move on the
part of the Roman Curia to cripple Protestantism in the United Kingdom.
The demand for the reform of the worst land system in Europe was looked
upon as a resistance to the constitution inspired by the agents of the
Vatican. The Irish people asks for nothing, but the Pope or the Irish
Catholic hierarchy, working in darkness, is supposed to have put it into
their heads, though the Irish people have taught both Pope and Bishops
many lessons upon the distinction between religious authority and
political dictation.

Thus there gradually developed during the nineteenth century the Unionist
and the Nationalist parties, the former upholding the legislative Union
though not averse (upon pressure) to the concession of administrative
reforms: the latter under many forms claiming in greater or lesser measure
the abolition of the _fons et origo malorum_, the withdrawal from the
people of Ireland of the right to an independent legislature. The historic
claim to complete independence has on many occasions been modified in
theory or abated in practice by the National leaders: but a survey of the
history of Ireland since the Union shows that, with whatever apparent
abatements or disguises the claim may have been pressed, there has always
been deep down the feeling that behind the Union lay the Conquest, the
hope that to repeal the one meant a step upon the road to annul the
other.




IRISH NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.


The political history of Post-Union Ireland opens with an armed rebellion.
Robert Emmet for an abortive attempt to seize Dublin Castle was condemned
and executed in 1803. His rising was the last effort of the United
Irishmen. Since the Union, and for more than a century after his death,
the country was governed under a species of martial law, and Coercion Acts
were matters of almost annual enactment. The Government could not count on
the steady loyalty of any class of the community. The Orange societies
required to be placated, the Presbyterians to be muzzled, the Catholics to
be suppressed. Castlereagh's administration was a frank recognition of the
fact that Irishmen as a body were hostile to the Union, and that any means
might be employed to keep them quiet. For more than twenty years the
Catholics waited in vain for the fulfilment of the hopes of emancipation
held out at the time of the Union. Meanwhile "the bonds of Empire"
continued to be drawn tighter and tighter. In 1817 the Irish Exchequer,
the belated relic of Ireland's independent existence, was amalgamated with
that of England, and the long history of the financial oppression of the
country began. At last in 1823 Catholic Ireland began the public
agitation of its claims for civil equality with Irish Protestants. The
agitation, justifiable and necessary in itself, natural and dignified had
it taken place in an independent Ireland and had it been of the nature of
an appeal to the justice of their fellow-countrymen, assumed the
inevitable form of an appeal to a foreign legislature for a justice denied
them at home. The Catholic Association founded in 1760 was revived by
Daniel O'Connell and in six years' time, so strong was the feeling
aroused, the English Government yielded, for fear (as the Duke of
Wellington confessed) of a civil war. O'Connell had talked as if he were
ready for anything and the Duke of Wellington seems to have thought that
he meant what he said. It was the first victory for "moral force" and
O'Connell became enamoured of the new weapon. Next year the Tithe War
broke out and ended in 1838 in an incomplete victory, the Tithes, instead
of being abolished, being paid henceforth in money as an addition to the
rent. But before the Tithe War ended, O'Connell (now member for Clare in
the Imperial Parliament) had founded the Constitutional Party by giving
his support to Lord Melbourne's Government. For O'Connell's policy there
was this to be said: that, the Union being an accomplished fact, the only
way to secure legislative benefits for Ireland was through the only means
recognized by the constitution: that, both English parties being equally
indifferent to the special interests of Ireland, it was sound practical
policy to secure by an alliance with one or other, as occasion might
dictate, some special claim upon its consideration and (incidentally) some
hope of appointments to Government positions of Irishmen in sympathy with
the majority in Ireland: that the only alternative was open defiance of
the Constitution and the sacrifice of what otherwise might be gained by
its recognition. Against his policy it could be urged that to employ
constitutional forms was to recognize a constitution repugnant to his
declared convictions; that appeals to the Parliament of the United Kingdom
tended in practice to intensify Irish divisions and to break up the nation
into two groups of litigants pleading before a bar which viewed them with
an indifferent disdain; that in any case success in the appeal would be
the result of accident and circumstance or be dictated by the interests of
English policy. Between these two views of Irish national policy Ireland
has been divided and has wavered ever since.

But O'Connell, having been successful once, seems to have conceived it
possible to be successful always, and he decided to attempt the Repeal of
the Union. It is hard to suppose that he thought this possible by any
means which he was prepared to use. In 1840 he founded the Repeal
Association, and in two years' time he had practically the whole of
Catholic Ireland, and a small but enthusiastic body of Protestants, behind
him. Monster meetings were held all over the country. Repeal Clubs were
founded, recruits pressed in, "moral force," in the form of threats that
"he would either be in his grave or a freeman" within a reasonable time,
was employed by the leader. But when the Government proclaimed the
meeting, announced to be held on Sunday, October the 8th, 1843, at
Clontarf, chosen as the scene of Brian Boroimhe's crowning victory over
the Danes, O'Connell yielded at discretion. No reform, as he proclaimed
afterwards, was worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood; and
Brian's battlefield saw the troops wait all day long for the foe that
never came. Unable to persuade, O'Connell was unprepared to fight, the
enemies of Repeal. But the Repeal Association continued: the Repeal
members of Parliament either were (like O'Connell) arrested and imprisoned
or withdrew from Westminster to deliberate in Ireland upon Committees of
the Repeal Association on matters of national moment. As time went on,
O'Connell (and still more his worthless son, John) gave the Association an
ever-increasing bias towards sectarianism and away from Nationalism. He
fought the "Young Ireland" Party, as Davis, Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel and
their associates were called, who carried on the purely national and
liberal traditions of the United Irishmen, and finally forced them to
secede. Their paper _The Nation_, founded in 1842, was until its
suppression the mouthpiece of the liberal and really National Party. It
voiced in impassioned prose and verse the aspirations of the historic
Irish nation. Its guiding spirit, Thomas Davis, was a member of a
Protestant family in Mallow, and its contributors comprised men of all
creeds, Irish and Anglo-Irish, who looked forward to the revival of Irish
culture, of the Irish language and of an Irish polity in which room would
be found for all sons and daughters of Ireland, free to develop as one of
the family of European nations, released from all outside interference in
national concerns. But Irish divisions, fostered by the Union, fomented by
statecraft and furthered by many Irishmen, grew steadily more pronounced.
Thomas Davis and his friends, at the risk of misunderstanding and
misrepresentation, did their utmost to promote union on the basis of a
common pride in Ireland's past and a common hope for Ireland's future. The
Committees of the Repeal Association worked hard at reports upon Irish
needs and Irish conditions. They promoted the composition and publication
of Repeal Essays pointing to the results of the Union in diminishing
manufactures and in an impoverished national life. They had a temporary
success, and their writings were destined to supply inspiration to their
successors, but they were battling with a running tide. The moderate
people, tired of the struggle, were finding in Federalism a resting place
between conviction and expediency or had made up their minds to accept the
Union. The gradual process of Anglicization went on apace. The
establishment in 1831 of the Board of National Education under the joint
management of Catholic, Protestant and Presbyterian dignitaries was, in
spite of much opposition, making sure headway. It was destined to destroy
for all practical purposes the Gaelic language which till then had been in
common use in all parts of Ireland. It proscribed Irish history and Irish
patriotic poetry in its schools. It was seized upon by ecclesiastics of
all persuasions and made, in the name of religion, a potent instrument of
a policy of internal division and mistrust. It placed education, with all
its possibilities of national culture and national union, in the hands of
a Board definitely anti-national in its outlook, working through
instruments to whom sectarian prejudices meant more than national welfare.
Had Davis lived he might have done much with his great gifts, his tolerant
spirit and his heroic temper: his death in 1845 was one of the greatest
losses which Ireland suffered during the nineteenth century. O'Connell,
whose later activities had been almost wholly mischievous, died two years
later just as the full horror of the Famine burst upon the country. The
Government which had assumed responsibility for the interests of Ireland,
met this awful visitation with an ineptitude so callous as almost to
justify John Mitchel's fiercest denunciations. While the crops were being
exported from the country over 700,000 persons died of starvation and as
many again by famine fever. When the fever and famine had done their work,
the clearances began. The population fled from the country where there was
nothing left for them or, if they did not fly, they were shipped off by
the landlords to leave room for the development of grazing farms. From
1846 to 1851, one million and a quarter of the population "emigrated," and
in the next nine years they were followed, thanks to the same causes, by
another million and a half. During the same period 373,000 families were
evicted from their holdings to provide room for a handful of graziers.

The Famine and its consequences seemed a final proof of the failure of the
English Government to preserve the elementary interests of Ireland, and a
section of the Young Irelanders could see no other remedy than an appeal
to force, if they were to regain independence and keep Ireland from
destruction. John Mitchel seceded from _The Nation_ and founded _The
United Irishman_, in which week after week with extraordinary eloquence
and courage he advocated the policy of resistance. He advised the
peasantry to procure arms, to manufacture pikes, if nothing better could
be had, to resist the official searches for arms (for a stringent Coercion
Act had been one of the weapons with which the Government combatted the
Famine) and to refuse to allow food to leave the country. He appealed in a
series of letters to the Protestant farmers of Ulster to help Ireland as
they had helped before in the days of the United Irishmen. Had all the
leaders of the Young Ireland Party possessed the spirit of Mitchel, and
had any of them known how to organize a rebellion, they would not have
lacked a very formidable following. But Mitchel was arrested, sentenced
and transported before anything was done and the actual outbreak under
Smith O'Brien and Meagher was doomed to failure from the outset.

Mitchel had advanced far beyond "moral force" and the Repeal of the Union.
He had definitely renounced the idea of arguing the Union out of
existence: he regarded no policy as either practicable or manly which did
not begin and end in the assertion that Ireland was a free country and was
prepared to adopt any and every means to put her freedom into practice.
Like all the Young Irelanders, he had begun his political life as a
Repealer and a follower of O'Connell; he had appealed to the Irish gentry
to act again as they had acted in 1782. But Irish history since the Union
and especially the experiences of the Famine years (there had been several
partial famines before 1846) was making some serious thinkers very
sceptical of a political solution which left one of the main factors of
politics out of account. The man who saw the defects of the Repeal
solution and exposed them most trenchantly and convincingly was James
Fintan Lalor. In a series of letters and articles written for _The Nation_
and for the _Irish Felon_ he expounded a theory of nationality which went
to the very roots of political facts. His policy was not Repeal; "I will
never," he said, "contribute one shilling or give my name, heart, or hand,
for such an object as the simple repeal by the British Parliament of the
Act of Union." The facts of everyday life in Ireland showed that a new
social system was required, the old having had its day. "There was no
outrise or revolt against it. It was not broken up by violence. It was
borne for ages with beggarly patience, until it perished by the irritation
of God in the order of nature." So long as a system remained in which the
land of Ireland was not in possession of the people of Ireland, no repeal
or other measure purely political would avail. If the landlords were to
remain (and Lalor had no desire to expel them if they were willing to
submit to the paramount right of the nation) they must accept their titles
to whatever rights should be theirs from the Irish nation and the Irish
nation only. "The principle I state, and mean to stand upon, is this" (he
wrote) "that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to
the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of
Ireland; that they, and none but they, are the landowners and lawmakers of
this island; that all laws are null and void not, made by them, and all
titles to land invalid not conferred and confirmed by them; and that this
full right of ownership may and ought to be asserted and enforced by any
and all means which God has put in the power of man." The coming of the
lean years culminating in the Famine had taught Lalor the overwhelming
importance of the question: "A revolution is beginning to begin which will
leave Ireland _without a people_ unless it be met and conquered by a
revolution which will leave it without landlords." Failure to observe (or
to see the importance of) the land question had led to the defeat of
Mitchel and Smith O'Brien. "They wanted an alliance with the landowners.
They chose to consider them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce
them to hoist the green flag. They wished to preserve an Aristocracy. They
desired, not a democratic, but merely a national revolution. Who imputes
blame to them for this? Whoever does so will not have me to join him. I
have no feeling but one of respect for the motives that caused reluctance
and delay. That delay, however, I consider as a matter of deep regret. Had
the Confederation, in the May or June of '47, thrown heart and mind and
means and might into the movement I pointed out, they would have made it
successful, and settled at once and for ever all quarrels and questions
between us and England." But though Lalor insisted on the importance of
the question of the ownership of the soil and confessed complete
indifference to Repeal, an indifference which he claimed was largely
shared by the people of Ireland (for Repeal, as he said, the Irish wolf
dog "will never bite, but only bark") he was a land reformer, not out of a
lack of interest in political questions, but out of an intense belief in
the realities of politics. He never joined the Repealers, partly because
O'Connell and his following disgusted him; as he says in a letter to Gavan
Duffy: "Before I embarked in the boat I looked at the crew and the
commander; the same boat which you and others mistook in '43 for a war
frigate because she hoisted gaudy colours and that her captain swore
terribly. I knew her at once for a leaky collier-smack, with a craven
crew to man her, and a sworn dastard and a foresworn traitor at the
helm--a fact which you and Young Ireland would seem never to have
discovered until he ordered the boat to be stranded and yourselves to be
set ashore." This language may be unnecessarily vigorous and hurtful but
the judgment is not essentially unjust. But it was not merely disgust
which kept Lalor out of the Repeal ranks. He disbelieved utterly in the
Repeal of the Union as a solution for the Irish question. It was in the
first place impracticable. "You will _NEVER_, in form of law, repeal the
Act of Union. _Never_, while the sun sits in heaven, and the laws of
nature are in action. _Never_, before night goes down on the last day."
What was, however, practicable was to claim the land, refuse to pay rent
for it, and institute a protracted, obstinate and violent resistance to
the attempt on the part of English troops to take it back again. Once the
land was again in the possession of the people of Ireland their ultimate
policy would be clear. "Not the repeal of the Union, then, but the
Conquest--not to disturb or dismantle the Empire, but to abolish it
utterly for ever--not to fall back on '82 but act up to '48--not to resume
or restore an old constitution, but found a new nation and raise up a free
people, and strong as well as free, and secure as well as strong, based on
a peasantry rooted like rocks in the soil of the land--this is my object."
"Not the constitution that Wolfe Tone died to abolish, but the
constitution that Wolfe Tone died to obtain--independence; full and
absolute independence for this island, and for every man within this
island." Lalor knew well enough that this meant fighting in the long run,
but he thought that it was worth fighting for while Repeal of the Union
was not: but who was to lead the fight? Little was to be looked for from
the Repeal leaders, content with "a small Dublin reputation," with neither
the desire nor the talents to lead a nation. His last article in the
_Irish Felon_, written while Smith O'Brien and Meagher were in prison, is
an impassioned appeal for someone to lead a nation that was only waiting
for a man. "Remember this--that somewhere and somehow and by somebody, a
beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws
first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green for ever?"

The _perenni fronde corona_ which Lalor promised has not yet been won and
may never be won by the means which Lalor thought of, but the influence of
his writings upon later Irish political thought has been profound. The
Repeal Movement brought out three men of real genius--Davis, Mitchel and
Lalor. Davis was always more than a simple Repealer; his mind took in too
great a range, his knowledge was too wide, his commonsense too great, to
see in Repeal of the Union the ultimate end of Irish political endeavour.
Mitchel abandoned Repeal for Revolution in hot blood and out of a haughty
heart. Lalor had the cool head and the keen eye and the sense of reality
which Mitchel lacked; but though he wrote less and did less and suffered
less, what he lost in immediate reputation he gained in his influence over
a later age and in a wider field.

The situation of Ireland in the years immediately following the Famine was
tragic. On the one side was starvation, impotence, despair. The starvation
might have been, and in any normally governed country would have been,
averted: but Ireland was in the unnatural position of being governed by
outsiders who had absolutely no interest in the country beyond that of
ensuring that it should not govern itself: seeing the remedy for its
misery, but unable to employ it, in the face of an army which not all the
fiery eloquence of Mitchel and Meagher could persuade the starving people
was capable of being defeated by a mob of pikemen, Ireland sank back into
an apathetic and moody despair from which it took many years to recover,
during which the life of the nation almost drained away. On the other side
was the Government, indifferent to the misery of its victim, determined
that nothing, not even the extinction of the race, should alter the fixed
resolve of England to be absolute and sole master in Ireland. The failure
of the Rebellion of '48 was not to the rulers of England a matter
altogether of congratulation. A highly-placed personage, able to gauge
with accuracy the sentiment of the English ruling classes, wrote: "There
are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland and I think it is now
very likely to go off without any contest, which people (and I think with
right) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they will
begin again." The awful mortality from famine and pestilence was regarded
with a kind of chastened and reverential gratitude, as an unexpected
interference of Providence for the extirpation of the hated race. In the
then temper of England no revolution had the least chance of sympathy or
success. It would have been crushed, whatever the cost.

But though prostrate, despairing and depleted Ireland still claimed her
rights, though for a few years it seemed as if they had been tacitly
waived. The Repeal agitation died, and its place was taken by the Irish
Tenant League which aimed not at interference with constitutional
arrangements but at the solution of the land question, not in the radical
method advocated by Lalor but by legislation securing certain rights to
the tenant, the claim of the landlord to be owner of the land being left
untouched. Lalor had foretold that on the land question Ulster instead of
being "on the flank" of the rest of Ireland would march with it side by
side: and Gavan Duffy in his League of the North and South went some
length in the way of securing the co-operation of the Northern Tenant
Righters. At the same time the Irish representatives in Parliament formed
the beginning of an Independent Parliamentary Party, holding aloof from
any binding alliance with either English Party but combining at need with
the party most favourable at the moment to Irish claims. But the new
policy proved a failure within three years, partly by the treachery of
members of the party, but chiefly through the inherent hopelessness of the
position of any Irish party then in Parliament. Besides, the Tenant League
had to contend with the masterful personality of Cardinal Cullen, an
ecclesiastic of the Ultramontane School, who spent his life in the
endeavour, temporarily successful, to throw the whole weight of his Church
against the just claims of the nation.

During the abortive attempt at a constitutional policy, the survivors of
the party of Mitchel and Lalor were not idle. It cannot be said that
Ireland had at this time come to recognize the futility of parliamentary
agitation, for it cannot be said to have given it a sufficient trial: but
the results of it had so far been disappointing, and the tradition of
independence was still fresh, and its spirit strong. The new form which
was assumed by the Separatist movement after the failure of '48 was that
known as the Fenian Society, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Its
chief organizers, James Stephens, John O'Mahony, John O'Leary and Thos.
Clarke Luby had all been "out" in '48. Stephens and O'Mahony had lived in
Paris till 1850; Stephens then returned to Ireland, gaining his living as
a teacher of French, while O'Mahony went to New York. Both in Ireland and
New York the teaching of the two friends found ready listeners, and an
amazing success. The Irish in America were only too ready to return to
Ireland to overthrow the Government in whose authority they saw the source
of their country's misfortunes and their own exile. On the conclusion of
the American War thousands of Irishmen who had fought under Grant or
Jackson were ready to place their services at the disposal of an Irish
leader. But they found no one of sufficient ability and prestige to lead
them. Smith O'Brien and the other survivors of the Young Ireland Party had
become constitutionalists. John Mitchel, though he went to Paris to act as
treasurer for the Society, refused to take any more active part. O'Mahony
and the Americans wanted to equip and despatch an expedition: James
Stephens, who had undertaken to organize the movement in Ireland, insisted
that American assistance should be confined to money. The money came in
slowly and though Stephens could enrol a revolutionary army he could not
equip it. The Americans too wanted the rising to take place before
Stephens thought the time was ripe, and the consequent quarrel between the
Irish and American leaders was fatal to the chance of success. In any case
little real progress was made until the year 1865, but the work of
preparation went steadily on. The organization in Ireland, which at first
was without a name, the oath of membership being merely an oath of
allegiance to the Irish Republic, was formally inaugurated on St.
Patrick's Day, 1858. In 1859 the Government, becoming alarmed, broke up
the Phoenix Society of Skibbereen, an independent organization, and the
members later on joined the Fenians. All the forces of the Church and the
influence of such recognized leaders as were left were arrayed against
the new organization. Fenians were refused the rites of the Church for
being members of a secret oath-bound society, and at least one member has
left upon record that having to choose between Faith and Country he chose
Country. The Fenians boldly defied Cardinal Cullen and his clerical
agents. The _Irish People_, founded in 1862 under John O'Leary as editor,
took up the Cardinal's challenge and faced consistently and courageously
the question of "the priest in politics." It did incalculable service to
the Fenians by its courage and frankness. In the same year Belfast and
Ulster were brought within the Fenian Circle. By 1865 there were, it was
claimed, 13,000 sworn Fenians in the army, rather more in the militia, and
a good many of the police had joined as well. Stephens judged it time to
prepare for action, but his despatches to the country ordering
preparations to begin fell into the hands of the police. The office of the
_Irish People_ was seized, Habeas Corpus was suspended and the jails were
filled. Stephens himself was arrested some weeks afterwards. After his
escape from Richmond Prison he lay hid for three months in Ireland and
then escaped to France and America. Whether better fortune would have
crowned his work if he had gone on in spite of the arrests is a nice
question. Some at any rate of his followers judged that he had missed his
chance. The subsequent attempt in '67 under American leaders fared no
better; and General Massey, arrested at Limerick Junction, judged it
better to avoid bloodshed by giving full information to the Government.

The Fenian Movement, as it was called, was both in Ireland and America
avowedly republican and separatist from the very first. Stephens wished to
establish one form of government only--an Irish Republic, and he believed
in only one method--that of armed revolution. He refused steadily to have
anything to do with tenant rights or parliamentary parties or tactics.

The avowed object of the Republican Brotherhood had failed, but it brought
about two measures of Irish reform, long agitated and overdue, but
neglected until the events of '65 and '67 brought home to a disdainful
Parliament the realities of the abuses and of the feelings which their
continuance had aroused. The Irish Church Act and Mr. Gladstone's first
Land Bill were due to the Fenians. They were not formally concessions to
Fenianism, as the Fenians were concerned first of all to establish a
Republic and then to decide upon reforms for themselves; the Government
merely supposed that by mending two intolerable abuses they could cut the
ground from under the revolutionary movement. This policy could be only
partially successful: but it succeeded so far that for a period of thirty
years there was no Irish party that openly and consistently proclaimed its
adhesion to the doctrine of complete separation.

The Home Rule policy put forward by Isaac Butt in 1870 fell far short even
of O'Connell's Repeal. Its object was to set up, not an independent, but
a strictly subordinate, Parliament in Dublin: the effect of this proposal
(whatever its authors may have intended) would have been to consolidate
the Union by removing opportunities of friction and of discontent. But
even the appearance of a reversal of the policy of the Union was
distasteful to Parliament; and the Irish members exhausted themselves in
providing an annual exhibition of eloquence and passion for the
delectation of a languid or tolerant audience. The pathetic and
humiliating performance was ended by the appearance of Charles Stewart
Parnell who infused into the forms of Parliamentary action the sacred fury
of battle. He determined that Ireland, refused the right of managing her
own destinies, should at least hamper the English in the government of
their own house: he struck at the dignity of Parliament and wounded the
susceptibilities of Englishmen by his assault upon the institution of
which they are most justly proud. His policy of parliamentary obstruction
went hand in hand with an advanced land agitation at home. The remnant of
the Fenian Party rallied to his cause and suspended for the time, in his
interests and in furtherance of his policy, their revolutionary
activities. For Parnell appealed to them by his honest declaration of his
intentions: he made it plain both to Ireland and to the Irish in America
that his policy was no mere attempt at a readjustment of details in
Anglo-Irish relations but the first step on the road to national
independence. He was strong enough both to announce his ultimate
intentions and to define with precision the limit which must be placed
upon the immediate measures to be taken. During the years in which he was
at the head of the National Movement practically all sections of
Nationalists acknowledged his leadership and his policy. If he was not
able to control all the extreme elements that grouped themselves under his
banner it was no more than might have been expected. Neither he nor the
Irish Republican Brotherhood was responsible for the murders perpetrated
by the Invincibles, who had no connection or sympathy with the Fenian
policy; but their excesses were used, and used with effect, to damage not
only Parnell's position but the claims of Ireland. It was he himself who
gave to his enemies in the end the only fatal weapon which they could use
against him: but the prompt use of it by his own party was a portentous
event in Irish politics. For the first time the Irish people not alone
conformed to the exigencies of an alliance with an English party, but
allowed that party to veto their choice of a leader. Parnell himself had
once said "As the air of London would eat away the stone walls of the
House of Commons, so would the atmosphere of the House eat away the honour
and honesty of the Irish members." Certainly the tortuous ways of party
politics had destroyed their loyalty, and though a small band proved
faithful to him in spite of the Liberal veto, the majority came to a
decision, practically dictated by the Irish hierarchy and acquiesced in
(even if reluctantly) by a majority of his countrymen, to terminate his
position as leader. But, though this betrayal seemed to have destroyed the
cause for which he had fought, it may be questioned whether it was really
more than a symptom of the inherent weakness of his position. The utmost
he could gain in the direction of Home Rule, the utmost anyone could have
gained under the limitations which he himself imposed upon his policy,
fell markedly short of the minimum which a majority of his followers
thought attainable at once and of what he himself announced to be the
ultimate object of his policy. He is remembered, not as the leader who
helped to force a Liberal Government to produce two Home Rule Bills, but
as the leader who said "No man can set bounds to the march of a nation."

The death of Parnell marks the end of an epoch. A strong, romantic and
mysterious personality, he won and kept the affections of the Irish people
in a way which had been possible to few leaders before him and which none
has attained since. The history of Irish politics for years after his
death was a story largely of small intrigue, base personalities, divided
counsels and despairing expedients; and the policy which eventually
emerged, for which Mr. John Redmond was responsible, was widely removed
from that of Parnell. The policy to which Mr. Redmond's adhesion was given
was that of a Home Rule which might be described as "Home Rule within the
Union," a Home Rule which in return for a local legislature and internal
control, resigned to the Imperial Parliament all claim to the right to a
foreign policy and to all that would raise Ireland above the level of an
inferior dependency. It is true that Parnell would have obtained little
more than this, if he had lived; but he would have obtained it in a
different way and would have accepted the concession with a gesture of
independence. Post-Parnellite Home Rule has been based largely upon the
ground that a better understanding between the two countries is desirable
in the interests of both; that government in Ireland is less efficient,
more costly, less appreciated than it would be if it were administered by
the people of Ireland themselves, with a due regard to the interests and
general policy of the Empire; its justification is found in the success of
the self-governing colonies who, thanks to being responsible for their own
affairs, are contented, prosperous and loyal partners in an Imperial
Commonwealth. All this is true, but it is a truth that would have carried
no meaning to the mind of Parnell. To him the British Empire was an
abstraction in which Ireland had no spiritual concern; it formed part of
the order of the material world in which Ireland found a place; it had,
like the climatic conditions of Europe, or the Gulf Stream, a real and
preponderating influence on the destinies of Ireland. But the Irish claim
was to him the claim of a nation to its inherent rights, not the claim of
a portion of an empire to its share in the benefits which the constitution
of that empire bestowed upon its more favoured parts. For some years
after Parnell's death the leaders of the Irish Parliamentary Party felt
obliged to maintain the continuity of tradition by using the language of
the claim for independence and to speak of "severing the last link" which
bound Ireland to England; but even in America and Ireland such expressions
were heard less and less often from official Nationalists. The final
attitude of the Irish Parliamentary Party is admirably summed up in the
words of Mr. John Redmond: "Our demand for Home Rule does not mean that we
want to break with the British Empire. We are entirely loyal to the Empire
as such and we desire to strengthen the Imperial bonds through a liberal
system of government. We do not demand such complete local autonomy as the
British self-governing colonies possess, for we are willing to forego the
right to make our own tariffs and are prepared to abide by any fiscal
system enacted by the British Parliament.... Once we receive Home Rule we
shall demonstrate our imperial loyalty beyond question."

Ten years before these words were used the Sinn Fein movement had begun,
as a protest against the conception of national rights which made such
language possible, as the latest form which the assertion of national
independence has assumed.




SINN FEIN.


Of the origin of this name as the title of a political party a pleasant
tale is told. It is said that some people, convinced that (in the words of
Davis) "the freeman's friend is Self-Reliance," and wishing to make it the
basis of a national movement, being anxious for a suitable Irish name for
such an idea, applied to a famous Irish scholar to furnish it. He told
them a story of a country servant in Munster sent with a horse to the
fair. The horse was sold and the servant after some days appeared in his
master's kitchen, worn out but happy, and seated himself on the floor. To
the enquiries of some neighbours who happened to be there, as to where he
had been and what he had done, he would give no answer but "Sinn fein sinn
fein." The prodigal servant's witty reply eludes the translator. To his
hearers it conveyed that family matters were matters for the family: but
it was no mere evasion of a temporary or personal difficulty. It was the
expression of a universal truth. Society is divided into groups, large or
small, which have their own problems and their own interests. Their
problems they can best solve themselves, and of their interests they are
themselves the best judges. The solutions and the judgments will not
always commend themselves to outsiders; but though outsiders cannot be
denied the right to hold and to express their opinions they have no
rights of veto or of interference. This right of independence, however, is
subject in practice to serious limitations, and the history of human
society is largely the history of the reconciliation of the competing
interests and claims of social groups, each claiming to be in the last
resort rightfully independent. One of such groups is the nation, and it is
generally recognized that nations as such have rights analogous to those
exercised by other social groups. They may be forcibly deprived by another
and stronger group of rights the exercise of which seems to the stronger
to be inimical to its own interests; or rights may be surrendered in
return for what may be judged to be a fair equivalent. But it is not held
that rights can be extinguished by force or that, if a suitable
opportunity should occur, they may not be regained either by force or by
agreement. These things are generally acknowledged in the abstract; but in
concrete instances there is seldom an equal unanimity: and a nation whose
rights are in abeyance (especially if it be in the interest of a stronger
neighbour to prevent their exercise) is in a position which seldom admits
of a simple or harmonious solution. Ideally it has a right to complete
independence: practically it has to be content with as much independence
as it can make good; and the methods which it may employ are various,
always open to challenge and compassed by uncertainty.

A nation may maintain its moral and spiritual, long after it has
forfeited its material and political, independence. To such a nation the
more valuable part of its independence has been preserved. But it is
hardly possible in the long run for a nation which has become materially
and politically dependent upon another to retain its moral and spiritual
independence unimpaired. The loss of the latter is the final stage in
national decline.

To the founders of Sinn Fein, a national condition was presented to which
no other remedy than their own seemed to offer the prospect of relief. All
previous efforts to recover the political independence lost by the Act of
Union had ended in disaster and disappointment. Force had been tried and
proved unavailing: the experiences of '48 and '67 had left little doubt
upon the minds of reasonable men that the attempt to regain Irish
independence by force of arms was (however heroic) an impossible and
foolish attempt. "We believe" (wrote the chief exponent of Sinn Fein)
"with the editor of the _Irish World_ that the four-and-a-quarter millions
of unarmed people in Ireland would be no match in the field for the
British Empire. If we did not believe so, as firmly as we believe the
eighty Irishmen in the British House of Commons are no match for the six
hundred Britishers opposed to them, our proper residence would be a padded
cell." But if force of arms had proved useless, so had constitutional
agitation. There was no argument of public justice, public expediency or
public generosity which had not been urged without effect upon
Parliament. Irish members had been arguing against the Union for a hundred
years: there was no point of view from which the case could be presented
that had been overlooked. When Parliament seemed to listen and to be
prepared to act it was found not to have heard the arguments for
independence but arguments for a different kind of a Union. The belief
that nothing was to be expected from Parliamentary action received later a
striking confirmation: for when the Irish demand was whittled down to a
bare minimum and all claim to independence expressly renounced, a pretext
was found in the exigencies of English political relationships for
refusing even that.

Not only had political independence gone beyond the chance of recovery by
either force or argument but material independence had followed it. The
trade, commerce and industries of Ireland which had flourished during its
brief period of independence had dwindled since the Union and from causes
for which the Union was directly responsible. The "equitable proportion"
of Imperial taxation to which the taxes of Ireland had been restricted by
the terms of the Act of Union had proved to be inequitable, so that
Ireland was overtaxed to the extent of two-and-three-quarter millions of
pounds per annum: new taxes in defiance of the Act had been imposed:
Ireland, again in defiance of the Act, had been made jointly responsible
for a debt which was not her own: Irish banks and Irish railways were
managed not with reference to Irish interests but in the interests of
English finance and English trade: the Irish mercantile marine was no
more: the mineral resources of the country in coal and iron remained
undeveloped lest their development might act unfavourably upon vested
interests in Great Britain. The population had declined at a rate without
parallel in Europe: even Ulster, proclaimed to be prosperous because
Protestant and Unionist, had seen the population of its most "loyal"
counties almost halved in the space of seventy years. Nothing but the
removal of the cause could arrest this spreading decay, and the cause was
declared to be irremovable: to tamper with it was to lay an impious hand
upon the Ark of a grim Covenant.

But the last refuge of independence was still safe--resolve was still
strong--no weakness of acquiescence, no dimness of spirit, no decay of the
soul was as yet to be discerned. An answer to these questions might be
found in the history of the language and of what the possession of a
native language implied. Up to the time of the Union the Gaelic language
had preserved intact, in spite of Penal Laws and the instruments of
repression, all that was most vital in the national spirit. Tales of
warriors and heroes, of the long wars of the Gael with the stranger, the
sighs of love and the aspirations of devotion, satire and encomium, all
the literature and song of a people were enshrined in the native tongue.
Behind it, as behind an unassailable rampart, the national culture was
preserved, in misery and degradation, it is true, the mere shadow of what
it was and might be, but still its existence was secure. The Irish
language was understood all over Ireland, and was the familiar tongue of
three-quarters of its inhabitants. It was not a necessary consequence of
the Union itself that this should be destroyed, but it was a necessary
consequence of the measures which the Act of Union made it possible to
take. The English Government decided to embark upon the task of
"civilizing" the inhabitants of Ireland by a comprehensive system of
practical education. In 1831 the "National" Education system was founded
and before the century was old its work was done: it had "educated"
Ireland out of its traditional civilization and culture. The authors and
administrators of this system were sincere and well-intentioned men: they
believed that they were removing a disability and conferring a benefit.
They regarded ignorance as barbarous and disgraceful; and what was
ignorance if it was not inability to write, read, and speak the English
tongue? A love of learning had always distinguished the Irish people; and
here was the learning, for which so many vain sacrifices had been made in
the past, brought in full measure to their very doors. Everything that
might induce suspicion of the Danai, _dona ferentes_, was carefully
avoided. The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin held a seat on the Board and no
book was sanctioned by the Board without his unreserved acquiescence. The
Catholic clergy were encouraged to take a share in the administration of
the schools and to supervise or impart the religious instruction of the
pupils. It was the avowed policy of the Board to avoid anything that might
savour of proselytism on the one hand and of the perpetuation of sectarian
discord on the other. Pupils of the two creeds were to meet together on
equal terms and in friendly rivalry in the classroom, while their
particular religious interests were entrusted to their respective clergy.
But this paternal care for the susceptibilities of Irish children, this
careful abhorrence of sectarian animosities, went hand in hand with an
elaborate disregard of every distinctive national feeling and
characteristic. English was the language of the school, while Irish was
the language of the fireside and of the street. Irish history was ignored:
references to national and patriotic sentiments were carefully excluded,
as a possible disturbing influence, from the approved text books: while
the privilege of being "British," and the duty of feeling it to be a
privilege, were carefully inculcated.

It may seem extraordinary that such a system should have been accepted,
even if the attempt to impose it were made. But in fact the bribe of
knowledge is a great bribe; and in this case the consequence of taking it
was in obscurity. To learn English was to possess the only key to the
knowledge that was offered, and when English was learnt, the language of
"progress" crushed the language of tradition. A few far-seeing Irishmen,
like Archbishop MacHale, saw the inevitable tendency and endeavoured to
correct it; but in general no one noticed that the Irish language was
going until everyone noticed that it had gone. Men's minds were set upon
other things. The struggle for political independence and political and
social equality absorbed energy and attention, and the political struggle
had to be carried on by men who understood English. O'Connell's election
for the county of Clare struck a deadly blow at the preservation of the
language and at all that the preservation of the language implied: he
himself, with a miserable servility, refused to speak any tongue but the
tongue of Parliament. The National Board of Education did not, it is true,
escape criticism: but the criticism was directed not to its educational
shortcomings or to its anti-national bias, but to its policy of "religious
indifference." The Presbyterian ministers were up in arms against a system
by which "the Gospel" was excluded from the schools. They claimed the
right to conduct the schools supported by the Board in defiance of the
terms upon which the Board had promised to support them. They contended
for the principle of a programme in which the reading of the Bible might
at any moment without notice be substituted by a Presbyterian teacher for
any item on the programme for the day, any Catholic children who happened
to be in attendance being allowed to withdraw, the responsibility for the
child's spiritual loss being solemnly laid upon the shoulders of the
parents. The Protestant clergy, who were supposed as part of their duty to
keep schools in their parishes, though they had neglected the duty for
generations, followed with similar claims. They stirred up their
congregations until mobs took to wrecking the National Schools in counties
like Antrim and Down, and rifle clubs were formed under the patronage of
the local aristocracy for the defence of their threatened Bibles. Under
the Ultramontane leadership of Cardinal Cullen the Catholic clergy adopted
a similar attitude. They alleged that the National system was hostile to
their faith. Whatever danger to the faith had been contained in it had at
any rate escaped the vigilance of Archbishop Murray and the authorities
whom he had consulted. But the spirit of religious animosity once let
loose could not be chained; and the system which began by promoting the
co-education of the two creeds, ended by a segregating of the population
from infancy into hostile camps. This accomplished the end which was
designed by nobody but reached by everybody, that of breaking down the
feeling of national unity and perpetuating feelings which it had been the
aim of patriots to obliterate.

But though the closing decade of the nineteenth century presented a
spectacle of national disunion and apathy, of failing vigour and vanishing
ideals, it saw the beginning of a movement destined to arrest the decline
of one department of the national life. The foundation of the Gaelic
League in 1893 may be regarded as the turning point in the history of the
language. When it was on the verge of extinction its decline was stayed
by the enthusiastic patriotism of Dr. Douglas Hyde. Non-political and
non-sectarian, the League worked for the restoration, preservation and
diffusion of the Irish language, Irish music and Irish industries. In its
councils Catholic priests and laymen worked side by side with Protestant
laymen and ministers. It not only revived the language (its first and main
object) but it proved incidentally, as if in answer to a frequent but
foolish criticism, that Irishmen of different creeds and political
opinions could sink their differences in the common interests of
patriotism. It kept rigidly and sternly aloof from all connection with
professedly political parties. It had no more to do with official
Nationalism than it had to do with Ulster Unionism. It resisted with
success the attempts of some of the clergy to interfere with its
programme: in the case of the parish priest of Portarlington who objected
to mixed classes on the specious ground of public morals it asserted its
rights to control its own activities and established once for all, so far
as it was concerned, the principle that the sphere of the clergy's
activities is not co-extensive with human life. It criticized the
Hierarchy with as much independence as it would have criticized a local
Board of Guardians; and in the end it won and held the enthusiastic
support of the best elements in Irish life. Looking from things temporal
and devoting itself to things of the mind, it widened the horizon and
cleared the outlook of many districts through all Ireland. P. H. Pearse
said with truth "The Gaelic League will be recognized in history as the
most revolutionary influence that ever came into Ireland." The revolution
which it wrought was moral, intellectual and spiritual and its influence
in strengthening and developing the national character can hardly be
over-estimated. Blamed alike for doing too much and for not doing enough,
it adhered with undeviating consistency to its own programme and has been
fully justified by its work. It stimulated activities in spheres far
remote from its own. It enriched Anglo-Irish literature through the works
of writers to whom it opened a new field and for whom it provided a fresh
stimulus. There is hardly a writer in Ireland to-day of any promise in
either prose or verse who does not owe a heavy debt to the work of the
Gaelic League.

The Gaelic League proceeded upon the assumption that Irishmen possessed
and ought to possess an interest in the language of their own country. It
did not argue the point or indulge in academic discussions upon the
utility of Gaelic as a medium of communication or upon the psychology of
language. Its simple appeal to a natural human feeling found a response
wider than could have been evoked by a learned controversy or effected as
the fruit of a dialectical victory. But language is only a part of
nationality and the attachment of a human being to the language of his
country is only a special case of his attachment to the nation. This,
though the Gaelic League held aloof from all politics (in the narrow sense
of the word), is what gave to the work of the Gaelic League a real
political importance. The stimulation of national sentiment in one
department gave a stimulus to the same sentiment in other departments, and
the new and vigorous national sense which it fostered was bound to lead
sooner or later to expression in political action. But even after this
political activity began to be manifest, the League confined itself to its
original work, and held as much aloof from politics infused by its own
spirit as from the forms of political action which held the field when its
work began.

Sinn Fein is an expression in political theory and action of the claim of
Ireland to be a nation, with all the practical consequences which such a
claim involves. It differs from previous national movements principally in
the policy which it outlines for the attainment of its ultimate end, the
independence of Ireland: though it should be understood that nearly every
point in the Sinn Fein political programme had been at least suggested by
some previous Irish Nationalist thinker. In opposition to the
Parliamentary Party it held that for Ireland to send representatives to
Westminster was to acknowledge the validity of the Act of Union and
virtually to deny the Irish claim to an independent legislature. In
contrast with the National movements of '48 and '67 it disclaimed the use
of physical force for the attainment of its ends. While it held as a
matter of abstract political ethics that a nation subjugated against its
will by another nation is justified in regaining its independence, if it
can do so, by any means at its disposal, including force, yet as a matter
of practical Irish politics it renounced the use of force unequivocally.
"It is because Ireland is to-day unable to overcome England on the
battlefield we preach the Sinn Fein policy," wrote the principal exponent
of the policy in 1906. The remnants of the Fenian Brotherhood had no
sympathy with a policy such as this: and though representatives of the
"physical force party" were allowed to express their opinions in the Sinn
Fein papers, their views were not officially adopted and never became part
of the Sinn Fein policy. At least one prominent member of the old Fenian
Party saw reason to adopt the Sinn Fein policy in preference to that of
armed force. "I would not," wrote John Devoy from New York in 1911,
"incite the unorganized, undisciplined and unarmed people of Ireland to a
hopeless military struggle with England." This renunciation of force was
however very different from O'Connell's famous declaration of his
intention not to fight. While Sinn Fern held that the most practical way
to establish Irish freedom in the twentieth century was not the way of
force it never concealed its opinion that force was a legitimate method of
securing national rights. In fact no responsible national leader has ever
held any other opinion in any country.

Nor was the Sinn Fein Party in its inception a Republican Party. It was
strictly constitutional, and in fact forfeited the support of many ardent
Nationalists by adherence to this definitely constitutional policy. While
the Parliamentary Party claimed to be the only constitutional party by its
use of the forms of the existing constitution, Sinn Fein laid claim to the
merit of a superior constitutionalism. It relied upon the Renunciation Act
of 1783 which declared that the right "claimed by the people of Ireland to
be bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the Parliament of that
kingdom, in all cases whatever, and to have all actions and suits at law
or in equity which may be instituted in that kingdom decided in his
Majesty's courts therein finally and without appeal from thence shall be
and it is hereby declared to be established and ascertained forever and
shall at no time hereafter be questioned or questionable." The Act of
Union, carried as it was, was a clear breach of this declaration, and the
policy of Sinn Fein was to ignore, holding it as null and void, the Union
and every subsequent arrangement made in contravention of the Act of 1783.
If it came to a question of constitutionalism Sinn Fein took up a High
Tory attitude compared with the accommodating constitutionalism of the
official Nationalist Party.

Though Sinn Fein as a political organization in being did not exist till
1905 the way had been smoothed for it and several actual steps taken
several years before. The first symptom of the coming movement was the
establishment of literary societies which drew their inspiration from the
Young Ireland movement of the 'forties, and the publication in Belfast by
Miss Alice Milligan of the _Shan Van Vocht_, a literary and political
journal which became a semi-official exponent of the new Irish-Ireland
movement. The centenary celebration of the Rebellion of 1798 led to a
quickening of interest in the history of Irish separatist movements and an
endeavour was made to keep the interest from dying out by the
establishment of '98 Clubs. Finally in 1899 the _United Irishman_ was
founded by Mr. Arthur Griffith.

The title which Mr. Griffith chose for his paper is significant. The
adoption of the name of John Mitchel's paper was more than a hint that
John Mitchel's policy was to be revived. But it was to be the policy, not
of the abortive revolution of '48, but that expressed earlier in a
prescient passage. A plan (said Mitchel) for the repeal of the Union "must
develop not one sole plan followed out to the end, but three or four of
the possible and probable series of events which may evidently lead to the
result. It must show (for one way) how a parliamentary campaign, conducted
honestly and boldly, might bring the state of public business in
Parliament to such a position that repeal would be the only solution; for
another way, how systematic passive opposition to, and contempt of, _law_
might be carried out through a thousand details, so as to virtually
supersede English dominion here and to make the mere repealing statute an
immaterial formality (this, I may observe, is _my_ way); and for a third
way how, in the event of an European war, a strong national party in
Ireland could grasp the occasion to do the work instantly.... It should
also show how and to what extent all these methods of operation might be
combined." In this one passage Mitchel sketched successively the Parnell
policy, the Sinn Fein policy and the policy of the Easter Rising.

_The United Irishman_ ran as a weekly paper from March 4, 1899, to April
14, 1906. During this time twenty-three issues were seized and confiscated
in the Post Office and upon three occasions in the year 1900 the paper was
publicly suppressed. In 1905 the Secret Service threatened the printer
with prosecution unless the printing of the paper was discontinued; and in
1906 the increasing liabilities of the United Irishman Publishing Company
(who engaged Mr. Griffith as editor) led to the discontinuance of the
paper. But before it ceased publication the Sinn Fein Movement had been
successfully inaugurated. The paper was remarkable for the ability with
which it was edited, the literary excellence of its articles both
editorial and contributed, the range of its topics and the freedom which
it allowed to the discussion in its columns of different views. Its
contributors included many of the best-known Irish writers, though many of
them were not (or did not remain) in sympathy with its political
propaganda. It championed the cause of the Gaelic League, of native
industries, of native music and of native games. It spread information
upon the mineral resources of Ireland, its waterways, its railways, its
vital statistics, and the menace of emigration. It republished as serials
such standard works as John Mitchel's _Apology_ and an authorized
translation of D'Arbois de Jubainville's _Irish Mythological Cycle_. Mr.
Best contributed a series of articles on "The Old Irish Bardic Tales." It
published a drama by W. B. Yeats and its columns were always open to
literary and dramatic criticisms and discussions. It had a weekly column
on European politics. And finally it argued with courage, brilliancy and
passion the cause of Irish independence.

The editorial in the first number gives a general idea both of the style
and of the teaching of the paper. "There exists, has existed for
centuries, and will continue to exist in Ireland, a conviction hostile to
the subjection, or dependence of the fortunes of this country to the
necessities of any other; we intend to voice that conviction. We bear no
ill will to any section of the Irish political body, whether its flag be
green or orange, which holds that tortuous paths are the safest for
Irishmen to tread; but, knowing we are governed by a nation which
religiously adheres to 'The good old rule--the simple plan--that those may
take who have the power, and those may keep who can,' we, with all respect
for our friends who love the devious ways, are convinced that an
occasional exhibition of the naked truth will not shock the modesty of
Irishmen and that a return to the straight road will not lead us to
political destruction.... To be perfectly plain, we believe that when
Swift wrote to the whole people of Ireland 170 years ago, that by the law
of God, of Nature, and of nations they had a right to be as free a people
as the people of England, he wrote commonsense; notwithstanding that in
these latter days we have been diligently taught that by the law of God,
of Nature, and of nations we are rightfully entitled to the establishment
in Dublin of a legislative assembly with an expunging angel watching over
its actions from the Viceregal Lodge. We do not deprecate the institution
of any such body, but we do assert that the whole duty of an Irishman is
not comprised in utilizing all the forces of his nature to procure its
inception.... With the present day Irish movements outside politics we are
in more or less sympathy. The Financial Reformers ... are incidentally
doing good in promoting an union of Irishmen in opposition to their one
enemy; the resuscitation of our national language is a work in which
everyone of us should help; at the same time we would regret any
insistence on a knowledge of Gaelic as a test of patriotism. It is
scarcely necessary to say we are in full sympathy with the objects of the
Amnesty Association; but we shall not at any time support an appeal to any
such myths as English Justice or English Mercy.... Lest there might be any
doubt in any mind we will say that we accept the Nationalism of '98, '48
and '67 as the true Nationalism and Grattan's cry 'Live Ireland-Perish the
Empire!' as the watchword of patriotism."

The political creed of the _United Irishman_ was the absolute independence
of Ireland; and though it did not advocate the methods of armed revolution
it opened its columns to those Nationalists who did: though its policy was
the re-establishment of the Constitution of 1782, not the establishment of
an Irish Republic, it contained articles written by Republicans who made
no secret of their views. But the object of this, confusing to the
careless or intermittent reader, was gradually to build up a kind of
national forum in which all "real" Nationalists might have their say, and
to induce a general consensus of opinion in favour of the new policy. Its
aim at first was strictly critical and educational. In writing of the '98
Clubs the editor says: "We look to them for the fostering of a national
and tolerant public opinion, which will raise the _morale_ of the people,
so grievously lowered by the squalid agitations of the past; we look to
them for the inculcation of the doctrine of self-reliance, without which
neither our land nor any other can hope for salvation; and we look to them
anxiously for the teaching and training of youth, for our future depends
largely on the young." Everything was made to turn upon the question of
self-reliance and independence: what inculcated or enhanced these
qualities was good, what hindered them was bad or (at best) indifferent.
Political independence was regarded as the sequel and corollary of moral
independence, and all political action that sacrificed this stood
self-condemned. Under this condemnation fell in the first place the Irish
Parliamentary Party: their policy was derided as one of "half-bluster and
half-whine": when Mr. Redmond spoke, in an unguarded moment, of "wringing
from whatever Government may be in power the full measure of a nation's
rights" he was bluntly told that all this was "arrant humbug." "After one
hundred years of the British Parliament we are poorer and fewer, and our
taxation has been multiplied by ten. All the signs of the times point to
the continuance of this policy of practically burning the candle at both
ends; and our self-respect and our status before the nations of Europe
would be infinitely raised by a manly refusal to lend the support of our
presence to an assembly in which our interests are ignored whenever they
clash, and sometimes when they do not clash, with the interests of
England. If our 'Parliamentary representatives' had spirit, they would
have retired from the British Parliament when the Home Rule Bill was
defeated, and have told their constituents that they were wasting time in
fighting Ireland's battle with British weapons and that further
representation at Westminster was 'neither possible nor desirable.' That
would have been a protest that would have roused the attention of the
civilized world and even now it would be well that such a protest should
be made; for it _is_ waste of time and money and a source of degradation
to countenance a system which ignores us.... By turning their attention to
the practical development of industries in Ireland and pledging
themselves to a policy of practical support and preference for the
products of Irish labour, our people can undoubtedly advance the social
condition and prosperity of the country; but while they are hoping against
hope for some vague indefinite assistance from Westminster, a genuine
manly effort in this direction is impossible."

If the Parliamentary Party was charged with futility and lack of dignity,
other Irish movements were criticized with a similar candour. Even the
Gaelic League did not win the entire and unqualified approval of the
national Mentor. The "persistent labouring of the fact that the language
question is non-political" was held to savour of a certain lack of candour
and of courage. The Gaelic movement (it was said) had for its aim "the
intensifying of Irish sentiment, the preservation of Irish ideals": it
aroused enthusiasm "by awakening memories hot with hate and fierce with
desire of vengeance on the foreigner." It was asserted that "as a factor
towards freedom, and as such _alone_, the people will respond to its
claims upon them: for them culture has no charms"; and the League was
bluntly told that it could not continue to pursue its policy of aloofness.
"With politics," wrote William Rooney (who seems to have held a unique
position of authority and trust in the new movement up to the time of his
early death), "as at present understood, and which, after all, mean
nothing but partisanship, the Gaelic League has rightly had nothing to do;
but with politics, in the sense of some public policy aiming at the
reincarnation of an Irish nation, it cannot refuse to meddle." The Gaelic
League, like the Parliamentary Party, pursued its way undisturbed: but the
criticism was not unmarked. And the Catholic clergy (so often represented
as immune from the criticism of all good Irish Nationalists) were
faithfully (and not always tenderly) taken to task when they wandered from
the straight path; it was said that they took no effective steps to arrest
emigration: that they "next to the British Government" were "responsible
for the depopulation of the country": that they failed to encourage Irish
trade and manufactures: that the priests "made life dull and unendurable
for the people": that the Hierarchy had backed the Parliamentary Party
against the Nationalists of '48 and '67: that they were apathetic on the
question of the language. It was asserted that the priesthood with their
exaggerated caution with regard to the natural relations of the sexes had
"brought a Calvinistic gloom and horror into Ireland"; "To-day the land is
dotted with religious edifices but the men and women whose money built
them are fleeing to America to seek for bread." "It is high time this
monstrous hypocrisy should be faced and fought. While the country is
making a last fight for existence its people are being bled right and left
to build all kinds of church edifices and endow all kinds of church
institutions and their money is being sent abroad to England, Italy, and
Germany.... We strongly advise the Irish people not to subscribe a single
penny in future towards the eternal church building funds unless they
first receive public assurances that their money will be expended in
Ireland." These criticisms are characteristic of the candour and
consistency with which the test was applied to all movements, bodies and
institutions in Ireland: were they or were they not a factor in the
material and moral upbuilding of the Irish nation as a free and
self-reliant community.

The war against the Transvaal Republics made the question of recruiting
for the army a question of public importance in Ireland during the early
days of the paper, and its articles on the subject first brought it into
conflict with the Castle authorities. That Mr. Chamberlain's policy was
directed to the extinction of Transvaal independence was self-evident and
the war on that account was not popular in Ireland. In the Boers
struggling hopelessly for the maintenance of their freedom was seen an
analogue of the long Irish struggle for independence, and any Irishman who
enlisted in the British army was denounced as "a traitor to his country
and a felon in his soul." But it was not the crushing of Transvaal
independence in which the army was employed that formed the only argument
against enlisting. The official returns of the statistics of venereal
disease in the British army were printed with a commentary of provoking
frankness. The excesses of the British army in Burmah and the charges made
against the soldiers for offences against Burmese women were insisted
upon to prove that no decent Irishman could join the army. But in fact it
was something more than the sufferings of the Boers and the Burmese which
inspired this attitude. The British army was regarded as the instrument by
which Ireland was held in subjugation, as the force which upheld the power
to whose interests Ireland was sacrificed. One of the concluding numbers
of the paper printed the text of an anti-recruiting pamphlet for the
distribution of which prosecutions were instituted. It concluded: "Let
England fight her own battles: we have done it long enough. Let her arm
and drill the sickly population of her slums: the men of the hills and
country places in Ireland will go no more. Let her fight for the extension
of her Empire herself, for the men of the Gael are not going to be bribed
into betraying themselves and their country again at the bidding of
England." It was found difficult to obtain convictions against persons who
distributed these pamphlets. Even in Belfast a jury refused to convict a
man for this at the instance of the Crown: though the accused made no
excuse or apology, and though his counsel said in his speech to the jury,
"You are fathers and brothers, and there is not one of you who would not
rather see your boys in hell than in the British Army."

The seizure of the _United Irishman_ by order of Lord Cadogan in
consequence of its anti-recruiting propaganda served only to advertise its
attitude, and secure for it some of the popularity which attends whatever
is in conflict with the authorities in Ireland. It also urged the paper to
further efforts in the same direction and from the time of Queen
Victoria's visit in 1900, "who now in her dotage," as the leader on the
subject ran, "is sent amongst us to seek recruits for her battered army,"
it was in constant conflict with the Irish police.

While the _United Irishman_ pursued its extensive and boisterous business,
of which this full account is significant and pertinent, an organization
of Irishmen who shared its views generally was being slowly formed. In one
of the early numbers of the paper a contributed article on "A National
Organization" had appeared (and been approved of in a leader), urging the
formation of a party "with the openly avowed and ultimate object of ending
British rule" in Ireland; such an organization should honestly acknowledge
"its present inability to lead Ireland to victory against the armed might
of her enemy" and confine itself "for some time to the disciplining of the
mind and the training of the forces of the nation, whilst impressing on it
that, in the last resort, nothing save the weapons of freemen can regain
its independence.... It need have no secrecy about it whatsoever.... Such
an organization should ... require only two qualifications from its
members, one, that they declare themselves advocates of an Irish Republic,
the other, that they be persons of decent character.... It should adopt no
attitude of antagonism to the Parliamentarians; but point out to the
people that Parliamentarianism is not Nationalism, and leave them, in
their own judgment, to give it what support they pleased. Toleration, free
impersonal criticism, and sympathy with every man seeking, after his own
light, the welfare of our common country, should be distinguishing
characteristics of the organization and its members." Discussion of these
proposals, partly favourable, partly critical, followed and in October,
1900, the first steps were taken in the foundation of the Cumann na
nGaedhal. Its objects were to advance the cause of Ireland's national
independence by (1) cultivating a fraternal spirit amongst Irishmen; (2)
diffusing knowledge of Ireland's resources and supporting Irish
industries; (3) the study and teaching of Irish history, literature,
language, music and art; (4) the assiduous cultivation and encouragement
of Irish games, pastimes and characteristics; (5) the discountenancing of
anything tending towards the anglicization of Ireland; (6) the physical
and intellectual training of the young; (7) the development of an Irish
foreign policy; (8) extending to each other friendly advice and aid,
socially and politically; (9) the nationalization of public boards.
Membership was open to "all persons of Irish birth or descent undertaking
to obey its rules, carry out its constitution, and pledging themselves to
aid to the best of their ability in restoring Ireland to her former
position of sovereign independence." The _United Irishman_ commenting on
this observes: "It comes to interfere with no policy before the people--it
asks only the help and support of Irish Nationalists.... Let us be Irish
in act and speech, as we pretend to be in heart and spirit, and a few
years will prove whether the remedy is not better sought at home among
ourselves than beyond the waters." While the association aimed at the
cultivation of a spirit of self-reliance and the attainment of a moral
independence, it was clear that the realization of its ideals would be a
slow process and would leave the actual political situation much as it
was. The whole Irish nation might talk Irish, play Irish games, support
Irish industries, deanglicize their children, have their own ideas of
foreign policy and love one another like brothers, and yet Ireland would
not have regained independence. The ends of Cumann na nGaedhal were remote
and, if attained, unsatisfactory to those to whom independence meant more
than a mere lofty disregard of the truth that Ireland was as a matter of
fact politically dependent on another country. Something more was needed
to bring the new policy (if it could be called new) into more intimate
connection with political facts. The link with current politics was
supplied by Mr. Griffith in an address which he gave to the third annual
convention of Cumann na nGaedhal in October, 1902, in which he outlined
what came to be known afterwards as the Hungarian Policy. The new policy,
instead of adopting a neutral attitude towards existing political parties
in Ireland, boldly declared war upon the Irish Parliamentary Party. The
Convention passed the following resolution: "That we call upon our
countrymen abroad to withhold all assistance from the promoters of a
useless, degrading and demoralizing policy until such times as the members
of the Irish Parliamentary Party substitute for it the policy of the
Hungarian Deputies of 1861, and, refusing to attend the British Parliament
or to recognize its right to legislate for Ireland, remain at home to help
in promoting Ireland's interests and to aid in guarding its national
rights." With this resolution Sinn Fein may be said to have been
inaugurated.

Though the policy of abstention from Parliament came to be known as "the
Hungarian Policy" it was a policy that had been advocated, and to a
certain extent practised, in Ireland long before the Hungarian Deputies
adopted it. In 1844, the "Parliamentary Committee of the Loyal National
Repeal Association on the Attendance of Irish Members in Parliament"
presented a report which contained the following: "The people of Ireland,
having in vain attempted to obtain from the Imperial Parliament detailed
measures of justice, and with equal failure sought the restoration of
their domestic Senate or even inquiry into the wisdom of that restoration,
have at length sought to obtain those rights by agitation out of
Parliament. They have to this end arrayed themselves into a Loyal and
National Association to obtain the Repeal of the Union. They try to obtain
strength by the reality and display of union and organization. They seek
converts by their speeches, their writings, and their peaceful virtues.
They are endeavouring to increase their knowledge and their power by
reading, thinking and discussing. And to carry out their projects of
organization, conversion and self-improvement, they subscribe large funds
to a common treasury. Their efforts in the Imperial Parliament having then
been so fruitless, and their undertaking at home being so vast, they, the
people of Ireland, have consented that such of their members as seek with
them domestic legislation, should secede from the Imperial Parliament and
control the agitation, instruction and organization of the people at
home." This report is signed by Thomas Davis. A correspondence between
Thomas Davis and the Earl of Wicklow, to whom certain resolutions of the
Repeal Association had been sent, debates the rival merits of the policies
of parliamentarianism and abstention. The Earl, who had no intention of
leaving Parliament, wrote: "I now believe that there exists amongst the
British people an anxious desire to do justice to our country and to atone
in every way in their power for the evils of former mismanagement." Lord
Wicklow had formed this conviction before 1844. The "Hungarian Policy" of
1902 was framed for the same situation and in face of the same conviction.

It is difficult to understand why the credit of the policy was not claimed
for Thomas Davis the Irishman instead of for the Hungarian Franz Deák:
unless it be that the policy had in the case of Ireland never been put
into actual effective practice and had remained fruitless of result, while
in Hungary it had seemed to have achieved its object. Be that as it may,
Mr. Arthur Griffith proceeded to contribute to the _United Irishman_ a
series of articles on "The Resurrection of Hungary," reprinted in book
form the same year and widely circulated. The preface represented the
policy as an alternative to that of armed resistance: the body of the book
gave a historical account of the struggle of the Hungarians under Deák for
the restoration of the constitution of 1848 and its success, due (it was
claimed) entirely to Deák's policy of abstention from the Austrian
Imperial Parliament: the concluding chapter drew the parallel between
Hungary and Ireland, claiming that by abstaining from sending members to
Westminster Ireland could secure the restoration of the constitution of
1782. The book was interesting and able: the narrative was presented with
vigour and spirit: but the accuracy of some of its statements and
conclusions was open to question and as a piece of popular propaganda it
was a failure. While many people read it, it produced no immediate or
widespread response. Exception was taken to the view that Ireland ought to
aim at the restoration of the constitution of 1782: exception was taken to
the substitution of a peaceful for a forcible policy. "If the Irish
members" (wrote a representative of the latter body of critics) "of the
English Parliament withdrew from Westminster to-morrow the government of
the country would be carried on just as it is to-day; and so it will and
must be as long as the people forget they are Irishmen with a country to
free from a foreign yoke. The protest would end in smoke unless armed men
were prepared to back it."

Mr. Griffith, nothing daunted, continued his fight against on the one hand
the traditional parliamentarianism and on the other hand the advocates of
physical force and revolution and the members of the Republican Party. His
claim to independence for Ireland was to be based not upon force but upon
law and the constitution of 1782: his claim was not a Republic but a
national constitution under an Irish Crown. He tried to show in a series
of articles on "The Working of the Policy"--which from now on begins to be
referred to as the Sinn Fein Policy--how his ideas might be put into
practice. But to carry on such a policy as he had outlined, some political
organization other than the Cumann na nGaedhael or the '98 Clubs was
required. This was inaugurated at a meeting held in Dublin on November
28th, 1905, under the chairmanship of Mr. Edward Martyn. The policy of the
new body, the National Council, was defined as "National self-development
through the recognition of the rights and duties of citizenship on the
part of the individual and by the aid and support of all movements
originating from within Ireland, instinct with national tradition and not
looking outside Ireland for the accomplishment of their aims." A public
meeting held afterwards in the Rotunda passed the following resolution:
"That the people of Ireland are a free people and that no law made without
their authority and consent is or can ever be binding on their conscience.
That the General Council of County Councils presents the nucleus of a
national authority, and we urge upon it to extend the scope of its
deliberation and action: to take within its purview every question of
national interest and to formulate lines of procedure for the nation." Mr.
Griffith, who was the main-spring and driving force of the movement,
speaking in favour of the resolution, proposed the formation of a council
of 300 to sit in Dublin and form a _de facto_ Irish Parliament, with whom
might be associated all those members of Parliament who refused to attend
at Westminster; its recommendations should be binding upon all County
Councils and Boards of Guardians, whose duty it would be to carry them
into effect as far as their powers extended.

With this meeting ends the preliminary stage, and Sinn Fein formally takes
its place as a duly constituted political party with its own policy and
aims. The _United Irishman_, the organ of its infancy, ceased to exist,
and its place was taken by _Sinn Fein_.




THE EARLY YEARS OF SINN FEIN.


In the year 1906 Sinn Fein emerged from the region of ideals and
abstractions, of academical discussion and preliminary propaganda, into
the arena of Irish party politics with a fully formulated practical
policy. Taking constitutional ground with the dictum that "the
constitution of 1782 is still the constitution of Ireland," it proposed to
show how the people of Ireland, keeping within the letter of a law which
they could not otherwise break, might render nugatory the effort to hold
the country in dependence upon England in pursuance of the Act of Union.
It proposed to arrest the anglicization of Ireland by recovering for the
Irish people the management of those departments of public administration
in which the anglicizing process was working most markedly to the
detriment of Irish interests and which might be remodelled without any
actual breach of the existing law. In the first place it seemed necessary
to take education in hand, and by the introduction of a system more in
accordance with Irish needs and capabilities and characteristics,
endeavour to train up a generation of young Irish men and women, imbued
with a national spirit and national pride, capable of taking their part in
the agricultural, industrial and administrative life of the country.
County Councils might do much in this direction through their intimate
connection with the administration and policy of the Department of
Agriculture and Technical Instruction; a wise use of the means placed by
the Department at their disposal might in a few years revolutionize to the
advantage of Ireland the entire education of the country. The young men
and women thus trained might form the nucleus of an Irish Civil Service,
if the County Councils could be induced to abandon their "patronage" in
the positions at their disposal and throw them open to competitive
examination; others of these trained Irishmen might be employed in an
unofficial Irish Consular Service to the great advantage of Irish
commerce, handicapped in foreign markets by English consuls in the
interests of the English commercial houses. Pressure could be brought to
bear upon the Irish banks to adopt a policy more in sympathy with Irish
trade and industry. There was deposited in Irish banks a sum of
£50,000,000, the savings of the people of Ireland; yet these banks
invested this money in English securities (the Bank of Ireland during the
South African War even lent money to the English Government without
interest) while Irish industries were starving for lack of the capital
which the banks refused to lend. The Stock Exchange, controlled by the
Government, neglected to quote shares in Irish companies that might be
formed for the furtherance of particular industries in particular
districts, discouraging investors who were thus left unable to dispose of
their shares in the ordinary way. It was hoped that public bodies as well
as private persons could be induced to bring pressure to bear on the banks
by withdrawing or withholding accounts until they should adopt a more
patriotic policy, though it was more difficult to see how the Stock
Exchange could be dealt with. The difficulties put by railways and their
heavy freights on the exchange of commodities could be obviated by a
development of the Irish waterways under the control of popularly elected
bodies: the County Councils should see to this and to questions such as
afforestation and the encouragement of home manufactures by specifying
their use in the giving of contracts for institutions under their control.
The Poor Law system should be remodelled in accordance with Irish
sentiment and the money expended upon it spent in Ireland upon Irish
goods. To ensure the advantage of foreign markets without English
interference an Irish Mercantile Marine should be established, what could
be done even by a poor country in this way being shown by the example of
Norway, where nearly everyone was at least part owner of a ship.

But to stimulate and foster native industry and native manufacture was to
Mr. Griffith (whose writings on economic matters formed a kind of gospel
for Sinn Fein) an urgent and supreme duty. He was convinced that until
Ireland became an industrial as well as an agricultural country her
economic position was insecure. Thinking always in terms of national
independence, which he interpreted to mean national ability to dispense
with outside assistance, he looked forward to a time when Ireland should
be able not merely to feed her population from her own resources, but to
supply them with nearly all the other necessaries of modern life. Irish
coal and iron existed in abundance to supply the necessary fuel and raw
material; there was plenty of native marble and other stones for building;
Irish wool and hides were once famous over Europe for their abundance and
excellence. All that was required to make Ireland once more a prosperous
manufacturing country was at her disposal within her own boundaries, and
only waited for the policy that would call out her latent powers. In an
independent State the encouragement required would be forthcoming in
protective legislation, pursued until the protected industry became
established and able to compete on favourable terms with similar
industries in other countries, the work of protection being limited
strictly to the task of building up a temporary screen to shelter a
budding national industry from the wind of competition until its strength
was established. The Irish Parliament in the days of its independence had
adopted this policy, which had enabled it during its short life to secure
to Irish manufactures an unprecedented prosperity. But Ireland, deprived
of legislative powers, might fall back upon a less secure but still
efficacious method of protection. Irish consumers might refuse to purchase
English goods while Irish goods of the same quality were to be had, and
be content to pay in an enhanced price their share of what under other
circumstances the State might have expended in bounties to the industry;
public bodies might insist upon the use of goods of Irish manufacture;
port authorities should arrange port dues so that they should fall most
heavily on manufactured goods brought into the country, and should publish
periodical returns of the imports of manufactured goods at every port in
Ireland; Irish capital should be invited and encouraged to undertake the
development of the country on industrial and commercial lines, being
assured, in the support of industrial and corporate public feeling, of
encouragement and success in its enterprise.

In expounding this theory of protection and of the vital necessity to a
country of developing its industrial life Mr. Griffith was confessedly
following the economic doctrines of the German economist Friedrich List,
"the man whom England caused to be persecuted by the Government of his
native country, and whom she hated and feared more than any man since
Napoleon--the man who saved Germany from falling a prey to English
economics, and whose brain conceived the great industrial and economic
Germany of to-day." A man with credentials like these might well be
listened to with profit. The commercial policy that made the New Germany
could not fail to make a New Ireland, and List made seductive promises. He
foretold an increase in population by a combination of agricultural and
industrial enterprise greater in proportion than by the development of
either industry or agriculture by itself: he denied the possibility of
intellectual progress to a country relying solely or mainly upon
agriculture: culture marched behind the mill and the factory. But the
chief merit of the policy undoubtedly was that it promised a
self-contained and independent economic existence, serving as the basis of
a distinctive national culture.

The merits of List's theories in the abstract it is for economists to
determine: but the concrete instance of the commercial expansion of
Germany seemed at the time a sufficient vindication of their merit. But
Germany was an independent State, competent to fix its own tariffs, give
State encouragement to its industries and determine its own destinies.
Ireland could do none of these things: the efforts of individuals,
societies and local bodies would have to supply the place of legislative
control, their efforts must be voluntary and would be difficult to control
and co-ordinate. To ensure the will to follow out the suggested policy if
it were even accepted, and to secure its acceptance, was a work of
argument and controversy, and to secure a sympathetic or even attentive
audience was not easy. Great claims were made upon the national
intelligence and the national conscience, and success could only be
ensured by practical unanimity. Unanimity was not to be had, and could
hardly be expected in the near future: the task of securing it was one to
tax the resources of a generation of apostles, in the absence of some
cataclysm which might involve a complete change in the general outlook and
ensure the acceptance of the policy by the mere force of circumstances.
Meanwhile something might be done to co-ordinate spasmodic and voluntary
effort. In the absence of a Parliament it might be possible to bring
together a representative assembly whose directions and decisions might
carry a moral sanction to the conscience of an awakened public and to this
end it was proposed to constitute a Council of Three Hundred, forming a
_de facto_ Irish Parliament. A similar council had been suggested by
O'Connell, prolific of expedients: but, sterile in execution, he had never
permitted it to meet and transact business. The expedient was now to be
revived: the Council was, upon report from special committees (such as
those that had been appointed by the Repeal Association) "to deliberate
and formulate workable schemes, which, once formulated, it would be the
duty of all County and Urban Councils, Rural Councils, Poor Law Boards,
and other bodies to give legal effect to so far as their powers permit,
and where these legal powers fell short, to give it the moral force of law
by instructing and inducing those whom they represent to honour and obey
the recommendations of the Council of Three Hundred, individually and
collectively." Finally, Arbitration Courts were to be instituted to
supersede the ordinary courts of law in civil cases, which "would deprive
the corrupt bar of Ireland of much of its incentive to corruption" and
foster a spirit of brotherhood.

Such was the new policy: and it was claimed that "not on recognition of
usurped authority, but on its denial--not on aid from our enemies but on
action for ourselves, the Sinn Fein policy is based. Its essence is
construction and its march to its ultimate political goal must be attended
at every step by the material progress of the nation." The work of
exposition and instruction was carried on partly in the columns of _Sinn
Fein_ partly by means of clubs and branches through the country. A branch
was formed in Belfast in the early autumn of 1906, and at the meeting of
the National Council a month later it was announced that there were
already twenty branches in existence. At that meeting resolutions were
passed in favour of boycotting articles of common consumption from which
the British Exchequer derives its chief revenue (a measure recommended
long before by the Young Ireland Party), in favour of new systems of
primary and secondary education, of competitive examinations for County
Council appointments and of a National Banking System.

The Appeal which the National Council issued for support was based on the
ground that the Council "denies the right of any foreign legislature to
make laws to bind the people of Ireland, denies the authority of any
foreign administration to exist in Ireland, and denies the wisdom of
countenancing the existence of an usurped authority in Irish affairs by
participating in the proceedings of the British Parliament."

The two years following 1906 saw a great advance in the spread of Sinn
Fein principles. Debates were organized with members of the other
Nationalist organizations, reading rooms were established and lectures
given. In Belfast, the Dungannon Club, a separatist organization which had
for some time published a small and ably conducted paper called the
_Republic_, as well as a series of pamphlets, now amalgamated with the
West Belfast Branch of the National Council. Every care was taken to
prevent the movement assuming a sectional as distinct from a national
tendency. Every instance of intolerance towards a fellow-Irishman
committed by members of any political party was faithfully pilloried in
the columns of _Sinn Fein_. When the Westport Guardians (for example)
demanded the dismissal of Canon Hannay from his chaplaincy for being the
author of _The Seething Pot_, which offended the political sensibilities
of the worthy Guardians, he found no more strenuous advocate, and the
Guardians no more unsparing critic, than _Sinn Fein_. In Dublin the
movement was particularly strong, and even succeeded in securing the
return of some of its candidates at the elections to the City Council.
When the Liberal Government in 1906 offered Mr. Redmond, in place of a
Home Rule Bill, what was known as the Devolution Bill, the sincerity of
English parties in their dealings with Ireland began to be widely
questioned and Sinn Fein received an additional impetus. An official Sinn
Fein handbook, "Leabhar na hEireann the Irish Year Book," was published
containing, in addition to articles on the Sinn Fein policy, a number of
valuable statistics with reference to Irish resources, enterprises,
movements and parties, both political and religious. At last in 1908 the
time seemed to have come for contesting a parliamentary election. Mr. C.
J. Dolan, the sitting member for North Leitrim, declared himself a convert
to the new movement. He resigned his seat and offered himself for
re-election as a Sinn Fein candidate. He polled less than a third of the
votes, and Sinn Fein received a serious setback. In fact the ground had
not been sufficiently prepared. A weekly paper, supplemented by a few
pamphlets, with no great circulation outside Dublin, was an insufficient
instrument with which to achieve the success of a new policy within two
years. It was proposed and attempted to repair the error by the
establishment of a daily edition of _Sinn Fein_. But the movement had made
no progress among the more prosperous classes. The paper was in
difficulties from the start and an attempt to make it more popular by
increasing it from four pages to eight committed it beyond recall to
failure. Meanwhile a Sinn Fein Co-operative Bank had been established,
and, pushing ahead, the party issued a programme to which candidates for
election to all elected bodies in Ireland were to be asked to subscribe.
They were asked to pledge themselves to support the independence of
Ireland, a system of protection for Irish industries, the establishment of
an Irish Consular Service and an Irish Mercantile Marine, a general
survey and development of the mineral resources of Ireland, an Irish
National Bank, National Stock Exchange and National Civil Service,
National Courts of Arbitration, a National System of Insurance, National
Control of Transit and Fisheries, a reform of the educational system, the
abolition of the poorhouses, the gradual introduction of the Irish
language as the official language of public boards. In addition they were
to agree to refuse to recognize the British Parliament, and to discourage
the consumption of articles paying duty to the British Treasury and the
enlistment of Irishmen in the British Army.

This ambitious programme met with little or no response, and with the
collapse of the daily paper the apathy of the general public became more
marked. On the mass of Unionist Ireland, especially in Ulster, Sinn Fein
had practically no influence. The movement for the reform of the financial
relations between England and Ireland which had followed the publication
of the Report of the Financial Relations Committee in 1896 had been the
last All-Ireland movement in which Unionist Ulster had taken part. But
after a brief period of enthusiasm the movement had come to nothing.
Though the Report showed that Ireland had been since the Union, and partly
in contravention of the express terms of that Act, the victim of grave
financial injustice, being over-taxed to the amount of
two-and-three-quarter millions of pounds per annum, nothing was done to
remedy the grievance. The English Government was obdurate: the landlords
gradually ceased to take any prominent part in the movement for fear of
prejudicing their class interests. Unionist Ireland, especially in Ulster,
allowed its morbid suspicion of everything in which the rest of the
country was interested to overbear (as usual) its patriotism and its
common sense, and Nationalist Ireland lost interest in the matter in
pursuit of other objects. The Financial Reform Association had been
dissolved in 1899 and the country settled down again to the old political
struggle. The Nationalist Party fought shy of the raising of all
fundamental questions. Its policy was to "wrest from whatever Government
was in power the full measure of a nation's rights," that is to say, to
gain as full a measure of Home Rule from either Liberals or Conservatives
as the exigencies of English politics and the opinion of the English
public might make possible. Their aim was not to educate Irish public
opinion or to convince Irish opposition. It was taken for granted that the
Liberal Party would some day bring in a Home Rule Bill and carry it
against the Conservative Party, and that that would end the matter: that
the Conservatives (according to the English party system of government)
would accept "the verdict of the people," yielding to the inevitable, and
that the Irish Unionists would have to follow suit. To discuss the
fundamentals of the problem, to endeavour to unite Irishmen (so far as
argument and a generally understood common interest could unite them) was
tiresome, irrelevant and tending to the subversion of party discipline.
For the policy now adopted by the Parliamentarians "a united party" was
above all things essential; and the unity desired meant not merely a
common aim but an agreement upon all details: the great offence was
"faction," and under faction was comprised all independent criticism
either of policy or of principle. A party thus constituted was, if things
went well and it was wisely led, an invaluable instrument of parliamentary
warfare at Westminster; but if things went wrong or a mistake was made, or
if Westminster should cease at any time to be the centre of interest,
disaster was sure to follow. And this conception of the duty of an Irish
National Party overlooked the possibilities latent in Ulster Unionism. To
an extent, not at the time fully grasped by anyone in Ireland, it stood
not for the Unionist Party, as that party was understood in England, but
for itself alone. The exigencies of party warfare required that it, like
the Nationalist Party, should attach itself to an English party; that it
should adopt the parlance of English parties; that it should declare its
unbending loyalty to Imperial interests and the British Constitution. But
it was not inclined to admit in practice that the British Constitution
could override its own particular interests. It could not be ignored or
flouted with impunity; it was the rock upon which all schemes based upon
the peaceful possibilities of English parliamentary situations were
destined in the end to make shipwreck.

But the rock was not yet in sight and its existence was unsuspected. It
was common ground to the two Irish parties that the arena was Parliament
and that the prize should go to the party which won the game according to
Westminster rules. It is easy now for those who kept their eyes shut to
say that they would have opened them if everybody else had not been born
blind, and it would be more dignified to say nothing. But the fact remains
that the mistake was made.

During the lean years for its policy that followed 1908, _Sinn Fein_
continued persistently to preach its doctrines: that to obtain "the full
measure of a nation's rights" Ireland must rely not upon outside aid but
upon her own efforts: that all Irishmen had a common interest, and that
interest not the interest of England: that all Irishmen, whether called
Nationalist or Unionist, were brothers in a common country impoverished
and weakened by the loss of independence resulting from the Act of Union,
and that to recognize their common interests and understand one another
was their immediate object. It published articles on the destruction of
Irish industries in the interests of those of England, a destruction
arrested by the Constitution of 1782, and acting without restraint since
the loss of that Constitution by the Act of Union. It welcomed literary
contributions by the most eminent Irish men of letters, without
distinction of politics or religion: it preached unceasingly the
doctrines of toleration and goodwill amongst Irishmen. But as the prospect
of the triumph of parliamentarianism through its alliance with the Liberal
Party grew brighter, interest centred more and more upon the doings of
Parliament and the vicissitudes of parliamentary fortunes. Now at last the
dream of a century was to take shape in something resembling a substance,
and the time for discussion, arrangement and accommodation was over. In
April, 1910, _Sinn Fein_ announced on behalf of its party that Mr. John
Redmond, having now the chance of a lifetime to obtain Home Rule, will be
given a free hand, without a word said to embarrass him. But it was
difficult not to speak sometimes. When the Liberal Budget left the House
of Commons that month, before the veto of the House of Lords had been
abolished, Mr. Redmond's acquiescence in these tactics was freely
censured. When in the autumn of the same year Mr. Redmond committed
himself to the declaration: "We do not want to discontinue our
representation in the House of Commons when Home Rule comes; we desire to
have Irish members sitting at Westminster not only to form a nucleus of
the ultimate Federal Parliament of the Empire, but also to assist in
legislation concerning Great Britain and Ireland collectively," the
declaration was quoted with disgust. The Home Rule of the Liberal Party
was indeed far removed from the Constitution of 1782.

Sinn Fein took no official part in the elections of 1910, preferring, as
it said in its official organ, to remain "wholly free from any moral
responsibility" for the legislation offered by the Liberals to the
Parliamentary Party, while retaining the right to examine, criticise and
warn. This was not purely an act of self-sacrifice. In fact Sinn Fein was
never at so low an ebb. While the country was drifting farther and farther
in the direction of Home Rule, Sinn Fein was insisting more and more upon
first principles. Its official attitude of warm approval of the work of
the Gaelic League was exchanged for one of insistence upon the urgency of
making Irish the national language. "We must begin again," said _Sinn
Fein_, "to be an Irish-speaking people, or there can be no future of
national independence before us." With England on the one hand and America
on the other, 120,000,000 people speaking English, the danger to the
language was imminent. "We freely admit," it proceeded, "that this
conclusion is not one we sought nor one we desired. The conviction has
forced itself upon us and has been with some reluctance accepted by us."
And it continued to speak plain language about the Home Rule which now
seemed inevitable: "No scheme which the English Parliament may pass in the
near future will satisfy Sinn Fein--no legislature created in Ireland
which is not supreme and absolute will offer a basis for concluding a
final settlement with the foreigners who usurp the government of this
country. But any measure which gives genuine, if even partial, control of
their own affairs to Irishmen shall meet with no opposition from us and
should meet with no opposition from any section of Irishmen." So far was
Sinn Fein at this time from any desire to do more than infuse a new spirit
into Irishmen, favourable to the eventual future development of the policy
outlined by the National Council, that it expressly disclaimed the title
of a party. "It is not our business," was the conclusion of a pamphlet
issued by the Belfast Branch of Sinn Fein, "to make one more party among
the political parties of Ireland, nor to carry on a party propaganda nor
to waste time quarrelling with any political party. Above the cries of
contending parties we raise the cry of Ireland and Irish independence--an
independence in the gaining of which Catholic and Protestant will be
shoulder comrades as they were a century ago, and in the advantages of
which they will be equal sharers. Not an Ireland for a class or a creed,
but an Ireland for the Irish, and the whole of the Irish, not an Ireland
fettered and trammelled by England, but mistress of her own destinies,
evolving her own national life and building for herself an ever-increasing
prosperity. We can leave the past with its bitter memories, its bigotries
and its feuds to those whose property it is, the reactionaries who here,
as in every country, would stem the tide of national advancement. We have
to recognise the nation, rather than parties within the nation; for it is
greater than any party, and in the service of the nation all men have an
equal right as well as an equal duty."




SINN FEIN AND THE REPUBLICANS.


From 1910 to 1913 the Sinn Fein movement was practically moribund.
Political attention in Ireland was largely centred on the fate of Home
Rule and the tactics of the Irish Party at Westminster or the struggles of
the Party at home with Mr. William O'Brien and the All-for-Ireland League.
The Constitution which Ireland might enjoy in 1914 was of more pressing
interest than the merits of the Constitution of 1782.

But there were other forces at work in Ireland in opposition to the two
official parties of Unionists and Nationalists. There were in the first
place the survivors of the Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood,
whose ideal was an Irish Republic, independent of any connection with
England or indeed with any other country. Fenianism had become to all
outward appearance practically dead in Ireland. It had suffered, in the
opinion of some at least of its members, from the fact that it had put
revolutionary action first and the preaching of republicanism second. As
one of them wrote afterwards, "The Fenian propagandist work in the sixties
was entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism.
Rightly or wrongly I have always held the view that the absence of the
deeper Republican thought amongst our people accounted for a considerable
amount of the falling away after '67." The people whose republican
sentiments were weak "dropped back into the easier path leading only to a
much modified national independence." Accordingly after 1867 the Fenians
attempted to make republicanism an essential part of their propaganda.
There had been a large number of Protestant Irishmen among the Fenians,
and, as Republican sentiment had been traditional in Ulster since the days
of the United Irishmen, it seemed that a movement aiming at an Irish
Republic might have more chance of success among Ulster Protestants than
any form of "Home Rule." Besides, the "New Departure," the alliance of
Fenianism with Parnell in the Land War, had weakened the movement still
more. "It was disastrous," says the same authority, "to the Fenian
movement as such, but it drove the Land League through to a degree that no
really constitutional movement could ever have reached." In allying itself
to some extent with Parnell, in abandoning for the time in his interests
its revolutionary propaganda, it seemed to have weakened its own moral
force, while it did not succeed in winning even Home Rule. And the fact of
its being of necessity a secret society brought it under the ban of the
Church. Fear of ecclesiastical censure most often kept young Irishmen out
of Fenianism. It was not enough for the Fenians to say, as they did, that
to the existence of a secret society whose aims were lawful there was no
moral or theological objection. The experts in morals and theology said
that there was, and their word, and not that of the Fenians, was accepted
on the whole as final. And the actions of the Invincibles during the
Parnellite struggle had gravely compromised not Parnell only but the
Fenian Party, to which they were supposed to belong. As a matter of fact
the Irish Republican Brotherhood had nothing to do with them. It had no
sympathy with, nor reliance on, their policy of political assassination. A
member of the Brotherhood who joined the Invincibles was regarded as
having broken his oath to its members and its constitution. But this was
not generally believed, any more than Parnell's statement that he had been
no party to the brutal murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish; and the
prestige of Fenianism was lowered. Still, the Irish Republican Brotherhood
was in existence as a centre of separatist and republican thought and the
imminence of Home Rule could not but stimulate its interest. Its members
must either decide to lend their support to Mr. Redmond as it had once
been lent to Parnell, or to come out, whether openly or in private, as his
opponents.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood was not the only centre of republican
thought in Ireland. In 1896 the Irish Socialist Republican Party had been
founded in Dublin by James Connolly, the ablest organizer and writer which
Irish Labour has yet produced. Under his editorship _The Workers'
Republic_ became an organ of Socialism and Republicanism in their
application to Irish conditions. The new party took its part in Irish
political activities. It joined the movement to commemorate the Rebellion
of 1798, the work of the United Irishmen whose political creed had been
republican. Along with other Irish Nationalists it joined in the work of
the Irish Transvaal Committee and helped to organize and equip the Irish
Brigade which fought on the side of the South African Republics. But till
after the General Election of 1910 it made no attempt to enter Irish
politics as an independent party. It remained in its constitution a purely
trade union party though sympathetic with, and ready to lend its aid in,
the Irish national movement. In 1911 the proposal to found a combined
political and industrial movement was defeated by only three votes at the
Congress held at Galway, and in the following year the Clonmel Congress
decided to found "an Irish Labour Party independent of all other parties
in the country, in order that the organized workers might be able to enter
the proposed Irish Parliament as an organized Labour Party upon the
political field." Though the Irish Labour Party was not professedly
republican, and though its political activities were confined for the time
to the enforcement of the political interests of Irish Labour, yet the
leaders and a considerable number of the rank and file were undoubtedly
republican in their aims and sympathies.

The Irish Labour Party had need, in truth, to be independent of all
existing political parties in Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Party was
definitely and irrevocably committed to the Conservative and capitalist
programme. It would as soon have admitted to its ranks a professed
dynamitard as a professed socialist (whatever his views might have been on
the subject of the Legislative Union). On Socialism the Church could not
be expected to smile (and did not smile) and its attitude determined that
of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Party was in a delicate position: it
could not say a word against Socialism for fear of offending the English
Labour Party, whose votes were required in the parliamentary struggle: it
could not say a word in favour of it for fear of offending the Church. It
was sitting upon a razor's edge and a word too much in either direction
might easily disturb its balance. So it voted steadily, manfully and
silently for Labour measures in England and left its action to the
country. In the frame-work of the Sinn Fein programme there was no place
for Labour. Among all its plans for the relief of Ireland from the evils
of the English connection there was none for the relief of the evils of
which the workers complained. Its official organ was against strikes, and
even considered that the connection of Irish with English Labour was an
act of treachery to the country. Some of the most pungent criticism to
which the party was subjected came from the paper founded in 1911 by James
Larkin, _The Irish Worker and People's Advocate_. In its first number, the
editor defined his attitude to the O'Brienites, the Irish Parliamentary
Party and Sinn Fein. He described the last as a "party or rump which,
while pretending to be Irish of the Irish, insults the nation by trying
to foist on it not only imported economics based on false principles, but
which had the temerity to advocate the introduction of foreign capitalists
into this sorely exploited country." "Their chief appeal" (he goes on) "to
the foreign capitalists was that they (the imported capitalists) would
have freedom to employ cheap Irish labour.... For eleven years these
self-appointed prophets and seers have led their army up the hill and led
them down again, and would continue to so lead them, if allowed, until the
leader was appointed King of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782."

The definitely Republican movement found an organ of expression in the
autumn of 1910 by the establishment of _Saoirseacht na h-Eireann, Irish
Freedom_, a fortnightly paper of eight pages, under the management of
Seaghan MacDiarmada. Its motto was a quotation from Wolfe Tone: "To
subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection
with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils and to
assert the independence of my country--these were my objects." Its policy
was explained at length in its editorial: "We believe that free political
institutions are an absolute essential for the future security and
development of the Irish people and, therefore, we seek to establish free
political institutions in this country; and in this we wish not to be the
organ of any party, but the organ of an uncompromising Nationalism. We
stand not for an Irish party but for National tradition--the tradition of
Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, of John Mitchel and John O'Leary. Like them
we believe in and would work for the independence of Ireland--and we use
the term with no reservation stated or implied; we stand for the complete
and total separation of Ireland from England and the establishment of an
Irish Government, untrammelled and uncontrolled by any other Government in
the world. Like them we stand for an Irish Republic--for, as Thomas Devin
Reilly said in 1848, 'Freedom can take but one shape amongst us--a
Republic.'"

The attitude of this new republican movement to that of the previous Sinn
Fein movement is clearly defined in a subsequent leader. "The temporary
suspension of the Sinn Fein movement is often cited as a throwback but it
is nothing of the kind. Under whatever name we propagate our ideas the
Irish Nation must be built on Sinn Fein principles, or non-recognition of
British authority, law, justice or legislature: that is our basis and the
principles of the Sinn Fein policy are as sound to-day as ever they were.
The movement is temporarily suspended because some of its leaders directed
it into an '82 movement, thinking they could collar the middle-classes and
drop the separatists; but when the separatists were dropped there was no
movement left."

The new movement was in fact an attempt to rehabilitate and re-establish
the Sinn Fein movement by making it definitely republican while adhering
to the main lines of the policy by which Sinn Fein hoped to succeed. But
the original Sinn Fein continued on its way. Its paper continued to be
published and to find readers. It was unrepentant with regard to its
political aims: "We do not care a fig for republicanism as republicanism,"
said _Sinn Fein_ two years later; but from the winter of 1910 dates the
movement which eventually drove out of Sinn Fein the idea of the
re-establishment of the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland under the
Constitution of 1782 and replaced it by that of an Irish Republic.

The new movement was the direct outcome of the Wolfe Tone Clubs. It was
they who carried out all the work entailed by the publication of _Irish
Freedom_. These clubs had just been founded "to propagate the principles
and disseminate the teachings of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the other true
Irishmen who in 1798, 1803, 1848 and 1867 strove for the complete
independence of Ireland; to encourage the union of Irishmen of all creeds
and sections in working for the freedom of their country; to promote the
advancement of national thought and inculcate the spirit of self-sacrifice
and self-reliance by which alone true liberty can be attained." The
members pledged themselves to substitute the common name of Irishman for
that of Catholic or Protestant; no person serving in the armed forces of
England was eligible for membership.

This new branch of the Sinn Fein movement attempted to do what the old
Sinn Fein had not as yet done, get into direct touch with labour
questions and the labour movement, though perhaps not very successfully.
The first number of _Irish Freedom_ had an article on sweated industries,
pointing out that though Nationalists talked as if Belfast were the only
place in Ireland where workers were underpaid, many Nationalists were open
to the same reproach. It pointed out the duty of the universities in the
matter, pleading for a really scientific study of Irish economic problems,
including (besides the wages system) such questions as the working of the
Land Acts, Co-operation, the conditions of the Congested Districts. It
welcomed with enthusiasm the Co-operative Movement. "The co-operative
spirit," it said, "is perhaps the greatest asset in modern Ireland and it
will require a stronger flame than the speeches of political firebrands to
melt it away." On the occasion of the strikes in Belfast, Dublin, Cork and
other towns in 1911 it took sides with the strikers, in marked contrast to
Mr. Griffith's _Sinn Fein_, which preached something approaching "abject
surrender" on the part of the workers. It induced Mr. George Russell to
contribute an article on the Co-operative Commonwealth. This undoubtedly
went a certain way to bring about a friendlier feeling on the part of
Labour towards Sinn Fein, but it was long before the attitude of strict
Sinn Feiners was forgotten by the workers. Its attitude towards Ulster was
more outspoken and definite. In 1910 the objection of Ulster to the
approaching Home Rule policy of the Liberals began to harden into a
threat of extreme militancy. A section of Ulster Unionists announced their
intention not to submit under any circumstances to the Home Rule Bill even
if it should become law and receive the Royal assent. To the Republicans
this seemed "tantamount to an admission of the whole Irish case for
self-government. If it means anything it means that Ireland, north as well
as south of the Boyne, refuses to recognize any inherent right of the
electors of Great Britain to decide how it shall be governed." The
justness of this appreciation of the Ulster position must be examined
later: but, true or false, it is characteristic of the attitude which the
whole Sinn Fein Party was afterwards to take. But the Ulstermen coupled
with their attitude towards the Liberal Party and its doings a truculent
defiance of all Catholic Ireland. The cause of this hostility the
Republicans found in the attitude of the Parliamentary Party. While that
party was in the height of its success "no attempt was made to understand
their [_i.e._ the Ulster Protestants'] attitude or grapple with problems
that appealed to them, and the economic grievances of Belfast workers were
regarded as their own affair, not as the business of men who professed to
represent the Irish people as a whole. The prevailing idea seemed to be
that they should be left to stew in their own juice, and if they did not
fall in with whatever scheme the Liberals carried through the English
Parliament that they should be, in the phrase of a prominent
parliamentarian, which has never been forgotten, 'overborne by the strong
hand.'... The party of the future must make the conversion of Ulster the
first plank in their platform and recognize that a national settlement
from which Ulster dissented would not be worth winning." In the Ancient
Order of Hibernians, all sections of Sinn Fein as well as the Labour Party
saw a menace to any prospect of an accommodation with Ulster. This
strictly sectarian society, as sectarian and often as violent in its
methods as the Orange Lodges, evoked their determined hostility. "This
narrowing down," wrote _Irish Freedom_, "of Nationalism to the members of
one creed is the most fatal thing that has taken place in Irish politics
since the days of the Pope's Brass Band.... That the driving power of the
official Nationalists should be supplied by an organization of which no
Protestant, however good a patriot, can be a member, is in direct
opposition to the policy and traditions of Irish Nationalism." The Ancient
Order was described as "a job-getting and job-cornering organization," as
"a silent practical rivetting of sectarianism on the nation." The _Irish
Worker_ was equally emphatic. "Were it not for the existence of the Board
of Erin, the Orange Society would have long since ceased to exist.... To
Brother Devlin and not to Brother Carson is mainly due the progress of the
Covenanter movement in Ulster."

Devoted to the cause of an independent Irish Republic and of the union of
Irishmen without distinction of creed under one national banner, the
cause of Wolfe Tone, the movement attracted idealists who had so far held
aloof from the older, non-republican, form of Sinn Fein. Chief among these
were P. H. Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, both poets and men of fine
literary gifts, both regarded with affection for their high and
disinterested devotion to the cause of Ireland. And in accordance with
Irish Republican tradition it took up an attitude with regard to armed
revolution somewhat different from that of Sinn Fein. While the latter
held that in the present state of Ireland an armed revolution was
impracticable, the Republicans, though not directly advising it, held that
it had a reasonable prospect of success if England should become involved
in a European War. Some Irish revolutionists who had so far held aloof
from all political parties were encouraged by this to join the republican
branch of Sinn Fein and try to infuse into it a more determined
revolutionary spirit.

The Labour Party, whose opinions were expressed by the _The Irish Worker
and People's Advocate_, adopted a similar attitude. Their motto was the
phrase of Fintan Lalor: "The principle I state and mean to stand upon is
this--that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the
sun and down to the centre, is vested in the people of Ireland." Their own
language was equally explicit: "By Freedom we mean that we Irishmen in
Ireland shall be free to govern this land called Ireland by Irish people
in the interest of all the Irish people; that no other people or peoples,
no matter what they call themselves, or from whence they come, now or in
the future, have any claim to interfere with the common right of the
common people of this land of Ireland to work out their own destiny. We
owe no allegiance to any other nation, nor the king, governors or
representatives of any other nation." In spite of the criticism that a
purely Labour movement should confine itself to Labour questions, and
leave the broader political issues to the one side, _The Irish Worker_
declared for an independent Irish Republic: "We know," it said, "that
until the workers of Ireland obtain possession of the land of Ireland and
make their own laws they can only hope for and obtain partial improvement
of their conditions. We ask no more than our rights: we will be content
with no less." The desire for a "free independent nation, enjoying a true
Republican freedom" linked the Labour Party to the republican branch of
Sinn Fein, but on other questions there was much disagreement. The
attitude of Arthur Griffith to the Wexford Strike in 1911 was the subject
of bitter comment. The Young Republicans, who objected to English Trade
Unions sending "English money" to finance the Irish strikers, were bluntly
told to mind their own business: the Gaelic League, which encouraged Irish
manufactures, was said to have failed in its duty by taking no account of
the conditions under which they were manufactured, or of the wages paid to
the workers who made them: "the revival of the Irish language is a
desirable ambition and has our whole-hearted support; but the abolition of
destitution, disease and the conditions that cause them are even more
necessary and urgent. What is the use of bilingualism to a dead man?"

But however they might differ on minor points, both of these new parties,
the Independent Labour Party of Ireland and the Young Republican Party,
were at one with each other and with Sinn Fein in opposition to the
Parliamentary Party. It was pointed out that in the twenty-one years which
had elapsed since the death of Parnell his policy of "blocking the way to
English legislation until Ireland was accorded self-government" had been
abandoned without any other definite policy being substituted for it: that
during ten of those years an English party, professing sympathy with
Ireland, had been kept in office by the Irish vote: that Home Rule was
still in the future and the principles governing the expected measure
still undetermined. In March, 1912, the Executive of Sinn Fein resolved
unanimously: "That this Executive earnestly hopes that the promised Home
Rule Bill will be one that may be accepted as a genuine measure of reform
by the people of Ireland and that it may speedily become law. Should the
Bill, on the contrary, be rejected as unsatisfactory by the people of
Ireland, or should it, though satisfactory, fail to become law--which we
would deplore--the organization is prepared to lead the country by other
and effective methods to the attainment of self-government." In reporting
this resolution _Sinn Fein_ wrote, in words which at the time seemed to
many supporters of the Party offensive, but which now seem charged with
portent: "No new parliamentarian movement will be permitted unopposed to
build upon the ruins of that which goes down with a sham Home Rule
measure. To make this clear before the Home Rule measure be introduced is
the last service we can render the Parliamentary Party. They have had the
Government 'in the hollow of their hands' for years--they have removed the
House of Lords from their path--there is nothing to prevent the Liberal
Government introducing and passing a full measure of Home Rule save and
except its enmity to Ireland. With a majority of over 100 and the Lords'
veto removed the fullest measure of Home Rule can be passed in two years.
It is the business of the Parliamentary Party to have it passed or to
leave the stage to those who are in earnest."

The appearance of the text of the Bill was not reassuring even to those
advocates of Irish independence who were willing to take a measure of Home
Rule as an instalment. The financial provisions of the Bill met with
severe and justified criticism. In spite of the fact that Ireland had been
systematically over-taxed for a century, and that a Parliamentary
Commission had so reported nearly twenty years earlier, the financial
provision for the proposed Irish Parliament could only be described as
beggarly. And almost everything that really mattered in the government of
Ireland was withdrawn from the competence of the Irish Parliament. It was
described in mockery as a "Gas and Water Bill," and even convinced
supporters of the Parliamentary Party had their qualms in declaring their
acceptance of the measure. There was no dubiety about the verdict of the
Nationalist organizations opposed to Mr. Redmond. _The Worker's Republic_
was outspoken in the extreme: it complained that the Bill had been
extorted from the Liberals "by whining and apologizing": in an Open Letter
to the United Irish League of Great Britain, it said, "You are told that
the people of Ireland accepted the Bill as a full and complete recognition
of our claim as Irishmen. That is a lie ... a Bill, which is the rottenest
bargain ever made by a victorious people with a mean, pettifogging,
despised Government." "A beggar," it wrote again, "gets only crumbs and
we, Irish workers, want a country." The verdict of _Irish Freedom_ was
equally emphatic; it was summed up in the phrase, "Damn your concessions;
we want our country."

But whatever individual Irish Members of Parliament may have thought of
the Bill, the Party was as a whole committed to it. No one in Ireland knew
what negotiations, barterings, and bargains preceded the actual drafting
of the measure: what the difficulties and objections were which had to be
met by Mr. Redmond: in how far he had offered concessions, in how far they
had been forced upon him. They only knew that he was prepared to support
the resulting Bill and that the resulting Bill was less than they had been
led to expect. There was little open discussion of principles, criticism
was not relished or welcomed. The Party had done its best for the country
and the country was now called upon to back the Party. A bargain had been
made by the representatives of the Irish people and the Irish people were
expected to stand by the consequences. Under other circumstances this
appeal would have been accepted, but it was no answer to the complaint
that the Irish representatives had not been empowered to abandon in
express words every national claim that went beyond those satisfied by the
provisions of the Home Rule Bill. This was the kernel of the dispute
between the Party and the Nationalists who opposed them. It seemed as if
by the deliberate renunciation of any desire or intention to claim for
Ireland anything more than the status of a dependency of Great Britain,
deprived forever (so far as an act of legislation could deprive her) of
her immemorial claim to be an independent nation, the Party had betrayed
the national demand and sold the national honour. But the Party did not
see (or betrayed no sign of having seen) the relevance of the criticism;
and certainly they miscalculated the strength of the opposition which was
gathering in the country. In the face of Ulster's attitude, they
confidently expected the whole country to rally to their support. And,
after all, what could, or would, the dissentients do about it? Sinn Fein
continued loudly to proclaim its policy of opposition to the use of
force. It was all very well to say "Sinn Fein is the policy of to-morrow.
If Ireland be again deceived as to Home Rule, she has no other policy to
fall back upon"; but the same article (December, 1912) contained the
words: "The great offence of Sinn Fein indeed in the eyes of its opponents
is that it does not urge an untrained and unequipped country to futile
insurrection." If Sinn Fein then would only talk, and the only place to
talk to the purpose was the House of Commons, what was there to prevent
Home Rule from being an accomplished fact "in the not far distant future?"
Ulster supplied the answer, not for itself only, but for the rest of
Ireland.




THE VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT.


The genius of Ulster (perhaps through some happy combination of primitive
stocks) has always been practical and militant. It was the last Irish
province to submit to English rule. The Celtic population which survived
the clearances and the plantings has exercised upon planters and settlers
the ancient charm of the Celtic stock and made them, in spite of
themselves, _ipsis Hibernis Hiberniores_. The O'Neills were the most
formidable antagonists whom the invaders encountered in Ireland. They made
the last great stand for national independence. When Owen Roe O'Neill died
the Irish nation was, in the words of Davis, "sheep without a shepherd
when the snow shuts out the sky" and the flight of the Earls was the sign
that the resistance of Ireland was over with the resistance of Ulster. In
later times and under changed conditions Ulster retained the prerogative
of leadership. The Volunteers who forced the Constitution of 1782 were
largely Ulstermen; the leaders of the United Irishmen were to be found in
Ulster and the compact of their Union was sealed on the mountain that
rises above Belfast. John Mitchel, who led the Young Irelanders in action
as Davis was their master in thought, was the son of an Ulster
Presbyterian minister. Other Irishmen may have excelled in literature and
the arts, have voiced more eloquently the aspirations of their country or
sung with more pathos of its fall, but the bent of Ulster has been on the
whole towards action and movement. The heart and brain of Ireland may beat
and think elsewhere, but Ulster is its right arm. Ireland is proud of
Ulster. Under an unnatural and vicious system of government they have
quarrelled; but if Ulster were reconciled to Ireland Ulster might lead it
where it chose.

On the question of the Home Rule Bill Ulster was almost equally divided.
The majority of the Ulster Protestants were against it, though a minority,
among whom traditions of Protestant Nationalism had survived the sordid
bigotries fostered for a century, were strongly in its favour; the
majority of the Catholic population were in favour of it. Among the
Nationalists there was a minority who professed the creed of Sinn Fein and
of Republicanism: late in 1913 a branch of the Young Republican Party in
Belfast, composed of Gaelic Leaguers, members of Freedom Clubs and Trades
Unionists unfurled its banner of an orange sunburst on a green ground with
the motto in white, "Young Republican Party--Dia agus an Pobul," and there
had been branches of Sinn Fein established in Ulster some years earlier;
but on the whole the Ulster Nationalists supported the Parliamentary
Party. No geographical or ethnological line of political demarcation could
be drawn. There was no district in Ulster which was not politically
divided: there was no stock in Ulster which had not members in both
political camps. Some of the most outspoken and vehement of the Unionist
Party bore, and were proud of, purely Irish names; many of the
Nationalists were the bearers of names introduced into Ireland with the
planters sent by King James. The settled policy of the Act of the Union
had done its work with almost complete success. The Protestant had learned
to regard the connection with England as essential to the maintenance of
his religious and civil freedom: he believed not only that the Roman
Catholic Church was officially intolerant, but that all Roman Catholics
were, as a matter of fact, intolerant in conduct and in practice, and
incapable of being anything else. And Irish Catholics seemed to him to be
peculiarly susceptible to the intolerant influences of their
ecclesiastical leaders. When the views of the Catholic Hierarchy in
Ireland and those of Irish Nationalists coincided he saw in their
agreement the triumph of the "priest in politics": when they differed he
was either at a loss to account for an occurrence so far removed from the
settled habits of nature or saw in it an obscure but interesting symptom
of a fear of Home Rule on the part of the Hierarchy, a fear that Home Rule
might jeopardise their own predominance. But not even the supposed
hesitations of the Hierarchy could reconcile him to the prospect of a Home
Rule under which the electoral majority would be "priest-ridden." Unkind
critics might have urged that people whose whole political outlook was
hag-ridden by the phantoms of popes and priests were not in a position to
call those "priest-ridden" who at any rate sometimes differed sharply from
their clergy in political and civil affairs; but the Ulster Protestant was
proof against mere logical quibbles and rhetorical retorts. He had done
his thinking about politics with the Act of Union: he had taken his stand:
he was careless of taunts, cajolery and threats: let those meddle with him
who dared. He spurned the allegation of intolerance, but he was intolerant
without knowing it and (to do him justice) for reasons which, had they
corresponded with the facts, would have been sound. An Ireland under
ecclesiastical despotism, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be no
place for a man to live in, and to exchange the Legislative Union with
England for a legislative union with Rome would indeed be a disastrous
bargain. As a matter of fact, had the Ulster Protestant realized it, there
was no fear of any such result. In the Irish Catholic mind there was
clearly defined the limit of the sphere in which the Church was supreme.
That sphere was much larger than the restricted area within which the
Protestant allowed his Church to legislate at its ease: but it was subject
to limitations all the same. And it was growing narrower and narrower.
Individual ecclesiastics may have roamed at large (and did roam at large)
over the whole sphere of human activities: individual priests made
monstrous claims upon the submission of their flocks in matters with
which they had no kind of concern. The intense devotion to their religion
which marks Catholic Irishmen, the respect which they feel for the
priesthood which stood by them in dark and evil days, had induced a spirit
of patience in submission to claims which could not be substantiated. But
with the revival of interest in political thought the position was
changing. The battle for political freedom of thought and action which the
Fenians had fought had its result. Ecclesiastical claims in civil matters
were subject to a close scrutiny. The Gaelic League had more than once
asserted with success its claim to be free in its own sphere from any kind
of ecclesiastical dictation, and in every instance the people of Ireland
has taken its side. The attempt of the Roman Curia to interfere with the
subscription to the Parnell testimonial had been an ignominious failure;
and the boast of an Irish leader that he would as soon take his politics
from Constantinople as from Rome was generally acknowledged to be sound as
a statement of theory. But there were still instances enough of impossible
claims on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities to afford the Ulster
Protestant a good _prima facie_ brief against Home Rule.

Allied to the fear of the "priest in politics" was the fear that under
Home Rule every position in Ireland worth speaking of would be given to
Roman Catholics and that Protestants would be systematically and
ruthlessly excluded. This was an apprehension very difficult to deal with
because the real grounds of it were seldom openly expressed. These grounds
were first, the consciousness that Irish Catholics had been for
generations systematically excluded from all posts that were in the gift
of Irish Protestants and the consequent probability that reprisals would
be called for and taken; second, the innate conviction, born of
generations of religious controversy and suspicion, that Catholics were
"not to be trusted," that, whatever they said to the contrary, they were
certain to act harshly towards Protestants, and that the accession to
power in Ireland of a permanent Catholic majority would mean persecution
in matters of religion and corruption in matters of administration. This
position was fortified by a set of arguments, crude in themselves, but
less crude than the convictions that required to employ them. It was
pointed out that Irish Catholics, being deprived for generations of
acceptable opportunities of higher education, and of practically all
opportunities of administrative experience, could not be expected to have
the necessary qualifications for the posts to which they were certain to
be appointed: that this was not their fault (it certainly was not) but
that, facts being facts, reasonable persons must take account of them and
frame their attitude in accordance with them. It may seem strange that all
this was called "adherence to the principles of civil and religious
liberty," that persons calling for religious toleration in the abstract
should refuse to practise it in any number of given cases: but though
there was a certain amount of conscious artifice in the use of words,
arising from a dim feeling that the profession of tolerant and liberal
sentiments was more likely to arouse outside sympathy than a blunt
statement of religious prejudice, there was, after all, the idea that the
only way to preserve civil and religious liberty in Ireland for anybody
was to curtail its exercise in practice by the Roman Catholic and
Nationalist portion of the country. It was easy for Catholics to point to
the number of Protestants who had been honoured and trusted leaders of the
national movement, to the friendly terms upon which Protestants and
Catholics for the most part lived together in the South and West of
Ireland, to the Protestants who had been appointed to positions of trust
and profit under boards and in institutions managed by Irish Catholics.
The answer was that such Protestants either were the only persons who
could be trusted to perform the duties of their position or had proved
"accommodating" enough to suit, or that their appointment was part of a
deep-laid plan to conceal the real feeling of Catholics to Protestants
until such time as, the bait being taken, Protestants would confide in
their enemies and hand themselves over to their mercies.

It is evident that no line of argument would have dispelled feelings such
as these; and there does not seem to be in fact any possibility of
dispelling them by mere professions of friendliness, or by any other means
than an experience to the contrary which can build up gradually an
opposite conviction.

The religious difficulty was the root difficulty in Ulster with regard to
Home Rule. If it had been removed or removable the rest would have been
easy; but it was not the only difficulty. There was the fear, widely held
by the Belfast merchants and manufacturers, that a Home Rule Parliament
would ruin their industries: directly by means of taxation and indirectly
by public mismanagement. It was held that an Irish Parliament could not
"pay its way" without the imposition of extra taxation, and that no source
of profitable taxation was to be found in Ireland save and except the
prosperous industries of the North. In the second place, it was believed
that, Ireland being largely agricultural, the new Parliament would
represent a predominantly agricultural interest and that its legislation
might be expected to fail to take into account the industrial interests of
the country, mainly represented in the North. Again, an untried Parliament
would for a time be almost certainly guilty of mismanagement and
incapacity from which the business interests of the North would be sure to
suffer.

Lastly, the strong "British" sentiment of Ulster barred the way to any
weakening of the tie uniting Ireland to Great Britain. This feeling,
amounting at times almost to the consciousness of a secondary nationality,
found expression in the theory that Protestant Ulster was a separate
"nation." But though the expression of the theory was often absurd, the
feeling which underlay it was genuine. It had not been always there: it
was liable to disappear under the stress of stronger feelings: it had been
subject to revulsions. When the Irish Church Act was passed, the Grand
Orange Lodge of Ireland, the Cardinalate of Ulster Protestantism, had
passed by a majority the following resolution: "That all statements and
provisions in the objects, rules and formularies of the Orange institution
which impose any obligation on its members to maintain the Legislative
Union between Great Britain and Ireland be expunged therefrom." The
resolution was inoperative because a two-thirds majority was required to
alter the rules: but that it could be passed is significant of the fact
that "British" sentiment is not the ruling sentiment in the stronghold of
Ulster Unionism under provocation. Still, though spasmodic and uncertain,
the feeling had to be taken into account, and in the hands of skilful
manipulators was capable of being worked into a factitious fervour.

While Ulster Unionists were of this mind it was not to be expected that
they would acquiesce without protest in the passing of a Home Rule Act:
nor was it to be expected that they would think differently because a
majority of the electors of Great Britain decided that they should. The
only people who could win them were their own countrymen. Sinn Fein saw
this clearly and in its own way tried its best to allay Protestant fears
and Protestant prejudices. _Irish Freedom_ printed a letter from New York
from an old Fenian who said, "The great barrier to Irish success is the
fear of the Protestants--unfounded and unreasonable, but undeniably
there--that their interests would be in danger in a free Ireland. Remove
that fear and the Irish question is solved. It would be of infinitely more
service to Ireland to convert ten Ulster Orangemen to Nationality by
convincing them that their interests would be safe in a free Ireland than
to convince a million Englishmen that the Irish would be loyal to the
king.... We had many ex-Orangemen in Fenianism.... All experience shows
that it is easier to convert an Orangeman to full nationality than to any
form of Home Rule." But for Irish Catholics to convert Irish Orangemen to
anything requires infinite tact, infinite patience, and a long lapse of
time: and it cannot be said that either the Sinn Fein or the Republican
Party properly estimated the difficulty and complexity of the problem. The
attempt to moderate the Ulster resistance by appeals to the principles of
democratic government was, if possible, even less successful. It proved
vain to urge that under democratic rule the will of the majority must
prevail: that every party must expect to be in its turn in a minority and
must learn to take the rough with the smooth: that the very principle and
object of the Act of Union was that people in Ireland should not have the
final say in the Government of Ireland but that the Parliament of the
United Kingdom should decide: that both parties in Ireland had
acknowledged this principle for generations and that for the Nationalists
to act as the Unionists were doing now would have been denounced by the
Unionists themselves as an offence against good government. Appeal was
made to Ulster in the interests of the Empire to allow Home Rule to have
at least a fair trial. It was told that Englishmen were convinced that the
government of Ireland was radically vicious, and that the only way to
amend it was to entrust the internal affairs of Ireland to a strictly
subordinate Parliament: that they felt that to continue in Ireland
indefinitely an indefensible system of administration was to embitter the
internal relations of the three kingdoms and weaken the Empire at the very
centre. It was pointed out that a friendly Ireland would be worth many
divisions of the Fleet and Army in the European struggle which could be
seen to be approaching and the Ulster Unionists were asked to 'sacrifice'
to the Empire what Parliament felt they ought no longer to retain.

Neither argument nor appeal had the least effect: the argument meant
nothing to them and the appeal was supposed to imply that the argument was
known to be unsound. They took their stand upon the Act of Union and
declared that, it having once been passed, no Parliament had any right
whatever to deprive the Unionists of Ulster of "their rights as British
citizens." It was, of course, perfectly clear that, Home Rule or no Home
Rule, everybody in the country was as much a British citizen as ever: and
the idea that Parliament could not, if it pleased, repeal the Act of Union
(which, as a matter of fact, it was very far indeed from proposing to do)
was quite absurd. The fact is that all parties were at cross purposes and
that a great many politicians were using language which meant one thing to
themselves and another thing to everybody else, while a certain number
were using language which they were perfectly well aware did not express
what they really meant. "Loyalty to the Empire" did not mean the same
thing to the Prime Minister and to the Orange orators who held the ear of
Ulster; and when the latter professed sentiments of toleration and good
will to "their Catholic fellow-countrymen" (as they sometimes did) they
must have known that they were using words which they did not mean
literally and strictly. At the bottom of everything was the conviction
that, Protestantism being a superior kind of religion, any measure which
placed Protestants on a footing of permanent equality with Roman
Catholics, a position in which Protestants would (to use a common phrase)
"pull only their own weight," was an offence against first principles, a
measure to be resisted to the utmost, first by any arguments which came to
hand, and in the last resort by other measures. They were "loyal to the
Empire" but they expected loyalty from the Empire to them: placed in
Ireland in a position of superiority guaranteed by the Union, they had
seen the symbols of superiority one by one stripped from their shoulders.
A long series of "concessions" to the Catholics (as successive steps in
the establishment of religious equality were described) had, it was said,
left "the Irish" without any "real grievance." The Irish were free to
vote, to buy and sell, to build their churches, to have their own schools
(which the State paid for), to exercise, in short, all civil rights, with
the one restriction, that in the Parliament which legislated for their
country they were in a permanent minority. This was the one great result,
as it had been the one chief attraction, of the Union, and this it was
determined at all hazards to retain.

Everybody at the time underestimated the extent and the vigour of this
feeling, except those who shared it. Englishmen thought (when they heard
of it) that it was all talk and that a "more reasonable view would
eventually prevail": they never understood that they had rivetted upon
Ireland a system which prevented its upholders from taking a "reasonable"
view of anything and incapacitated them from understanding any point of
view except their own. Irish Nationalists pointed to the long series of
truculent threats with which Orange Ulster had greeted every measure of
Irish reform. They recalled the "gun clubs" which had been the answer to
the establishment of the Board of National Education: the threat to "kick
the Queen's crown into the Boyne" if the Irish Church Act should be
passed; and they confidently expected to see a similar luxuriance of
denunciation wither before the chilling blast of an Act of Parliament.
Sinn Fein and the Republican Party (though they did not grasp the fact
that what the Orange Party feared was not the suppression of their
religion but the loss of its political ascendancy) adopted an attitude
useless to reconcile Ulster to Home Rule but admirably calculated, once
Home Rule were passed in defiance of Ulster, to work upon its feeling of
resentment at the "betrayal" of its interests and exploit its wounded
pride in the interests of the independence of Ireland.

But while Sinn Fein was making its proposals, unheeded (and indeed
unheard) by those to whom they were addressed, to disarm the opposition of
Ulster to the cause of Irish freedom, the Ulster leaders were taking steps
to adopt a policy supposed to have been abandoned in Irish politics since
the failure of the Fenian rising. The staid merchants, the prosperous
professional classes, the sturdy farmers of Ulster, supported by the
Belfast Protestant artizans, had begun to drill. Unionist Clubs were
formed throughout the province: volunteers were enrolled in defiance of
the law, under the pretext of being associations formed for the purpose of
taking "physical exercise," though with a growing feeling of strength and
security this pretext was abandoned. Talk of "guns" and "cold steel"
replaced arguments based upon economic conditions and the stringency of
the "bonds of Empire." A theory of "loyalty" was developed compatible with
a chartered licence to defy the authority of King and Parliament in the
affairs of the United Kingdom. As the inevitable day approached when, by
the provisions of the Parliament Act, the Royal Assent to Home Rule must
be given, the attitude of the Ulster leaders became more and more at
variance with all loyal precedents. The Ulster Volunteer Force was
organized as an army for service in the field: it was provided with
signallers and despatch riders, with ambulance units and army nurses:
hospitals were arranged to receive and tend the expected "casualties":
plans were formed to seize strategic points in the province. A Provisional
Government was constituted which on the day of the passing of the Act was
to assume the government of Ulster and replace the King's Government until
such time as it might be advisable again to restore the dispossessed
monarch to his Ulster dominions. The possibility of outside alliances was
not left to chance. The Volunteers were heartened by the news that "the
greatest Protestant monarch" in Europe had promised his aid: the Emperor
of Germany would not stand idly by while Protestantism in Ireland was put
by a British Government under the heel of Irish Catholics. Rifles were
still lacking, but they were not long in being supplied. They were
imported from Hamburg and landed in Larne; and by means of a perfectly
co-ordinated and admirable piece of organization distributed over Ulster
within twenty-four hours.

All Ireland, as if stunned by the shock, waited breathlessly to see what
would happen. Nothing happened. The Liberal Government, with defiance
shouted in its beard, decided that, no actual breach of the "law" having
been committed, no prosecutions need take place. The Cabinet was of course
in a very difficult position, for it had to reckon not with the Ulster
Party only but with the English Tories as well. The latter had seen from
the first the uses to which the Ulster Party might be put in the English
political struggle. The Conservative party hoped by exploiting "the Ulster
question" to bring about the downfall of the Liberal Government: and the
further the Ulster Party went, the more thoroughly they frightened
moderate people in England by threats of bloodshed, anarchy and civil war,
the better: the more truculent the threats of armed resistance the greater
the probability that they need never be put into force. It was a dangerous
game, but danger added zest to the amusement; and Irish parties, whether
Unionist or Nationalist, were to English politicians persons of
unaccountable vehemence whose ways were past finding out: in any case once
they had served their turn they could quietly be shelved. The Cabinet
seems to have considered that this alliance between the Ulster Party and
the English Tories at once put the breach of the conventions of politics
in Ulster under a kind of sanction and ensured that extreme action would
never be taken in Ireland; for it would be absurd to assume that an
English party would ever consent to the wild scheme of handing over Ulster
interests to the charge of Germany; the rest would be, as it had always
been, a matter of arrangement, of the expedients of which the Mother of
Parliaments was still fertile. For whatever reason, then, the Cabinet
decided to protest against the "unprecedented outrage" and leave the
perpetrators to the judgment of posterity. But Nationalist Ireland was not
inclined to see in the inaction of the Government merely the inertia of
perplexed politicians waiting for an unprecedented problem to point the
way to its own solution. They knew by experience that had _they_ imported
arms, or proclaimed their intention of doing so, or publicly flouted the
meanest of the Irish Executive the Crimes Act would have been put into
operation at once and his Majesty's prisons in Ireland would have been
filled. They saw in the failure even to prosecute the Ulster leaders, to
proclaim their organization, to deprive them of their arms, merely the
traditional tenderness of the British Government to its Irish "friends."
They began to believe that neither English party was really sincere in
anything connected with Ireland except in the desire, whether admitted or
denied, to maintain the privileges and ascendancy of the Protestant
interest. Mr. Redmond was criticised with acrimony and vehemence for
failing to do what he could not have done, and forcing the Cabinet to take
action. When later the importation of arms into Ireland was prohibited by
Order in Council, a proceeding of doubtful legality, this also was
interpreted _in malam partem_: it was aimed not so much at preventing
Ulster from getting more arms as at preventing the rest of Ireland from
getting any. It was a piquant situation. Ulster, which had been for a
century the backbone of the "loyalist" interest in Ireland, whose one
publicly proclaimed panacea for all Irish disorders and complaints had
been "the firm and impartial administration of the law," which had called
for the suppression of every attempt on the part of Nationalist Ireland
even to express its national aspirations, was now openly contemptuous of
the law, loud in its expressions of defiance of the Government and
charging the Cabinet, suspected of some faint determination to do
something to assert itself, with "organizing a pogrom." On the other hand
Nationalist Ireland, the supposed enemy of all law, order and even public
decency, was lifting up its hands in horror at the insult to the majesty
of British law and calling upon its representatives in Parliament to do
something, anything, to ensure respect for it. It called upon the
Government to show itself to be in earnest, the Government being in
reality as much in earnest as anybody. But, perplexed at the prospect of
having to enforce the law in Ireland against the wrong people, the King's
Government continued to eye the Ulster Government, each "willing to wound
and yet afraid to strike." As a matter of fact the Ulster leaders, had
they been put to the pinch, could not have made their authority really
effective even in their own area: but with admirable and consummate
audacity they succeeded in making the fact seem so doubtful that any
attempt to suppress them appeared to be involved in serious risk.

Among the Nationalists the only section which was able to use the
situation to advantage was the Republican Party. To them it seemed
incredible that any Irishman should be willing to fight either for or
against such a measure as Home Rule, which gave Ireland a subordinate and
impoverished parliament and retained the Imperial connection practically
unimpaired. But whatever the merits of the measure in itself it had in
their eyes one wholly admirable result. It had for the first time since
the days of the Fenians roused a section of Irishmen to arm against the
British Government: and it had opened the eyes of all Irish Unionists,
armed or unarmed in opposition to it, to the fact that the interests of
their party, courted and promoted in Ireland for a century in English
interests, were as nothing to an English Government when the exigencies of
party warfare required that they should be sacrificed. Their view was put
forcibly and humorously by P. H. Pearse in an article contributed to
_Irish Freedom_ in 1913. "It is now," he wrote, "the creed of Irish
nationalism (or at least of that Irish nationalism which is vocal on
platforms and in the Press) that the possession of arms and the knowledge
of the use of arms is a fit subject for satire. To have a rifle is as
ridiculous as to have a pimple at the end of your nose, or a bailiff
waiting for you round the corner. To be able to use a rifle is an
accomplishment as futile as to be able to stand on your head or to be
able to wag your ears. This is not the creed of any nationalism that
exists or has ever existed in any community, civilized or uncivilized,
that has ever inhabited the globe. It has never been the creed of Irish
nationalism until this our day. Mitchel and the great confessors of Irish
nationalism would have laughed it to scorn. Mitchel indeed did laugh to
scorn a similar but much less foolish doctrine of O'Connell's; and the
generation that came after O'Connell rejected his doctrine and accepted
Mitchel's. The present generation of Irish Nationalists is not only
unfamiliar with arms but despises all who are familiar with arms. Irish
Nationalists share with certain millionaires the distinction of being the
only people who believe in Universal Peace--here and now.... It is foolish
of an Orangeman to believe that his personal liberty is threatened by Home
Rule: but, granting that he believes that, it is not only in the highest
degree common sense, but it is his clear duty to arm in defence of his
threatened liberty. Personally, I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much
less ridiculous figure than the Nationalist without a rifle; and the
Orangeman who can fire a gun will certainly count for more in the end than
the Nationalist who can do nothing cleverer than make a pun.... I am not
defending the Orangeman; I am only showing that his condemnation does not
lie in the mouth of an unarmed Nationalist.... Negotiations might be
opened with the Orangeman on these lines: You are creating a Provisional
Government of Ulster--make it a Provisional Government of Ireland and we
will recognize and obey it. O'Connell said long ago that he would rather
be ruled by the old Protestant Ascendancy Irish Parliament than by the
Union Parliament; 'and O'Connell was right,' said Mitchel. He certainly
was.... Any six Irishmen would be a better Government of Ireland than the
English Cabinet has been.... Better exploit Ireland for the benefit of
Belfast than exploit her for the benefit of Westminster. A rapprochement
between Orangemen and Nationalists would be difficult. The chief obstacles
are the Orangeman's lack of humour and the Nationalist's lack of guns:
each would be at a disadvantage in a conference. But a sense of humour can
be cultivated, and guns can be purchased. One great source of
misunderstanding has now disappeared: it has become clear within the last
few years that the Orangeman is no more loyal to England than we are. He
wants the Union because he imagines that it secures his prosperity: but he
is ready to fire on the Union flag the moment it threatens his prosperity.
The position is perfectly plain and understandable. Foolish notions of
loyalty to England being eliminated, it is a matter for businesslike
negotiation. A Nationalist mission to North-east Ulster would possibly
effect some good. The case might be put thus: Hitherto England has
governed Ireland through the Orange Lodges: she now proposes to govern
Ireland through the A.O.H. You object: so do we. Why not unite and get
rid of the English? They are the real difficulty; their presence here the
real incongruity." When Pearse wrote this he seemed like a voice crying in
the wilderness: but the echoes answered sooner than anyone expected.
Pearse afterwards confessed that this and other articles contributed by
him at this time to _Irish Freedom_ were written "with the deliberate
intention by argument, invective, and satire, of goading those who shared
my political views to commit themselves definitely to an armed movement."
The armed movement which resulted was that of the Irish Volunteers.




ULSTER AND NATIONALIST IRELAND.


Nationalist Ireland had been officially committed to a peaceful and
constitutional policy since the inception of the Home Rule Movement in
1870. Home Rule did not satisfy, and was never admitted as satisfying, the
national demand. But the Fenian Movement had at last driven into the heads
of even Irish landlords and Tories that some concession to national
sentiment was necessary if the government of Ireland was to be made a
tolerable task for decent men. The Home Rule programme was one in which
Repealers and Conservatives agreed to join, the former in despair of
getting anything better, the latter in despair of retaining any longer all
that they had. But once accepted by the Repealers it had committed them,
in the necessities of the case, to a strictly parliamentary policy; and
that policy continued to be pursued even after the necessities which
caused it to be adopted ceased to operate. It was not a policy ever
accepted without reservation by Irish Nationalists: a considerable body of
them held aloof always from the Home Rulers, regretting the old virile
ways and words of Mitchel and Davis, and regarding the Home Rule programme
as a Tory snare into which Irish Nationalism had fallen. The years of
Parnell's leadership saw a nearer approach to national unanimity in the
parliamentary policy than was seen before or has been seen since. But it
was emphatically in the eyes of "strong" Nationalists a policy that could
only be justified by results, and the results were slow to appear. When
they appeared at last in the shape of a Home Rule Bill of the Asquith
Ministry there is no doubt that had it been carried and put into operation
the advocates of a stronger policy would have been overborne by the men of
moderate opinions. That is not to say that Home Rule would have been
accepted by all coming generations as a satisfactory solution of the Irish
situation; but it would have meant an immediate settling down of the
country to the solution of many internal problems and the return to
Ireland of something approaching the normal conditions of a civilized
country. The prospect was shattered by the enrolling of the Ulster
Volunteers. To the ordinary Home Ruler, the moderate Irish Nationalist,
their action seemed to be a gross and unpardonable breach of faith. For a
century Irish Unionists had uttered to Irish Nationalists the unvarying
challenge to acknowledge and submit to the supremacy of the Imperial
Parliament: they had called upon Ireland to abandon its appeal to history
and its "impossible claims" to an independence which Parliament could
never sanction. The Home Rule Party had done so: no renunciation of a
claim to sovereign independence could be more explicit and unequivocal
than that made by Mr. Redmond. So far as the Home Rule Party was
concerned, they had agreed to all the terms imposed upon them: they had
appealed to Parliament, submitting to all the conditions implied in the
recognition of it as the court of final resort, and now their opponents
challenged in advance the competence of Parliament to decide, and fell
back upon the weapons which Nationalist Ireland had been persuaded to
abandon. But though the Ulster Unionists might break the pact, it was
generally expected that the court to which they had taken their appeal
would see that its competence to decide it was not challenged. The
expectation was vain. The English Tory Party bluntly proclaimed that if
Ulster decided to repudiate the verdict of Parliament, Ulster would be
supported in any measure to that end which it should resolve to take. And
in the face of this proclamation the Liberal Party seemed to hesitate: the
Irish Party in Parliament could extract nothing from the Government beyond
vague assurances that all would finally be well. Nationalist Ireland,
surprised, uneasy, suspicious, indignant saw nothing more reassuring than
broad smiles of indulgent benevolence upon the faces of Cabinet Ministers.

But Ulster Unionists were not the only people in Ireland who disliked Home
Rule. It was just as little to the taste of Sinn Fein and the Republicans
and the Labour Party as it was to them. If the Ulster Party thought that
Home Rule was too great a concession, the others thought that it was
practically no concession at all. But being in a minority they were
prepared for the present to submit. The Sinn Fein Party and the
Republicans were well aware that Home Rule meant a set back to their
programme. Little as it conferred in comparison with what they wished to
have, it was certain to allay for many years the sting of Irish discontent
and to prolong the period during which Ireland would seek its satisfaction
in the shadow of its coming fortunes. The Labour Party had already begun
to organize its forces with a view to participation in the activities of
the expected Parliament, and looked forward with a modest confidence to
its immediate future. To all of these the arming of Ulster, which made the
Parliamentarians so indignant, was a light in the darkness. They had been
for years protesting unheeded against a policy which acknowledged the Act
of Union by acknowledging the supremacy of the Parliament which it set up:
their words had fallen for the most part upon stopped ears. And now from
the party supposed to regard the supremacy of Parliament as on a level
with the Ten Commandments came the mutterings of revolt and the rattle of
arms. Ulster had decided to defy "the English edict which would keep
Irishmen disarmed while the meanest Englishman may arm himself to the
teeth"; Ulster had taken up arms "against the usurped authority of the
Parliament of Great Britain to make laws to bind them." _Sinn Fein_
promised that Unionist Ulster would in its coming struggle with the
English Parliament "receive the sympathy and support of Nationalist
Ireland." From the Republican Party the action of the Volunteers received
unstinted and enthusiastic commendation. "Ulster has done one thing,"
wrote _Irish Freedom_, "which commands the respect and admiration of all
genuine Nationalists--she has stood up for what she believes to be right
and will be cajoled neither by English threats nor English bayonets. Her
attitude in this affair is the attitude of the O'Neills and the
O'Donnells: no other people but an Irish people could do it and something
of the kind was very necessary to shame the rest of Ireland out of
J.P.-ships and jobs into some facing of the facts.... In present
circumstances accursed be the soul of any Nationalist who would dream of
firing a shot or drawing a sword against the Ulster Volunteers in
connection with this Bill. Any such action would be an enforcement of a
British law upon an Irish populace which refused it, would be a
marshalling under the Union Jack. We are willing to fight Ulster or to
negotiate with her, but we will not fight her over the miserable shadow of
autonomy, we will not fight her because she tells England to go to Hell."
"The sheen of arms in Ulster was always the signal for the rest of
Ireland. And Ireland even in this generation, hypnotized as most of her
people are by catch cries about 'imperilling Home Rule,' by mockeries of
all 'wild' politics and 'wild' plans, by doctrines even more debasing in
their shameless lying than O'Connell's, Ireland has answered the call."

But to see in a revolt against a particular Act of Parliament a revolt
against the supremacy of Parliament _simpliciter_ was a mistake. Ulster
was willing, anxious indeed, that the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament
should be maintained in Ireland, but she made one condition: that
Parliament should ensure in Ireland the Protestant Ascendancy. For that
Ulster Protestantism professed to be prepared to fight to the death. It
was secured by the Legislative Union; and to weaken the Union was to
weaken it. So long as Ireland formed "an integral part of the United
Kingdom," so long as Catholic Irishmen were in a permanent minority in the
Parliament of that kingdom, so long did it seem certain that the
Protestant interest would be secure. Protestant England was considered to
have made a pact with Protestant Ulster, and Ulster was prepared to
enforce its observance even by force of arms. Ulster trembled when the
shadow of the Vatican fell across her as men once trembled at an eclipse
of the sun: and the Union seemed the only guarantee that recurrent
eclipses would not be the harbingers of a perpetual darkness.

And whatever elements of hope for the future Sinn Fein and Republican
Ireland might see in the attitude of the Ulster Volunteers towards England
it was plain that while they might be praised and imitated they could not
be followed. They were a strictly sectarian force formed to promote a
strictly sectarian object, while Sinn Feiners and Republicans stood for
the union of all Irishmen without distinction of creed. And their close
(and, as it seemed to many Irishmen, unnatural) alliance with the English
Tory Party was clear proof that their revolt (so far as it went) against
the authority of Parliament could and would be utilized to the greater
advantage of England and the detriment of Ireland. Ulster might propose to
fight for her own hand and her own position in Ireland, but her English
allies would see to it that nothing which Ulster gained would be lost to
England. The moral to be drawn was that Ulster being part of Ireland was,
however wayward and bitter, to be treated with consideration and respect;
her fears for her safety to be allayed; even her prejudices to be
considered and met; her incipient feeling of resentment against England
applauded and encouraged. So far and no farther Irish Nationalists could
go: but Ulster's claim to ascendancy could not for a moment be recognized.
Meanwhile the rest of Ireland should follow the example of the North and
arm in defence of a threatened liberty.

This was the attitude not merely of Sinn Feiners and Republicans, but of
many followers of the Parliamentary Party. But the bulk of the
parliamentarians took a different view. Some of them deprecated all
appeals to violence on the part of Irish Nationalists and held that it was
the business of Parliament to enforce its own authority upon the
recalcitrants: others thought nothing should be done, because nothing need
be done, Ulster being accustomed to threaten, but never being known to
strike: others again thought that the Ulster threats should be countered
by threats as determined, backed by means not less efficacious.

The last of these Nationalist sections joined with the Republicans and
some of the Sinn Feiners, Sinn Fein still officially adhering to its
traditional policy, to form, in imitation of the Ulstermen, the force of
the Irish Volunteers. The promoters of the movement were anxious to avoid
all appearance of opposition to a body of Irishmen whom, however they
might differ from them and no matter what collisions with them might occur
later, they respected for their vigour and resolution: on the other hand
they desired to make it perfectly plain that Ulster was not the only part
of Ireland that had the courage to proclaim its intention of standing up
for its rights. At a meeting held in the Rotunda in Dublin on November 25,
1913, the movement was publicly inaugurated.

Of the committee which took charge of the movement during its earlier
stages some were (or had been) supporters of Sinn Fein, others were
Republicans, more than a third were supporters of the Parliamentary Party
and a few had never identified themselves with any Irish political party
of any kind. And the manifesto to the Irish people issued by the committee
bore clear indications of its composite origin. It took sides neither with
nor against any form of Irish Nationalism and it contained no word of
hostility against the Ulster force. "The object proposed," it said, "for
the Irish Volunteers is to secure and maintain the rights and liberties
common to all the people of Ireland. Their duties will be defensive and
protective, and they will not contemplate either aggression or domination.
Their ranks are open to all able-bodied Irishmen without distinction of
creed, politics or social grade.... In the name of National Unity, of
National Dignity, of National and Individual Liberty, of Manly
Citizenship, we appeal to our countrymen to recognize and accept without
hesitation the opportunity that has been granted them to join the ranks of
the Irish Volunteers, and to make the movement now begun not unworthy of
the historic title which it has adopted." Volunteers were to sign a
declaration that they desired "to be enrolled in the Irish Volunteers
formed to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to all the
people of Ireland without distinction of creed, class or politics." The
final words of the declaration were an answer to the charge, printed in an
English newspaper a few days before, that the new movement was to form a
Volunteer force of Catholics in hostility to Protestants, and an answer by
anticipation to the charge, made freely afterwards, that the Volunteers
were intended to deprive Unionist Ulster of her just rights. The attitude
deliberately adopted towards Ulster could not have been better put than it
was by the President of the Volunteers, Professor Eoin MacNeill, in his
speech at the inaugural meeting. "We do not contemplate," he said, "any
hostility to the Volunteer movement that has already been initiated in
parts of Ulster. The strength of that movement consists in men whose
kinsfolk were amongst the foremost and the most resolute in winning
freedom for the United States of America, in descendants of the Irish
Volunteers of 1782, of the United Irishmen, of the Antrim and Down
insurgents of 1798, of the Ulster Protestants who protested in thousands
against the destruction of the Irish Parliament in 1800. The more genuine
and successful the local Volunteer movement in Ulster becomes, the more
completely does it establish the principle that Irishmen have the right to
decide and govern their own national affairs. We have nothing to fear from
the existing Volunteers in Ulster nor they from us. We gladly acknowledge
the evident truth that they have opened the way for a National Volunteer
movement, and we trust that the day is near when their own services to the
cause of an Irish Nation will become as memorable as the services of their
forefathers."

This was noble and chivalrous language and it loses none of its force when
one recollects that many of the platforms in Ulster were ringing at the
time with denunciations of "our hereditary enemies" and with references to
Irish Catholics as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," "the men whom we
hate and despise."

But in spite of the fact that the leaders of the Irish Volunteers wished
to preserve, and largely succeeded in preserving, a non-provocative
attitude towards the Ulstermen, the governing facts of the situation could
hardly be ignored completely. Phrases used at meetings for the enrolment
of Irish Volunteers appreciative of the spirit of Ulster were strongly
resented by many Nationalists who saw in the Ulster Volunteers a menace
not to the English exploitation of Ireland but to the national hopes. And
even the leading spirits in the movement could not conceal the fact that
the Ulster Volunteers, whatever they might prove to be in the future, were
certainly a present obstacle to the attainment of Home Rule, which, little
regarded by Sinn Fein and the Republicans as a final settlement, was
undoubtedly the only approach to a settlement that could be looked for in
the near future. The blame of this it was sought to throw on the English
Tory Party. "A use has been made," said Professor MacNeill, "and is daily
made, of the Ulster Volunteer movement, that leaves the whole body of
Irishmen no choice but to take a firm stand in defence of their liberties.
The leaders of the Unionist Party in Great Britain and the journalists,
public speakers and election agents of that party are employing the threat
of armed force to control the course of political elections and to compel,
if they can, a change of Government in England with the declared object of
deciding what all parties admit to be vital political issues concerning
Ireland. They claim that this line of action has been successful in recent
parliamentary elections and that they calculate by it to obtain further
successes, and at the most moderate estimate to force upon this country
some diminished and mutilated form of National Self-Government. This is
not merely to deny our rights as a nation. If we are to have our concerns
regulated by a majority of British representatives owing their position
and powers to a display of armed force, no matter from what quarter that
force is derived, it is plain to every man that even the modicum of civil
rights left to us by the Union is taken from us, our franchise becomes a
mockery and we ourselves become the most degraded nation in Europe. This
insolent menace does not satisfy the hereditary enemies of our National
Freedom. Within the past few days a political manifesto has been issued,
signed most fittingly by a Castlereagh and a Beresford, calling for
British Volunteers and for money to arm and equip them to be sent into
Ireland to triumph over the Irish people and to complete their
disfranchisement and enslavement."

All this was true, but it was only half the truth. It was true that the
Tory Party was making use of the threat of armed force; but the threat had
been made before the Tory Party could make use of it, and it had been made
by a body of armed Irishmen. But the followers were, as often happens,
less virulent than their leaders; and months after this the sight might
have been witnessed in Belfast of Ulster Volunteers and Irish Volunteers
using the same drill ground through the good offices of a tolerant
Ulsterman: and though the Ulster Volunteers were prepared undoubtedly to
fight for their privileges, some of the most vicious appeals to their
passions and their prejudices came from men who were not of the Ulster,
not even of the Irish, blood. Right through their tragic and tempestuous
career the Irish Volunteers in spite of countless difficulties and
provocations continued their attitude of punctilious courtesy to the
Ulster force. When the Ulstermen succeeded in their great coup of running
a cargo of rifles from Hamburg to Larne the _Irish Volunteer_
congratulated them heartily and warmly. Their attitude towards their
fellow-countrymen was deeply regretted, but for what they had done to
assert the freedom of Irishmen from English dictation they were accorded
generous praise. The spirit of the leaders in this matter permeated the
force. The head of the Irish Volunteers in Tralee wrote at a time when
threats of suppressing the Ulstermen with the help of the army were made:
"To my mind the Volunteers should prevent if possible and by force the
English soldiers attacking the Ulster rebels. Say to the English soldiers
and to the English Government, 'This is our soil and the Ulster rebels are
our countrymen; fire on them and you fire on us.'... Ulster is not our
real enemy, though ... Ulster thinks we are her enemy. Time will prove who
are Ulster's friends and ours."

But the history of the Irish Volunteers, though indispensable for the
understanding of the development of Sinn Fein is not the history of Sinn
Fein. Individual Sinn Feiners were prominent in the movement and brought
into it the spirit of national unity and disregard of the differences of
creed which kept Irishmen divided: but the Sinn Fein organization remained
distinct, praising, warning and criticizing the new movement and the
tactics of its leaders. It pointed out at once that for the Volunteers to
combine and to drill was not enough: they must have rifles and rifle
ranges, and urged that the provision of them should be seen to without
delay. But though it wished the Volunteers to be equipped as effectively
and as quickly as possible it still regarded an armed force of Irishmen as
inadequate to the task of winning Irish freedom. "To help the Volunteer
movement," said _Sinn Fein_, "is a national duty: they may not defeat
England, but the movement will help to make Ireland self-reliant." And
_Sinn Fein_ was emphatic in urging the dangers of a sectional policy, of
any attempt to narrow the basis upon which the new force was to be built
up. "It is better," ran a leader on the subject, "at the beginning of the
National Volunteer movement there should be frank speaking and frank
understanding. If it were designed to be a movement confined to or
controlled by any one Nationalist section we would not write a word in its
support. It would fail badly.... It is quite true that we must work
through public opinion in the circumstances of Ireland rather than through
force of arms, but it is a poor thinker who does not realize that the
public opinion which lacks the confidence, the calmness, the steadiness,
the judgment, the resolution and the understanding which a training in
arms gives a people is a poor weapon to rely upon in times of crisis."
The Volunteers were in the opinion of Sinn Fein a useful auxiliary in the
task of developing the one quality from which alone ultimate success was
to be expected, the self-reliance and moral resolution of the Irish
people. But [Greek: autos ephelketai andra sidêros]--the mere "sheen of
arms" has an attraction superior to all arguments and all policies: and
there is little doubt that the superior attractions of the Volunteers
proved too strong for many young and ardent Sinn Feiners and induced them
to put the means first and the end second. The phrase of _Irish Freedom_
in noticing the inauguration of the Volunteers probably gives the view of
most of the younger generation: "In this welcome departure from our
endless talk we touch reality at last."

The Irish Volunteers were not the only militant body which the example of
Ulster had formed in Ireland. While the Ulster campaign was in full swing
the workers of Dublin had been engaged in a bitter industrial struggle
with their employers in which after a prolonged battle victory had
somewhat doubtfully declared itself against them. The Labour leader, Jim
Larkin, decided to found a Citizen Army for Irish workers. "Labour," he
said in addressing the meeting at which the new force was inaugurated, "in
its own defence must begin to train itself to act with disciplined courage
and with organized and concentrated force. How could they accomplish this?
By taking a leaf out of the book of Carson. If Carson had permission to
train his braves of the North to fight against the aspirations of the
Irish people, then it was legitimate and fair for Labour to organize in
the same militant way to preserve their rights and to ensure that if they
were attacked they would be able to give a very satisfactory account of
themselves." He went on to say that the object of the Citizen Army was
"that Labour might no longer be defenceless but might be able to utilize
that great physical power which it possessed to prevent their elemental
rights from being taken from them and to evolve such a system of unified
action, self-control and ordered discipline that Labour in Ireland might
march in the forefront of all movements for the betterment of the whole
people of Ireland." The Citizen Army thus formed, never very numerous,
efficient or enthusiastic, was practically destroyed by the formation of
the Irish Volunteers. Most of its members joined the Volunteers, partly
because they were the more numerous and popular body, but principally
because a national policy had more attraction for them than one which was
purely sectional. Captain White, who had trained the first Citizen Army,
now urged that it should be reorganized upon a broader basis and in March,
1914, the Citizen Army, which afterwards played such a memorable part, was
put upon its final footing. The new constitution was as follows: "That the
first and last principle of the Irish Citizen Army is the avowal that the
ownership of Ireland, moral and material, is vested of right in the people
of Ireland: that the Irish Citizen Army shall stand for the absolute
unity of Irish nationhood and shall support the rights and liberties of
the democracies of all nations: that one of its objects shall be to sink
all differences of birth, property and creed under the common name of the
Irish People: that the Citizen Army shall be open to all who accept the
principle of equal rights and opportunities for the Irish People."

It might have seemed that the constitution and principles of the Citizen
Army were wide enough and national enough to justify a union or at least a
close co-operation with the Irish Volunteers. But at first the two bodies
held sternly aloof. The Labour Party had not been invited to send
representatives to the meeting at which the Volunteers had been
inaugurated, and many of the Volunteer Committee were suspected, rightly
or wrongly, of being entirely out of sympathy with Labour ideals and
Labour policy. When members of the Labour Party began to flock into the
Volunteer ranks their action was the occasion of a bitter controversy in
the official Labour organ. The Sinn Fein movement, whose spirit was
supposed to preside over the Volunteer organization, had never been on
cordial terms with organized Labour, and the members of the Irish Citizen
Army were publicly warned to keep clear of these "Girondin politicians,
who will simply use the workers as the means towards their own security
and comfort." Nor were the members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and
of the United Irish League who belonged to the Volunteer Committee any
more to the taste of Labour; they regarded these two bodies as bitter and
implacable opponents of their rights. Regarding themselves as the true
successors of the Nationalism of Wolfe Tone and John Mitchel, they called
upon the Volunteers for an explicit declaration of what was meant by "the
rights common to all Irishmen" which they were enrolled to maintain. Did
they mean the right to Home Rule, or to the constitution of 1782 or to an
Irish Republic? The Volunteers could not have said "Yes" to any one of the
three alternatives without driving out members who desired to say "Yes" to
one or other of the remaining two. The Volunteers had deliberately left in
abeyance controversies which the Labour Army wished to fight out in
advance. They, undoubtedly, desired a Republic and meant to say so. When
it was announced that the Irish Volunteers would be under the control of
the Irish Parliament (when there should be such a body to control them)
Labour became more suspicious still; was not the only Irish Parliament
even in contemplation to be subordinate to the Parliament of England? The
Volunteers seemed to treat the Citizen Army with indifference, if not with
contempt: and a bitter antagonism was developed which only common
misfortune was able to mitigate.

In all this welter of sharp antagonisms and conflicting policies the only
party which walked in the old political ways was the Parliamentary Party.
They expected confidently that political conventions would finally be
observed or that Parliament would deal effectively with those who tried to
break them. It was becoming plain, however, as time went on that the
conventions were not going to be regarded and that Parliament was as
likely as not to acquiesce in the breach of them. And the Party was not
aware of the change that was slowly passing over Ireland. A long tenure of
their place among the great personages and amid the high doings of
Westminster seemed to have made them somewhat oblivious of the fact that
Irish politics are made in Ireland. They did not feel the thrill of
chastened pride that shivered gently through Ireland when the quiet places
of Ulster echoed to the march of the Ulster Volunteers. They did not know
how many Irishmen regarded the action of Ulster not as a menace to the
dignity of the Parliament in which the Party sat but as the harbinger of
national independence. They underrated (as who then did not?) the
influence of Sinn Fein; they regarded the foundation of the Irish
Volunteers as the work of "irresponsible young men," though the "young
men" were nearer the heart of Young Ireland: like O'Connell, they "stood
for Old Ireland and had some notion that Old Ireland would stand by them."
Ireland, though no one guessed it at the time, was the crucible in which
were slowly melting and settling down all the elements that were to go to
the making of the future Sinn Fein.

Sinn Fein was at the time to all outward seeming an insignificant and
discredited party with an impossible programme. It still published a
small weekly paper with no great circulation. It did not agree with the
parliamentarians: it had a standing feud with the Labour Party: it gave a
dignified and pontifical blessing to the Volunteers without committing
itself to their whole programme. Its only electioneering venture, outside
municipal politics, had been a disastrous failure: it had won a few seats
on the Dublin City Council: it had tried and failed to run a daily paper.
When all Nationalist Ireland was waiting for Home Rule it declared Home
Rule to be a thing of naught. To the buoyant confidence of the
Parliamentary Party it opposed a cynical distrust of their aims and
methods, a constant incredulity of their ultimate success. When the Party
pointed to what it had done and to what it was about to do Sinn Fein
reminded the country that the very existence of a Parliamentary Party was
an acknowledgment of the Act of Union. When the Liberal Government was
engaged in an embittered and apparently final struggle for supremacy with
the Tory Party in the interests of Ireland, Sinn Fein professed entire
disbelief in its sincerity; it asserted that the Liberals really loved the
Tories very much better than they loved the Irish. With a querulous and
monotonous insistence it preached distrust of all English parties and even
of the English nation, towards whom it displayed a hostility that seemed
almost to amount to a monomania. To Irish Labour this indiscriminating
attitude seemed insensate bigotry: to the Irish people as a whole it
seemed incomprehensible that a Nationalist Party should regard the
Liberals as enemies and the Ulster Volunteers as brothers in arms. Sinn
Fein never seemed less certain of a future in Ireland than when events
were preparing to make Ireland Sinn Fein.

Early in 1914 _Sinn Fein_ saw in the King's Speech at the opening of
Parliament indications that the Cabinet and the Opposition had arranged "a
deal" over Home Rule and foretold an attempt at compromise. The next month
the Prime Minister proposed the partition of Ireland between the Unionists
and the Nationalists and the Irish Party accepted the proposal as a
temporary device to ease the parliamentary situation for the Cabinet. No
proposal better calculated to offend the deepest instincts of Irish
nationalism could have been made: no concession more fatal to the party
which agreed to it could have been devised. The mention of it provoked an
outburst in Ireland which did more to smash the Parliamentary Party and
leave the field open to their rivals than anything which had happened
since Home Rule was first mooted. The criticisms passed upon it by the
non-Parliamentary Nationalists were important, not so much on account of
the quarters they came from, as for the grounds on which they were made,
and their words awakened deeper feelings than had come to the surface for
years. "To even discuss," said _Sinn Fein_, "the exclusion of Ulster or
any portion of Ulster from a Home Rule measure is in itself traitorous.
When God made this country, He fixed its frontiers beyond the power of
man to alter while the sea rises and falls.... So long as England is
strong and Ireland is weak, England may continue to oppress this country,
but she shall not dismember it." "If this nation is to go down," wrote
_Irish Freedom_, "let it go down gallantly as becomes its history, let it
go down fighting, but let it not sink into the abjectness of carving a
slice out of itself and handing it over to England.... As for Ulster,
Ulster is Ireland's and shall remain Ireland's. Though the Irish nation in
its political and corporate capacity were gall and wormwood to every
Unionist in Ulster yet shall they swallow it. We will fight them if they
want fighting: but we shall never let them go, never." Sinn Fein and the
Republicans were no more emphatic than the Labour Party. James Connolly in
the _Irish Worker_ said of Partition: "To it Labour should give the
bitterest opposition, against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the
death if necessary as our fathers fought before us." It even used the
menace of partition as an argument in favour of joining the Citizen Army
and urged that Volunteers should transfer their membership to a body which
"meant business." "The Citizen Army," said an article signed with the
initials of one of its principal organizers, "stands for Ireland--Orange
and Green--one and indivisible. The men who tread the valleys and places
Cuchullain, Conall Cearnach, Russell and McCracken trod are bone of our
bone and flesh of our flesh. Because they may have a different creed does
not matter to us; it never mattered to the Government: an Irish Protestant
corpse dangled as often at the end of a rope as did the corpse of an Irish
Catholic."

But Sinn Fein saw that, though partition was unacceptable, it was no use
continually asking the Ulstermen to name the safeguards they wanted. They
would not name what they did not want: no safeguards would secure them in
a democratic modern community against their chief objection to Home
Rule--that in an Irish Parliament Protestants, as such, would be in "a
permanent minority." It was of the very nature of things that they should
be, if representative institutions were to be recognized at all. But
though in a minority they need not be, as they asserted they would be,
subject to disabilities, and Sinn Fein held that every offer to allay
their fears compatible with free institutions should be made. A Sinn Fein
Convention held in Dublin towards the end of April, 1914, agreed to make
the Ulstermen, on behalf of Sinn Fein, the following proposals: (1),
increased representation in the Irish Parliament on the basis partly of
population, partly of rateable value and partly of bulk of trade, the
Ulster representation to be increased by fifteen members including one for
the University of Belfast: two members to be given to the Unionist
constituency of Rathmines; (2), to fix all Ireland as the unit for the
election of the Senate or Upper House and to secure representation to the
Southern Unionist minority by Proportional Representation; (3), to
guarantee that no tax should be imposed on the linen trade without the
consent of a majority of the Ulster representatives; (4), that the
Chairman of the Joint Exchequer Board should always be chosen by the
Ulster Representatives; (5), that all posts in the Civil Service should be
filled by examination; (6), that the Ulster Volunteer Force should be
retained under its present leaders as portion of an Irish Volunteer Force
and should not, except in case of invasion, be called upon to serve
outside Ulster; (7), that the Irish Parliament should sit alternately in
Dublin and in Belfast; (8), that the clauses in the Home Rule Bill
restricting Irish trade and finance and prohibiting Ireland from
collecting and receiving its own taxes, or otherwise conflicting with any
of the above proposals, should be amended. These proposals, the most
statesmanlike and generous proposals put forward on the Nationalist side,
were, though approved of generally by the Belfast Trades Council,
contemptuously ignored by the Ulster leaders.

The offer of partition likewise was promptly rejected by Ulster: like the
Irish Citizen Army they "meant business." They meant to smash Home Rule
for good and all, for the South as well as for the North of Ireland, and
in conjunction with the English Tories they felt strong enough to do it.
They began openly to tamper with the allegiance of the army. Nor were
their efforts without success. Not only did large numbers of ex-officers
offer their services to the Ulster Volunteers, but many officers upon the
active list announced their intention of refusing to obey orders if
despatched to preserve order in Ulster and forestall the intention,
broadly hinted, of some of the Ulstermen to seize military depots in the
province. It was an open boast in Belfast that the ship conveying the arms
from Hamburg to Ulster had been sighted, but allowed to pass unchallenged
by officers of the Royal Navy on the ships detailed to intercept it. They
seemed deliberately to have adopted the policy of Catiline, _ruina
exstinguere incendium_, "to put out the fire by pulling down the house."
If the Protestant interest were to go down in Ireland, then should the
British Constitution which had fostered it go down with it.

All this was, of course, matter for unfeigned delight to all the
"advanced" people both in Ireland and outside of it. If officers were to
have the option of obeying orders or not at their will why should a like
latitude be denied the common soldier? If officers refused to act against
Ulster why should a private be required to fire upon strikers? Thanks were
publicly returned by _Irish Freedom_ to "the gallant British officers who
have helped their beloved Empire on to the brink above the precipice." But
so far as England was concerned, the crisis was tided over by the usual
method of compromise. There had been a "misunderstanding" for which both
sides were more or less responsible. There had been no actual intention of
employing force in a political dispute and therefore the question in
debate did not arise. The Minister of War was dismissed on a side issue,
the Premier assumed his responsibilities and everybody was more or less
satisfied, except the Irish.

Whatever were the rights or wrongs of the dispute between the Army and the
Government, it was plain that the dispute had been composed at the expense
of Home Rule. Partition in some form or other was now certain to accompany
Home Rule, if Home Rule were not actually shelved. The Irish Party were
solemnly warned by the advanced Nationalist papers. "Mr. Redmond has had
his chance," wrote one of these. "When partition is again mentioned, let
him stand aside even at the cost of the 'Home Rule' Bill. There is a force
and a spirit growing in Ireland which in the wrangle of British politics
he but vaguely realizes."

But Mr. Redmond was not so preoccupied with "the wrangle of British
politics" as he seemed. He realized quite clearly that the Irish
Volunteers were growing in numbers and in influence and that neither their
object nor their existence was compatible with the principles of Home
Rule. They proclaimed their intention of putting themselves eventually at
the disposal of the Irish Parliament: but the Bill contemplated a
Parliament which should have no right to accept their services. They were
largely controlled by men who thought little of Home Rule and everything
of the "rights of Irishmen," which might mean just what the Liberal
Government proposed to give but might also mean a great deal more. They
were a menace to the success of the parliamentary policy, and it seemed to
be his plain duty to suppress or to control them. To attempt suppression
would be dangerous: to control them seemed not impossible. He decided to
demand the right to nominate on their committee twenty-five "tried and
true" Nationalists whose allegiance to his policy was unquestioned. The
committee, faced by the alternative of either declaring war on Mr. Redmond
(a course as dangerous to them as to declare war on them would have been
to him) or of submitting to his demand, decided to submit. The twenty-five
new members (four of whom were priests and the majority of the remainder
Dublin Nationalists) joined the Committee and the Irish "military crisis"
seemed to have been solved. In reality it was only beginning. The Citizen
Army promptly declared war upon the reconstituted Volunteer Committee. "Is
there," asked _The Irish Worker_, "one reliable man at the head of the
National Volunteer movement apart from Casement who, we believe, is in
earnest and honest?... We admit the bulk of the rank and file are men of
principle and men who are out for liberty for all men: but why allow the
foulest growth that ever cursed this land (the Hibernian Board of Erin) to
control an organization that might if properly handled accomplish great
things." It accused the committee of having passed the Volunteers over to
a "gang of placehunters and political thugs" and called upon the rank and
file to sever all connection with them: "Our fathers died that we might be
free men. Are we going to allow their sacrifices to be as naught? Or are
we going to follow in their footsteps at the Rising of the Moon?" The
Citizen Army was gradually coming round to a standpoint more and more
national, and saw in the control of the Volunteers by the Parliamentarians
nothing but disaster to its idea of what nationalism involved. _Sinn Fein_
was equally vehement: "Redmond is only a tool," it wrote, "in the hands of
Asquith and Birrell who wish to destroy the Volunteers as Lord Northington
was a tool in the hands of Fox, to whom he wrote in 1783: 'They have got
too powerful, and there is nothing for us but for our friends to go into
their meetings and disturb the harmony of them and create division.'" When
Mr. Redmond appealed to America for money to "strengthen" the Volunteers
it pointed out that if he had been in earnest he would have asked not for
money but for arms, and would have had the Arms Proclamation withdrawn by
the Government. It printed a series of letters to the Volunteers, of which
the first contained the words: "The object [_i.e._ of the Volunteers] is
obtaining and maintaining the independence of Ireland. Those who are in
earnest should have their own committee, independent of Redmond and Co."
_Irish Freedom_ headed its leader on the transaction "The Kiss of Judas,"
and declared that "after the British Government the Irish Parliamentary
Party in its later years has been the most evil force in Ireland."

The original members of the Volunteer Committee were clearly uneasy and
tried to put the best face they could upon the matter. In their official
organ; _The Irish Volunteer_, they informed the public "The control of the
committee by Mr. John Redmond does not matter, provided his nominees
represent the feelings of the Volunteers: if they do the Irish Party will
see to the withdrawing of the Arms Proclamation and proceed to arm the
Volunteers at once." But the Irish Party did neither; and if Mr. Redmond
was expected to share the feelings of the Volunteers, the Volunteers
cannot have shared the feelings of the committee. A month before this the
_Irish Volunteer_ had printed the following: "For over a generation
Ireland has taken her national views from men whose whole lives were bound
up with the preservation of the peace. Suddenly, in a day, in an hour, the
whole situation has undergone a change. Force has reappeared as a factor
in Irish political life.... It is to be hoped that men are not joining the
national army from any motives but those which actuated the founders. The
object of the Volunteers is to maintain and preserve the rights and
liberties common to the whole people of Ireland. There is no question of
preserving merely the 'legal' rights graciously permitted us by a foreign
power." If the original committee seriously expected Mr. Redmond and his
nominees to acquiesce in the views expressed in the last sentence they
must have been simple to a degree. They were admittedly in a difficult
position; but they knew what they meant and they knew what Mr. Redmond
meant; and the sequel might have been foreseen.

It was put upon record later by a member of the committee that in the task
of arming the Volunteers the new members gave little effective assistance,
and that when arms were obtained they tried to have them taken from the
men who had paid for them and handed over _gratis_ to the Hibernians of
the North to use (without, it is true, a supply of ammunition) to overawe
the aggression of the Ulster Volunteers. But the members of the original
committee procured arms upon their own responsibility. In July they
succeeded in imitating the exploit of the Ulstermen at Larne. They ran a
cargo of rifles into Howth and another was landed at Kilcool. But the
forces of the Crown, absent at Larne and inactive in Ulster ever since,
displayed their unsuccessful vigour at Howth. The Volunteers were
intercepted on the way back, but after a scuffle succeeded in getting away
with their guns. The soldiers on the return journey fired upon a provoking
but unarmed crowd in the streets of Dublin. The country had barely time to
appreciate the contrast between Larne and Howth, when the sound of the
German guns in Belgium broke upon its ears.




SINN FEIN, 1914-1916.


John Mitchel had prophesied that "in the event of a European war a strong
national party could grasp the occasion" in Ireland, and Mitchel held too
high a place in the estimation of Irish Nationalists for his words to have
been forgotten or ignored. When Saurin (who, though an Orangeman and a
Tory and, after the Union, one of the law officers of the Crown in
Ireland, opposed the policy of Castlereagh) uttered his famous dictum on
the validity of the Act of Union, he provided Irish Nationalism with one
of its most authoritative maxims: "You may make the Union binding as a
law, but you cannot make it obligatory in conscience: it will be obeyed as
long as England is strong, but resistance to it will be in the abstract a
duty and the exhibition of that resistance will be a mere question of
prudence." Irish Separatists did not always find it prudent to speak with
the precision of the future Attorney-General: but the principle which he
laid down was always understood to be one of which they acknowledged the
validity. It had been repeated in language less classical, but equally
emphatic, by Parnell and Mr. Redmond; but the occasion to put into
practice the prudence of which Saurin spoke had either never come or never
been seized. But that it would come some day and in an unquestionable
shape was a maxim of the Separatists. The increasing signs of antagonism
between England and Germany had not since the beginning of the century
escaped watchful eyes in Ireland. In the year 1900 _The United Irishman_
in discussing German diplomacy had referred to the alliance between Irish
and Germans in the United States which (it added) "is such a welcome
feature of contemporary politics." When, two years before the war, Mr.
Churchill had referred in guarded language to the necessity to England of
a "loyal Ireland" in the near future, _Sinn Fein_ commented as follows on
his words: "We have, for instance, no illusion whatever on the subject of
Germany. If Germany victorious over England comes to Ireland, Germany will
come to stay and rule the Atlantic from our shores. She will give us
better terms than England offers. She will give us that Home Rule which
all the States of the German Empire enjoy.... We have no doubt whatever
that Ireland under German rule would be more prosperous than she has ever
been under the rule of England.... The fact would not induce us to love
Germany or to fight for a mere change of masters. But as a matter of
bargaining we can say to Mr. Churchill, when he offers us a bogus Home
Rule for aiding British policy against Germany, that Ireland would get
better terms from a successful Germany if she withheld that aid." This was
the language of a journal which voiced the opinions of a party definitely
committed against an Irish policy of force: the Republican Party, not so
committed used words less nebulous and guarded. In 1911 _Irish Freedom_,
printed a letter from John Devoy of New York, a prominent Irish-American
and ex-Fenian, pointing out that a German war was coming in the near
future, that England would need conscription before it was over, and that
Ireland must fight either for England or against her. A month or so later
an editorial returned to the point: "Wolfe Tone, though he appealed to
France for aid, did not ask Irishmen to sit idly by; and the arguments
Tone advanced with considerable success to induce France to aid in
establishing an Irish Republic can be applied to-day in the case of
Germany." Later in the year an article entitled "When Germany fights
England" discussed the policy of Ireland, having first stipulated for her
complete independence, throwing her weight on the side of Germany in a
war. Germany, it was thought, might play the same part as Tone had hoped
that France would play in 1798--might release Ireland from English
domination and then declare her absolute independence. No doubt seems to
have been entertained that such a policy would be acceptable to Germany;
for in Germany the Separatists saw, not an ambitious empire grasping at
world power, so much as a brave and efficient people trying to burst the
bonds with which English policy, and English intrigue had surrounded them.
Sinn Fein had taken its official economic policy from the German List, and
pointed to its success in establishing German industry upon a sure
footing (in spite of the industrial rivalry of England) as an augury for
Irish success and as a model for Irish effort. Germany was looked upon as
the one European nation at once bold enough and strong enough to challenge
English supremacy and vitally interested in challenging it effectively.
For, with Ireland in the possession of England, the key to the Atlantic
was in English hands: if Ireland were independent then the key would go to
whatever hands framed the most favourable alliance with Ireland.

But whatever the wisdom or the folly of such expectations, there is no
doubt that the Separatists looked to Germany not to annex but to free
Ireland. They did not desire that Germany should take Ireland from
England; but that Germany should declare Ireland to be an independent
sovereign State. Nothing less than this could have satisfied their
aspirations. For Germany to have offered less would not have secured their
assistance; if Germany had annexed Ireland they would have welcomed a
deliverer from Germany as eagerly as a deliverer was looked for them from
the domination of England.

But in the actual circumstances that accompanied the outbreak of war in
1914 there was no disposition to take sides with Germany on the merits, or
to stake everything upon the success of an understanding with Germany. It
is true that the official statement of the English case for the
declaration of war was received with a certain degree of quiet scepticism.
The commercial rivalry of the two empires, the prophecies of a coming war
that had been openly made for years, the _Entente Cordiale_ with the
French Republic, of the real meaning of which France at least made no
secret, had been too well known and had been too openly and too long
canvassed for the violation of Belgian neutrality by Germany to receive
the importance which was attributed to it or to be regarded as much more
than a blunder adroitly utilized. There was not so much sympathy with
Germany as a want of sympathy with England: there was not so much a lack
of sympathy with Belgium as a distrust of the appeals which were
insistently made to that feeling.

When war was declared the Home Rule Bill had not passed into law. A great
effort had been made to come to terms with the Ulster and the English Tory
Parties and had failed. It seemed as if the Government must either go
forward with its policy and take the risks or own defeat. It was assumed
as a matter of course that a foreign war ended _ipso facto_ all disputes
between the great English parties and that till the war should be over
internal opposition to the Government should cease. But what about
Ireland? Would the two Irish parties sink their differences in the same
way in the interest of the Empire? Would the Irish people give their
whole-hearted support and sympathy in the struggle to an England which had
so far failed to satisfy what they regarded as their elementary rights?
The choice fell to Mr. Redmond. On the one hand prudence counselled the
use of a unique opportunity: he might offer Irish support in return for
the immediate enactment of Home Rule and throw upon the Ulster Party the
onus of refusing to support the Empire in its deadly struggle. He might on
the other hand offer Irish support without conditions and leave the
satisfaction of the national claims of Ireland as a debt of honour to the
conscience of English statesmen. Had he bargained (and got his terms)
Nationalist Ireland would have been with him almost to a man: with that
simplicity of character, which, as the Greek historian says, "makes up a
great part of good breeding," he promised without conditions: England
might withdraw her soldiers from Ireland; the shores of Ireland, North and
South, would be guarded by her armed sons. The House of Commons, England
and the Empire were greatly impressed: the _beau geste_ of the Irish
leader was universally applauded. The Home Rule Bill was presented for the
Royal Signature and signed; a Suspensory Bill was hurried through
providing that its operation should be postponed; the Prime Minister
promised the enemies of Home Rule that before it was allowed to be put
into operation the Government would introduce and pass a Bill amending the
measure in such a way as to make it acceptable to its opponents; and Mr.
Redmond hurried home to rally Ireland to the cause of the Empire. The
situation was summed up later with brutal frankness by a Belfast Unionist
paper: "If the Nationalists will not enlist because the war is just, they
should not do so because they have got Home Rule; because they have not
got it. The Unionist Party has declared that when it comes into power it
will not allow the Act to stand." Even so between 40,000 and 50,000 Irish
Nationalists joined the Forces during the first year of the war.

By the time Mr. Redmond had returned to Ireland the attitude of all Irish
parties to the war had become pretty clearly defined. The Ulster
Volunteers, after about a month's hesitation on the part of their leaders,
had received official intimation that they were free to enlist. Any delay
there may have been was due, not to the feelings of the rank and file, but
to the tactics of the politicians, eager to extract the last possible
advantage from the situation. The bulk of the Nationalists, like the bulk
of the Ulstermen, were in sympathy with the cause of England and her
Allies as against Germany and the two parties sent recruits in almost
equal numbers. The attitude of Sinn Fein is put so clearly in a leader in
its official organ that it deserves quotation: "Ireland is not at war with
Germany: it has no quarrel with any Continental Power.... There is no
European Power waging war against the people of Ireland: there are two
European Powers at war with the people who dominate Ireland from Dublin
Castle.... To-day the Irish are flattered and caressed by their libellers.
England wants our aid and Mr. Redmond, true to his nature, rushes to offer
it--for nothing.... If England wins this war she will be more powerful
than she has been at any time since 1864 and she will treat the Ireland
which kissed the hand that smote her as such an Ireland ought to be
treated. If she loses the war, and Ireland is foolish enough to identify
itself with her, Ireland will deservedly share in her punishment.... We
are Irish Nationalists and the only duty we have is to stand for Ireland's
interests, irrespective of the interests of England or Germany or any
foreign country.... Let it (_i.e._ the Government) withdraw the present
abortive Home Rule Bill and pass ... a full measure of Home Rule and
Irishmen will have some reason to mobilize for the defence of their
institutions. At present they have none. In the alternative let a
Provisional Government be set up in Dublin by Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward
Carson and we shall give it allegiance. But the confidence trick has been
too often played upon us to deceive us again. If the Irish Volunteers are
to defend Ireland they must defend it for Ireland under Ireland's flag and
under Irish officers. Otherwise they will only help to perpetuate the
enslavement of their country.... Germany is nothing to us in herself, but
she is not our enemy. Our blood and our miseries are not upon her head.
But who can forbear admiration at the spectacle of the Germanic people
whom England has ringed round with enemies standing alone, undaunted and
defiant against a world in arms?" This was a clear declaration of
neutrality coupled with an offer of terms of friendship. But as the
negotiations in Parliament proceeded, as it became clear that, while Home
Rule was nominally to be passed, no effect was to be given to it for the
present, and no permanent validity to attach to the passing of it, the
tone of the Sinn Fein and Republican Press grew harder. "If the Home Rule
Bill," said _Sinn Fein_, "be signed, but not brought into immediate
operation, by the appointment of a Home Rule Executive Government, Ireland
is sold and betrayed. Let every Irishman get that into his head and keep
it there." "We regard no enemy of England as an enemy of ours.... It was
Grattan, the greatest of our constitutional leaders, who declared that if
the interests of the Empire clashed with the liberties of Ireland, then he
and every Irishman would say 'Live Ireland--perish the Empire.'" _Irish
Freedom_ which printed in capitals across its pages mottoes such as
"Germany is not Ireland's enemy," "Ireland First, Last and All the Time,"
said, "If England withdraws her troops utterly from Ireland the Irish
Volunteers will take and hold the country, hold it not alone against
Germany but against anybody else who attempts to interfere with it. And on
no other conditions will the Volunteers consent to move a step.... We are
not prepared to buy even freedom--were it offered--at the price of our
honour." It declared that "the psychological moment" had arrived for the
union of Irishmen, for the attainment of Irish liberty, and proposed for
the last time a working arrangement between the Irish Volunteers and the
Ulster Volunteers to further the real liberties of Ireland. The Labour
paper was even more outspoken. It ridiculed the parliamentary leaders for
their lack of ability in driving a bargain as compared with the more
astute Ulstermen; it ridiculed the advanced Nationalists who still talked
nonsense about a junction of the two forces of Volunteers: it declared
stoutly, "If England wants an Empire, let her hold the Empire.... Let no
Irishman leave his own land.... Keep your guns for your real enemies."
While it deplored the success of the recruiting campaign it allowed (with,
considering its own strongly expressed views, a commendable toleration)
articles to appear from Labour men giving their reasons for supporting the
war. But it had no illusions as to what was in store in the end for
Irishmen who put its ideas into practice. "For some of us," James Connolly
wrote, "the finish may be on the scaffold, for some in the prison cell,
for others more fortunate upon the battlefield of an Ireland in arms for a
real republican liberty." But as a last resort even Connolly proposed
terms of accommodation: he thought that the Volunteers by the bold policy
of refusing to move until their terms were conceded might force the
Government to repeal all clauses in the Home Rule Bill denying to Ireland
the self-government enjoyed by Canada and Australia. The last number of
his paper bore the legend "We serve neither King nor Kaiser." It had been
decided by all the political parties that then seemed to count in Ireland
that Irishmen must serve, if they served at all, not because they had
been given Home Rule but because they had not been given it--because
Ireland was still an integral part of the United Kingdom, bound to its
fortunes till the issue of the war should be determined. Three months
after war was declared the Sinn Fein, Republican and Labour papers were
suppressed by the police.

The public discussion of the terms upon which it might have been possible
to range even Separatists against Germany, the granting to Ireland of
something of her own to defend, being thus declared not to be in the
public interest, it seemed as if no obstacle remained in the way of
raising recruits all over the country. Irishmen were credited with a love
of mingling in a fight without any nice discrimination as to the grounds
of the quarrel or the merits of the dispute. "Is there not wars?" seemed
to some of the authorities to be a sufficiently potent appeal. But it was
found that there existed a confused and vague feeling that England as a
whole had at last, in spite of much English opposition, come to take a
friendly view of the Irish claim to self-government; that, if the war had
not occurred when it did, some way out of the difficulty would have been
found; that the Government was honest in its intentions and could hardly
be blamed for the tactics of its opponents. Even a slight and doubtful
indication of real friendliness on the part of England raises in Ireland a
response which must often seem to be out of proportion to the cause which
excited it; and at the beginning of the war Nationalist Ireland was ready
to respond to the call for men in a way which roused the cynical criticism
of the advanced wing of the Nationalist Party. "No English city," wrote
the _Irish Worker_ in September, 1914, "is displaying more enthusiasm than
Dublin in sending its bravest and best to murder men with whom they have
no quarrel." The Scottish Borderers, leaving for the Front, received an
enthusiastic send-off from the city in which a short while before they had
had to be confined to barracks; all over the country men were flocking to
recruit in the first few weeks of the war. Anti-English feeling was
practically smothered in a wave of enthusiasm. The Irish Volunteers, now
apparently under the assured control of the Parliamentary Party, became
the subjects of an almost embarrassing interest. Unionist peers and
gentry, retired militia officers and other people, not (to say the least)
distinguished for Irish patriotism, hastened to enrol in their ranks and
to proffer their services. The name of Major the Earl of Fingall appearing
as Chief Inspecting Officer of the Irish Volunteers in Meath in an order
signed by Colonel Maurice Moore, "Inspector-General, Irish Volunteers,"
would have seemed strange six months before and stranger still a year
afterwards. But it provoked little comment in August, 1914. It seemed as
if a miracle were about to happen and it became the apparent business of
the authorities to take steps to secure that it should not happen.

Enlistment had not been growing in popularity in Ireland for some years
before the war. In 1908, _Sinn Fein_ had pointed out with satisfaction
that the army returns showed that the number of Irishmen in the regular
army had then fallen to the lowest point upon record. The Boer War and the
anti-recruiting propaganda in Ireland had not been without their effect
upon Irish feeling and the real position and work of the army in Ireland
had been closely scrutinized. "The Curragh Mutiny" had provoked some very
pointed comments upon the spirit which really animated the army in
Ireland: it came to be looked upon as the citadel and symbol of all the
forces that opposed the claims of Ireland. "We all know in our hearts,"
said Roger Casement and Eoin MacNeill in a manifesto published in April,
1914, in the _Irish Volunteer_, "that the 'Union' means the military
occupation of Ireland as a conquered country: that the real headquarters
of Irish government on the Unionist principle is the Curragh Camp to which
the offices of Dublin Castle are only a sort of vermiform appendix." And
the functions performed by the army in Ireland would certainly have seemed
strange to anyone who felt any attachment to the views generally accepted
in England as to the relation of the army to the civil power. In the
General Orders for the guidance of the troops affording aid to the Civil
Power in Ireland, issued in 1891, the following paragraph is to be found:
"All officers in command of corps or detachments are to transmit to the
Deputy Adjutant General an immediate report of any outrages, large
meetings held or expected to be held for political or other purposes, or
occurrences that may take place in the neighbourhood of their posts
connected with the state of the country, whether they have or have not
been called upon to afford assistance to the civil power." The functions
of an army acting upon instructions like these are hardly to be
distinguished from those of an army of occupation, and Nationalist Ireland
was well aware of the efficiency with which these functions were
performed. To make enlistment popular in Ireland, even in a moment of
enthusiasm, was thus a work requiring a certain amount of tact and
discretion.

The first real difficulty arose with the Volunteers, whose services as an
army of defence had been pledged by Mr. Redmond to the Government. The
pledge had been given without the consent, or even the knowledge, of the
Volunteer Committee and they resented the implication that they could be
disposed of as if they were the private property of other people. They had
been enrolled with a definite object and any duty for which their services
were to be given must be shown to be at least not inconsistent with that
object. The committee, however, so far endorsed Mr. Redmond's offer as to
pass a resolution declaring "the complete readiness of the Irish
Volunteers to take joint action with the Ulster Volunteer Force for the
defence of Ireland." The Prime Minister promised in Parliament that the
Secretary for War would "do everything in his power, after consultation
with gentlemen in Ireland, to arrange for the full equipment and
organization of the Irish Volunteers." Whether the powers of the Secretary
for War were less extensive than the Prime Minister believed, or whether
the "gentlemen in Ireland" had other views, the scheme drawn up by General
Sir Arthur Paget and his staff "by which the War Office may be supplied
from the Irish Volunteers with a force for the defence of Ireland" was
rejected by the War Office. This, it is true, made little difference in
the end, for the Volunteer Committee, when the scheme was submitted to
them, demanded the inclusion of certain "primary conditions" which it was
not at all likely that the War Office would have accepted: but the
immediate rejection of it by the military authorities in England is
significant of the spirit in which the question of Irish recruiting was
approached. It was hostile not only to Irish ideals but to Irish
sentiment, to everything except the use to which Irish soldiers might be
put. The contrast between the treatment accorded to Irish Nationalist
recruits and the privileges granted to the Ulster Division can only be
explained on the assumption that the War Office desired to show
appreciation of the latter and suspicion of the former. The Ulster men
were allowed to retain their own officers and their own tests of
admission: the "regiments" formed under the Provisional Government of
Ulster were taken over, without alteration, by the English authorities:
they were allowed to refuse Catholics or Nationalists who offered to
enlist in their ranks: their recruiting marches were accompanied by bands
who played Orange party tunes through Catholic and Nationalist hamlets
while they went through the farce of lecturing the inhabitants on their
"duty to the Empire in this crisis." In November, 1914, an advertisement
appeared in the Dublin _Evening Mail_ announcing that a new Dublin Company
of the Royal Irish Fusiliers was to be formed to which none but Unionists
were admissible, intending recruits being directed to apply at the Orange
Hall. The Ulster Force was trained as a body in camps of its own, while
Ulster Nationalists had to take train for the South or were shipped to
England. Similar privileges were bluntly and persistently refused to the
Nationalists. The Ulstermen had their own banners: the Nationalists might
not fight under any emblem but the Union Jack, the symbol of the defeat of
their nationality, of the very Act of Union against which they were known
to be in protest. Treatment such as this could have only one result: the
people who decided upon it must have known what the result would be, and
by persisting in it showed that the result was desired. By cooling down
the enthusiasm of Nationalist Ireland they made it possible to declare
that Nationalist Ireland was "disappointing expectations" and to hint that
they had suspected all along that it was less eager to fight than had
appeared. Incidentally the result was held to justify the suspicions which
had brought it about. Irish soldiers were divided into two categories:
those whom the authorities delighted to honour and those whom they decided
to employ. It must be added that these manufactured animosities faded away
in the stress of battle. Ulstermen and Nationalists fighting side by side
covered themselves with glory and did equal credit to the old land; and no
more stringent criticisms of the treacherous and malignant policy that
divided them can be heard than from the lips of some of the men who
survived the glorious ordeal of the Somme.

But an influential body had from the first decided that the duty of
Irishmen, and especially of Irish Volunteers, was to remain in Ireland;
these were the members of the original Volunteer Committee and their
adherents: outside the Volunteer ranks they were supported by Sinn Fein,
the Republican Party and the Citizen Army. To them the supreme and
immediate duty of Irishmen, and in a special degree of the Volunteers, was
to safeguard the liberties of Ireland--a duty to which the fact of a
European war was irrelevant, except in so far as it might afford an
opportunity to strengthen and secure Irish liberty. There is little doubt
that some members of this party hoped that Germany would be victorious,
not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of Ireland, which had
little prospect of winning concessions from an England rendered invincible
by the overthrow of her most formidable rival: some of them regarded the
war as a mere struggle for commercial supremacy in which Ireland had no
interest at stake: but they would all alike have defended the shores of
Ireland against a German army which invaded them for the purposes of
annexation and conquest. To all alike the proposition that Irishmen had
any duty to enlist for foreign service in the English army was a denial of
the very fundamental article of their creed. When Mr. Redmond, then, in
his address to the Volunteers at Woodenbridge in September, 1914, urged
them to enlist for service overseas the inevitable crisis was provoked.
But the original provisional committee were now in a minority in the
counsels of the organization they had founded, and they were hampered by a
fundamental (and, indeed, intentional) ambiguity in the Volunteer pledge.
"The rights and liberties common to all Irishmen" was not a phrase which
carried its interpretation on its face. It was open to the Volunteer
followers of Mr. Redmond to say that the democracy of Great Britain had
conferred upon Ireland a "charter of liberty" and that it was the duty of
Irishmen to fight for Great Britain, keeping faith with those who had kept
faith with them. It was open to others to say that "the Thing on the
Statute Book" fell far short of conferring upon Irishmen the rights and
liberties to which they were entitled, and that the duty to secure first
that to which they were entitled precluded them from the prior performance
of any other task. The members of the original committee who took the
latter view could also urge that Mr. Redmond's original pledge that the
Volunteers would "defend the shores of Ireland" was not capable of the
gloss that "the shores of Ireland" under the circumstances was a
legitimate figure of speech for the trenches in the front line in France.
The difference of interpretation developed into a split. The members of
the original committee met in September and called a Volunteer Convention
for November 25, 1914, at which it was decided "to declare that Ireland
cannot with honour or safety take part in foreign quarrels otherwise than
through the free action of a National Government of her own; and to
repudiate the claim of any man to offer up the blood and lives of the sons
of Irishmen and Irishwomen to the services of the British Empire while no
National Government which could act and speak for the people of Ireland is
allowed to exist."

Before the split the Volunteers had numbered about 150,000; and it would
appear that the great majority of these at first sided with Mr. Redmond.
Many of them enlisted: many of them, under the title of the National
Volunteers, continued to exist as a separate body in Ireland: some at
least of them afterwards found their way back into the ranks of the Irish
Volunteers.

From the time of the Volunteer split the air was cleared politically in
Ireland: for the first time people began to know precisely where they
stood. The National Volunteers and the Parliamentary Party under Mr.
Redmond's leadership were committed, as were the Unionists, to the
unreserved and energetic prosecution of the war: all the other parties,
Sinn Fein, the Republicans, the Irish Volunteers, and the Citizen Army
adopted an attitude of watchful neutrality. Their view was bounded by the
shores of Ireland or when they cast a glance abroad it was as the
husbandman observes the clouds. They continued to differ (sometimes
sharply and vehemently) from one another: but the public, with a prophetic
disregard of the mere obvious present, began to label them
indiscriminately as Sinn Feiners. In truth common adversity was drawing
them closer together, and the apparently heterogeneous elements which went
to make up the Sinn Fein of present-day Ireland were being welded into a
unity of aim and resolution.

The results were soon apparent. During the month or so when the Volunteers
enjoyed the fleeting sunlight of aristocratic favour, the Foreign Office
had written (18th August, 1914) to H.B.M. Consul-General at Antwerp to
assist Mr. John O'Connor, M.P., and Mr. H. J. Harris in arranging for the
shipment to Ireland of certain rifles belonging to the Volunteers,
permission to export them having been obtained from the Belgian Government
by the Foreign Office. It was, no doubt, an oversight that no ammunition
for them was obtained, or could be obtained afterwards; but the rifles
came. Three months later an officer of the Volunteers who was employed in
the Ordnance Survey was dismissed without charge or notice and ordered to
leave Dublin within twenty-four hours. He was only the first of a series
of Volunteer organizers who suffered deportation under similar
circumstances. The Birmingham factory which was engaged in making guns for
the Volunteers was raided, its books and correspondence seized, and it was
ordered not to remove any goods from its premises. To be an Irish
Volunteer was to be "disaffected," and to be "disaffected" was to be
liable to summary measures of repression.

The autumn of 1914 saw the appearance of a new Separatist paper,
_Eire-Ireland_, which appeared as a weekly on October 26th and was changed
to a daily after the second number. It is significant of the change in
Irish feeling that it was now possible to run a Separatist daily paper in
Dublin, and of the gradual rapprochement between Irish parties that this
paper, intended as the organ of the Irish Volunteers, was edited by Mr.
Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Fein movement. Its attitude
towards the war was defined in an article by Roger Casement in the first
number: "Ireland has no quarrel with the German people or just cause of
offence against them.... Ireland has suffered at the hands of British
administrators a more prolonged series of evils deliberately inflicted
than any other community of civilized men." It emphasized the view of the
Volunteers that Mr. Redmond's advice to take their place in the firing
line was out of harmony with their principles. "The Irish Volunteers had
from the beginning and still have but a single duty--to secure and
safeguard the rights and liberties of Ireland." The new daily contained a
column "The War Day by Day" in which a critical analysis of the military
situation was attempted. While most of the other Irish papers merely
reproduced the amateur war criticisms of Fleet Street, the editor of
_Eire_, assuming that English newspapers were giving only one side of the
case, attempted an independent study of the situation, which was made to
appear much less favourable to the Allies than was asserted by other Irish
papers. Stories of German atrocities were analyzed and ridiculed. The
fortunes of the Irish regiments were followed with a jealous eye: it was
asserted that they were being sacrificed unnecessarily while English
regiments were spared, and the Government was challenged to prepare and
publish complete casualty lists for the Irish regiments of the line. The
protest of the German professors against the alleged Allied calumnies was
printed in full and annotated with sympathy. The assurance given to Roger
Casement by the German Acting-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs as to
the contemplated action of German troops if they should land in Ireland
was printed as a document of first-rate international importance. It was
assumed that the Ballot Act would be enforced in Ireland and passive
resistance to its enforcement was urged from the first number of the
paper. _Eire_ did not run for much more than six weeks. Its last number
(December 4) was a broad sheet announcing that the printer, whose premises
had been entered by a military force which had confiscated his property,
felt unable to continue the printing of the paper.

_Eire_ did not so much make, as voice, the opinions of a considerable
section of Irish Nationalist opinion. The newspapers were scanned eagerly
every morning all over Ireland for tidings of the Irish regiments. It was
known that they were engaged, that they were outnumbered, that they would
fight like lions ("the Gaels went out to battle but they always fell"): a
disquieting and ominous silence reigned as to their fate. It was assumed
that the news was bad and that it was being kept back: it began to be
asserted that they were being put upon forlorn hopes to spare the more
valued English regiments: and even those who did not credit the suspicion
felt uneasy when it was expressed. It may have been necessary to refrain
from telling the whole truth in official reports, but every course has its
disadvantages and, so far as Ireland was concerned, this had the result of
arousing suspicion and distrust. And to the question "Why, if these men
can fight and die for the freedom of others, are they not considered
worthy of the freedom they desire for themselves?" the answers did not
carry conviction.

The official "War News" printed in the Irish papers was read with
detachment and reserve; stories of German atrocities were received with
unimpressionable scepticism. This was not due to any pro-German bias, or
to any Sinn Fein propaganda. Peasants in remote villages who never saw
any paper but an odd copy of the _Freeman's Journal_ or the _Irish Daily
Independent_, and who were Redmondites to a man, discussed these matters
with a completely open mind, and with (to those who did not know them)
surprising acumen. People accustomed for years to read that their county
or their province, in which some unpopular grazier had been boycotted, was
"seething with outrage and disorder," to be told that a district in which
there was known not to be as much crime in a year as there was in an
English district of the same size every month was "in a state bordering on
almost complete lawlessness," were not moved when the Germans were charged
on the same authority with crimes against civilization. The word of "our
English correspondent" was simply "not evidence" against anybody. This
invincible scepticism, born of experience, was quite wrongly interpreted
as being the result of "pro-German" sympathies when it proved an
unexpected obstacle to the recruiting campaign.

The gradual growth of Sinn Fein and anti-English (which was only
accidentally and not on principle pro-German) sentiment during the war,
and the increasing difficulties found in the way of the recruiting
campaign, were due mainly to a growing disbelief in the sincerity of
English statesmen in their dealings with Ireland. The Government had gone
too far in the direction of Home Rule to make Unionists sure that the
promised Amending Bill would secure that they should not be "coerced": it
had not gone far enough to make Nationalists sure that it really meant to
do what it had promised. The result was the conviction upon all hands that
their rights must be secured by their own efforts not by reliance upon the
lukewarm sympathy of others. This conviction was not a matter of a sudden
growth nor did it always find expression in the same way: it acted at once
in favour of, and to the detriment of, recruiting: it was professed both
by Nationalists and by Unionists. At first recruits joined because the war
was just, because the Empire was in danger, because England had granted
Ireland a "charter of liberty," because the civilization of Europe was
threatened, because there was fighting afoot. Probably the majority
enlisted for one or other of these reasons. But the theory of "a free gift
of a free people" expounded by Mr. Asquith in Dublin fell more and more
into the background. It began to be represented on both sides that the
more recruits either party sent to the war the stronger would be the lien
of that party upon the sympathy of the English Government. Unionists whose
blood had flowed for England in Flanders could not be abandoned after such
a sacrifice: Nationalists who had given their best and bravest to the
cause of freedom could not be denied the freedom for which such a price
had been paid. The official recruiting campaign wavered in its appeal
between the two points. Its minor ineptitudes need hardly be taken into
account. It was hardly politic to cover the walls of police barracks in
Protestant villages in Ulster with green placards drawing attention to a
few weighty words of Cardinal Logue: these follies did neither harm nor
good. But it was different when appeals to the chivalry and bravery of
Irishmen alternated with deductions from the famous phrase about "the
rights of small nations." When Irish Nationalists were implored to rally
to the defence of the Friend of Little Nations the size of Ireland was not
likely to be forgotten. The inference that in fighting for the liberties
of small nations Irishmen would be helping their own nation to secure the
same liberty was the inference intended: but it was not always the
inference actually drawn. The person who first conceived the idea of
making use of that phrase for recruiting purposes in Ireland did the cause
of recruiting an unforeseen but serious disservice. Was it, after all,
really true (it was asked) that England could not recognize the freedom of
Ireland until Ireland had first helped England to force Germany to
recognize the freedom of Belgium? Was the freedom of Ireland then not a
matter of right but the result of a bargain--the equivalent of how many
fighting men? Had England been the friend of small nations before the war,
was she to be their friend during the war, or was Ireland only to help her
to be their friend after the war was over? The right of Ireland to more
freedom than she had enjoyed had seemed to be recognized before the war
had been spoken of; what had become of the recognition of it? And even
bargaining, however distasteful, has its usages: it was no bargain when
one side was called upon to pay up and the other carefully refrained from
promising anything definite in return.

The bulk of the recruits enlisted during the first year of the war, and
enlisted for worthy and honourable motives: when recruiting became, as it
did become later, a question of party tactics the results were less
favourable. But quite early in the war it became plain that there was
going to be a contest between the two Irish parties as to which should
have most to show for itself at the end, and there was no burning desire
to assist political opponents to obtain recruits. Sir Edward Carson
refused absolutely to stand on the same recruiting platform as Mr.
Redmond; the Belfast Unionist papers found it a grave lapse from principle
in the present Lord Chancellor of England that he addressed a recruiting
meeting in Liverpool in the company of Home Rulers. The Ulster Volunteer
Force was informed practically that it had a two-fold duty, to fight for
the Empire abroad, and to keep up the organization at home. It was plain
from the first that in Ireland there was to be no "party truce," and it
was recognized on all hands before long that when the war was over the old
fight was to be renewed. The position of the Home Rule Act, penned in the
Statute Book, with an Amending Bill waiting to tear it to pieces when the
time came for it to be allowed out, made this inevitable. And the
Government did not find it in its heart to hold an even balance between
the parties: and when the balance began to dip the end was in sight for
those who had eyes to see.

The only party really able to turn to account the situation thus created
was the Sinn Fein party. It had preached for years that the English
governing classes, indeed the English nation, were not, in spite of their
apparent readiness to listen to the Parliamentary Party, the friends of
Irish Nationalism in any real sense: that they had no intention (and never
had) of satisfying the just claims of Ireland: that the Parliamentarians
were mere pawns in a party game, to be sacrificed when it suited both or
either of the English parties: that the word of English statesmen could
not be trusted, and that Ireland had nothing to gain from them: that
self-reliance, vigilance and distrust of England were "the sinews of good
sense" in Irish politics. It had hinted, not obscurely, that the
opportunity of Ireland would come when England should be involved in a
European war, and that Ireland must be prepared when the day came to use
the opportunity. It now pointed a triumphant finger to what was going on
in Ireland and asked which had been the truer prophet, itself or the
Parliamentary Party. It quoted the returns of recruiting in Ulster in
support of its thesis: "The fact that out of 200,000 Unionists of military
age in Ireland--men who talked Empire, sang Empire and protested they
would die for the British Empire--four out of every five are still at
home, declaring they will not have Home Rule, is proof that the Irish
Unionist knows his present business." That Irish soldiers were to be used
to further English interests, and not the cause of Ireland, was (it held)
proved by extracts from English newspapers, where in unguarded moments the
naked truth peeped out: it gave prominence to a quotation from the
_Liverpool Post_ of September 12, 1914: "His Majesty could make a
triumphal tour of Ireland, North, South, East and West, and in reply to
his personal appeal, there would be 300,000 Irishmen of all creeds and
classes for the Front in less than a week. In England the question becomes
more and more important in the interests of the efficiency of our trade,
whether we can spare any more skilled mechanics for the ranks of battle.
The capture of the German trade is almost as vital to the existence of the
Empire as the destruction of Prussian militarism."

By the end of 1914 all avowedly Sinn Fein papers had been suppressed, and
the two American papers, the _Gaelic American_ and the _Irish World_, had
been prohibited in Ireland. The latter had been a supporter of Mr.
Redmond's policy but had parted company with him on the question of
recruiting in Ireland. The editor of _Sinn Fein_ countered the suppression
of his paper by an ingenious device. He began to publish a bi-weekly
called _Scissors and Paste_, which contained nothing but extracts from
other English, Irish, Colonial and American papers. It was introduced to
the reader in the only editorial it contained, entitled "Ourselves": "It
is high treason," it ran, "for an Irishman to argue with the sword the
right of his small nationality to equal political freedom with Belgium or
Servia or Hungary. It is destruction to the property of his printer now
when he argues it with the pen. Hence while England is fighting the battle
of the Small Nationalities, _Ireland_ is reduced to _Scissors and Paste_.
Up to the present the sale and use of these instruments have not been
prohibited by the British Government in Ireland." The columns of the
_Times_, the _Daily Mail_, and the _Morning Post_ supplied the German
Wireless messages: the _New York Times_ was drawn upon for James O'Donnell
Bennett's articles protesting against the reports of German atrocities. In
addition it printed suitable extracts from _The Reliques of Father Prout_,
from Barry's _Songs of Ireland_, Thomas Davis's _Essays_ and Sir Samuel
Ferguson: it reprinted Curran's speech in defence of the printer of _The
Press_ in 1797. It ransacked the _Daily Mail_ for that journal's vigorous
denunciations of the French in 1899: "If they cannot cease their insults
their colonies will be taken from them and given to Germany and Italy--we
ourselves want nothing more.... France will be rolled in the blood and mud
in which her Press daily wallows." The paper ran for a little over a
month. Its undoing was an extract from the _Irish Times_, a copy of a
notice posted on a Sunday morning in January, 1915, in places near a
number of Roman Catholic churches in Wexford: "People of Wexford, take no
notice of the police order to destroy your own property and leave your
own homes if a German army lands in Ireland. When the Germans come they
will come as friends and to put an end to English rule in Ireland.
Therefore stay in your homes and assist as far as possible the German
troops. Any stores, hay, corn or forage taken by the Germans will be paid
for by them."

Just before the disappearance of _Scissors and Paste_, the _Irish Worker_,
three weeks after its suppression, appeared again in Glasgow, where it was
printed by the Socialist Labour Party, and began to circulate once more in
Ireland.

After five months Mr. Arthur Griffith was again able to start a paper. The
Dublin printers could not be induced to take the risk of printing for him
again: but Belfast supplied one with the necessary enterprise. On June 19,
1915, _Nationality_ appeared as a penny weekly paper and continued to
appear until the Easter Rising in 1916. In tone _Nationality_ was a
reproduction of its predecessors and as the main characteristic of Sinn
Fein propaganda was its directness and simplicity two extracts from its
columns will suffice. An editorial (signed C.) on "The Fenian Faith"
written towards the end of 1915 contains the following: "The Fenians and
the Fenian faith incarnated in Allen, Larkin and O'Brien were of a
fighting and revolutionary epoch. They can only be commemorated by men of
another fighting and revolutionary generation. That generation we have
with us to-day. For we have the material, the men and stuff of war, the
faith and purpose and cause for revolution.... We shall have Ireland
illumined with a light before which even the Martyrs' will pale: the light
of Freedom, of a deed done and action taken and a blow struck for the Old
Land"; and a month or so later: "The things that count in Ireland against
English Conscription are national determination, serviceable weapons and
the knowledge of how to use them." Under the stress of circumstances Sinn
Fein seemed to have abandoned the policy of the days of peace and to have
come round in time of war to the policy which, even two years before the
war, had been enunciated in _Irish Freedom_: "Ireland can be freed by
force of arms; _that_ is the fact which ever must be borne in mind. The
responsibility rests with the men of this generation. They can strike with
infinitely greater hopes of success than could their fathers and their
grandsires: but if they let this chance slip ... if they strike no blow
for their country, whilst England herself is in handgrips with the most
powerful nation in Europe, then the opportunity will have passed and
Ireland will be more utterly under the heel of England than ever she was
since the Union." This was written in September, 1912. But the task of
putting the policy into practice, of welding the (at times) discordant
elements of anti-Parliamentarian Nationalism together and making possible
a united effort was reserved for other hands and another mind than those
of the founder of Sinn Fein.

During the vigorous years of its youth Sinn Fein had not confined its
propagandist activities to public meetings, the foundation of branches
and the publication of a paper. The National Council of Sinn Fein had
issued a series of "National Council Pamphlets" dealing with those aspects
of Sinn Fein policy upon which the public seemed to require instruction.
The first of these was a general exposition of the Sinn Fein policy by Mr.
Griffith. Others were "The Purchase of the Railways," "England's Colossal
Robbery of Ireland," a study of the financial relations between the two
countries since the Act of Union, "Ireland and the British Armed Forces,"
"Constitutionalism and Sinn Fein" and "How Ireland is Taxed," an
exposition of the fact (often ignored) that under the Union Ireland is the
most heavily taxed country in Europe. Finally, in 1912, a pamphlet by Mr.
Griffith, "The Home Rule Bill Examined," was a general review of the
powers conferred and withheld by the Home Rule Bill and an examination of
the real bearing of that measure upon the political and economic situation
of Ireland. The increasing difficulties which attended the publication of
a newspaper during the war, the increased demand for information upon the
situation created by it, the increasing number of those who felt that they
had something to say which required more space than could be afforded in a
newspaper, led to a revival of the publication of pamphlets. Early in 1915
a series of "Tracts for the Times" was projected by the Irish Publicity
League. The first of these was a tract "What Emmet means in 1915,"
significant of the direction in which minds were turning at the time. It
was followed by "Shall Ireland be Divided?" an impassioned protest against
the policy of partition and by "The Secret History of the Irish
Volunteers" (which ran through several editions), an account by The
O'Rahilly of the formation of the Volunteers, their policy, their attempts
to secure arms and their relations with the Parliamentary Party. The
traditional Sinn Fein view was enforced in "When the Government Publishes
Sedition," an analysis of the official census returns, showing that under
the Union the population of Ireland had been reduced by one-half, and in
two pamphlets on "Daniel O'Connell and Sinn Fein" an attempt was made to
commend the policy by an argument that O'Connell both in his methods and
his aims was really a Sinn Feiner, and by an exposition ("How Ireland is
Plundered") of the question of the Financial Relations in O'Connell's day
and since. Other pamphlets were "What it Feels Like" on the prison
experiences of the writer who had been imprisoned under the Defence of the
Realm Act for his political activities, "Ascendancy While You Wait" and
"Why the Martyrs of Manchester Died." During the same time the Cumann na
mBan, the women's branch of the Irish Volunteers, added to their
activities the publication of a "National Series" of pamphlets "Why
Ireland is Poor--English Laws and Irish Industries," "Dean Swift on the
Situation" and "The Spanish War," a reprint of a pamphlet published in
1790 by Wolfe Tone, urging the Irish Parliament to take into account in
the consideration of the threatened war with Spain solely and simply the
interests of Ireland, the only interests which it should allow itself to
consider. The Committee of Public Safety also in 1915 published a pamphlet
on "The Defence of the Realm Act in Ireland" showing how the Act was
administered for the suppression of Nationalist propaganda. The speech
which Mr. F. Sheehy-Skeffington delivered in the dock when charged under
the same Act with interfering with recruiting was published as a pamphlet
about the same time. The articles contributed to _Irish Freedom_ by P. H.
Pearse were reprinted under the title of "From a Hermitage" in the autumn
of 1915 as one of the "Bodenstown Series" of pamphlets, the first of which
had been Mr. Pearse's "How Does She Stand?" a reprint of two speeches
delivered in America in 1914 at Emmet Commemorations in New York and
Brooklyn and of the eloquent speech delivered at the grave of Wolfe Tone
in Bodenstown Churchyard in 1913. The funeral of O'Donovan Rossa in
August, 1915, also produced some pamphlets on Rossa's life and his
significance as a Fenian leader and a protagonist of the Irish Republican
cause. These pamphlets, and others, had a wide circulation; they were
eagerly discussed, especially among young Nationalists; they widened the
rift between the Parliamentary Party and their opponents, and had much to
do with the shaping of Irish Nationalist opinion.

Meanwhile the activities of the Irish Volunteers continued. The secession
after the dispute with Mr. Redmond had withdrawn a large majority of their
original numbers: indeed some authorities go so far as to say that
immediately after the formation of the National Volunteers, the original
committee could not count upon a following of more than 10,000 or 12,000
men. Be this as it may, the arrest and deportation of several of their
organizers, the constant supervision over their proceedings exercised by
the police authorities and the sure drift of Nationalist opinion away from
the Parliamentarians and their policy, not (it is true) so marked then as
to cause serious official misgiving, tended to increase their prestige and
popularity. The funds had for the most part gone with the National
Volunteers, but the Irish in America, who sided not with Mr. Redmond but
with the Irish Volunteers, supplied large sums of money for equipment and
organization. The report of the Second Annual Convention held in November,
1915, contains a speech by the President on the history and aims of the
movement which concluded: "Further I will only say that we ought all to
adhere faithfully and strictly to the objects, the constitution and the
policy which we have adopted. We will not be diverted from our work by
tactics of provocation. We will not give way to irritation or excitement.
Our business is not to make a show or indulge in demonstrations. We
started out on a course of constructive work requiring a long period of
patient and tenacious exertion. When things were going most easily for
us, I never shrank from telling my comrades that success might require
years of steady perseverance--a prospect sometimes harder to face than an
enemy in the field.... Great progress has been made, more must be made.
The one thing we must look to is that there shall be no stopping and no
turning back." There were at this time over 200 corps of the Irish
Volunteers in active training and the movement was spreading, if not
rapidly, yet quietly and surely. The leaders waited for time to do its
work, to bring fully home to Irish Nationalists the difference between a
policy in which the necessities of Empire held the first place and one in
which the claims of Ireland were supreme: meanwhile it was intended that
the Volunteers should act as "a national defence force for Ireland, for
all Ireland and for Ireland only," ready to ward off any assault upon
Irish liberty, but resolved not to provoke or to invite attack.

But in spite of official policies and intentions there had slowly been
formed a small but determined minority in Ireland who looked to revolution
as the only sure and manly policy for a nation pledged to freedom. This,
the creed of the Fenians, had not been openly avowed in Ireland for almost
half a century: Nationalists had come to regard it either as a forlorn
hope, a gallant but hopeless adventure, or as a policy out of harmony with
modern civilization and progress. Here and there a lonely but picturesque
figure might be seen, "an old Fenian," in the world but not of it, who
spoke with a resigned contempt of the new men and the new methods, an
inspiration but hardly an example to the younger generation. There was
still in existence the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an obscure and
elusive body, mysterious as the Rosicrucians and to all outward
appearances of hardly any more political importance. A secret but
apparently innocuous correspondence was understood to be kept up by them
with America where, among an important and influential section of the
expatriated Irish, the hope was more widely and more openly cherished of a
day when Ireland would shake off the lethargy of a generation and revert
to the age-long claim for independence. For a short time it seemed as if
the prospect of the grant of Home Rule would quench the last embers of the
revolutionary fire, as if the English democracy had at last stretched out
a friendly hand and that the rest would be the work of time. Ulster's
appeal to arms quickened the embers to a flame; in less than two years'
time a revolution was spoken of more openly than had been the case for
fifty years. No man in Ireland would have taken up arms to secure Home
Rule: it was a "concession" which to some Nationalists seemed the greatest
that could be obtained, to others (and perhaps the majority) to be a step
upon the road to a larger independence: both sections were agreed that it
should be sought by constitutional methods. But force might be the only
means of retaining what it had been proper to secure without it, and the
Irish Volunteers were prepared to fight those who attempted to take from
the people of Ireland any right which they had been able to secure.

But it was not to be expected that the purely defensive policy of the
Volunteers would commend itself to all sections of Nationalist opinion nor
could the formula of their association produce more than an outward and
seeming unity. So much had been true before the war; and when Europe was
involved in strife, when the issue between England with her Allies and the
Central Powers seemed to hang in the balance, a purely defensive and
waiting policy seemed to be a criminal neglect of the opportunity offered
by Providence. Mitchel's prophecy of the fortune that a continental war
might bring to Ireland seemed about to be fulfilled, unless the arm of
Ireland should prove nerveless and impotent. Not alone in Ireland were
voices raised to point the lesson: the Irish in America who still
professed the Fenian faith urged insistently the use of the opportunity.
Two books written by James K. Maguire and printed by the Wolfe Tone
Publishing Co. of New York, "What Could Germany do for Ireland?" and "The
King, the Kaiser and Irish Freedom" had a considerable circulation in
Ireland during 1915 and 1916. Written by an Irish-American who had been
educated at a German school in Syracuse, and was well known for his German
sympathies, they boldly announced that in a German victory lay the only
hope for the establishment of an Irish Republic. They asserted not only
that Germany would establish and guarantee the independence of Ireland,
but that she would help Ireland to develop her industries and commerce,
her resources in coal, metals and peat, which still after a hundred years
of the Union were no further developed than they had been in the middle of
the eighteenth century. To most Irishmen the panegyric of German
disinterestedness was an idle tale, and Sinn Fein had been proclaiming
(not without success) for nearly a score of years that the development of
Ireland must not be expected from outsiders but from Irishmen themselves.
But there were those who thought that the power to raise the heavy hand of
England must be found, not in the slow efforts of a painful and hampered
self-reliance, but in a hand heavier still: and it was assumed that German
aid once given to free and re-establish Ireland would be withdrawn before
it became tutelage and exploitation. No one dreamed of an Ireland that
should exchange the penurious restraint of the Union for the prosperous
servitude of a German Province: the end of all endeavour was the sovereign
independence of Ireland.

The German Foreign Office, with the sanction of the Imperial Chancellor,
had quite early in the war, on the motion of Roger Casement, given what
was taken for an unequivocal assurance on this point. "The Imperial
Government," the statement ran, "declares formally that Germany would not
invade Ireland with any intentions of conquest or of the destruction of
any institutions. If, in the course of this war, which Germany did not
seek, the fortunes of arms should ever bring German troops to the coast of
Ireland, they would land there, not as an army of invaders coming to rob
or destroy, but as the fighting forces of a Government inspired by
goodwill toward a land and a people for whom Germany only wishes national
prosperity and national freedom." Even a slight acquaintance with methods
of imperial expansion would point to the necessity for a rigorous scrutiny
of the terms of such a declaration and no such scrutiny would pronounce
this declaration to be even moderately satisfactory: even if it stood the
test it would not (so mysterious are the ways of State policy) have been
worth the paper it was written on. But "cows over the water have long
horns"--the German promise was an anchor sure and steadfast.

Whatever aid might be expected from Germany to secure the success of a
revolution, nothing could be done without a party in Ireland united in its
aims and able to take advantage of any aid that might be sent. No single
party in Ireland could have been said to fulfil the conditions. The only
Nationalist section which could have combined with an outside
expeditionary force landing in Ireland was the Irish Volunteers, but not
one of them was, by virtue of his Volunteer pledge, in any way bound to do
so. Nor was there any guarantee that their views as to the ultimate form
which a free Irish constitution should assume were identical: in fact it
was known that they were not. Official Sinn Fein still found the
independence of Ireland in the Constitution of 1782: the Republicans would
have nothing but a "true Republican Freedom." The Citizen Army was
Republican in its teaching but it was openly hostile to both sections of
the Volunteers. To it Sinn Fein and many of the Republicans seemed a
bourgeois party, from which the workers need expect nothing. To James
Connolly, their leader, the vaunted prosperity reached under the
independent Irish Parliament was the prosperity of a class and not of the
community, and he could point to the writings of Arthur O'Connor, ignored
by orthodox Sinn Feiners, in proof of his contention. To establish the
political ideals of Sinn Fein the Citizen Army was not prepared to raise
its little finger. The Republicans might have seemed more sympathetic and
congenial allies; but many even of them seemed too remote and formal in
their ideals, too much wrapped up in visions of a future Ireland, free and
indivisible, to have time to spare for the formulation of the means by
which all Irishmen might really be free. But there were not wanting men on
both sides who saw the necessity of union in the face of a common danger
for the furtherance of a common purpose, who taught that if Labour should
pledge itself to Ireland, Ireland should also pledge itself to Labour.
This union when it came about was mainly due to James Connolly and P. H.
Pearse.

James Connolly had been for several years the acknowledged leader of Irish
Socialism. His book on _Labour in Irish History_ written in 1910 is
recognized as a standard work: his _Reconquest of Ireland_, his pamphlet
_The New Evangel_, and his articles in _The Irish Worker_ were widely read
and had great influence among Irish Nationalists who belonged to the
Labour movement. His attitude to the two main Irish parties was one of
hostility: he was hostile to the Unionists as representing the party of
tyranny and privilege, to the Home Rulers as the followers of a policy
which was "but a cloak for the designs of the middle-class desirous of
making terms with the Imperial Government it pretends to dislike." To
ardent and vague talk about "Ireland" and "freedom" he opposed the cool
and critical temper of one who was accustomed to look stern facts in the
face: "Ireland as distinct from her people," he wrote, "is nothing to me;
and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for 'Ireland,'
and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and
the suffering, the shame and the degradation brought upon the people of
Ireland--aye, brought by Irishmen upon Irish men and women--without
burning to end it, is in my opinion a fraud and a liar in his heart, no
matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements he is pleased to
call 'Ireland'." Connolly believed in Irish Nationality, but he would not
have been satisfied with the right to wear the badges of independence; a
national flag, a national parliament, a national culture were in
themselves nothing; but if they meant the right of the common men and
women of Ireland to control their own lives and their own destinies then
they meant everything in the world to him. Like Wolfe Tone he believed in
"that numerous and respectable class, the men of no property"; to secure
their rights in Ireland he was ready for anything. The national mould in
which his Socialism came to be cast did not always appeal to his followers
and associates: they regretted his increasing devotion to Irish
Nationalism and his apparent indifference to pure Socialism; as one said
later, "The high creed of Irish Nationalism became his daily rosary, while
the higher creed of international humanity that had so long bubbled from
his eloquent lips was silent for ever." As a matter of fact he tested
alike theoretical Nationalism and theoretical Socialism by the facts;
Nationalism, to be worth anything, must secure the rights of the common
men and women who make up the bulk of the nation: Socialism, to be worth
anything, must secure the rights not of "humanity" but of the human beings
which compose it, and the principal human beings whose destiny an Irish
Socialist could influence were the Irish. Connolly had never shared the
extreme hostility to the Irish Volunteers which was characteristic of the
bulk of the Citizen Army: while he championed the rights of his class he
recognized that they formed, along with others, an Irish nation and that
their surest charter of freedom would be the charter of freedom of their
country. But it must be a real, universal and effective freedom if it were
to be worth the winning. Under his guidance and influence the ideals of
the Citizen Army began to approximate more closely to those of the Irish
Volunteers.

The Irish Volunteers on the other hand were learning under other guidance
to examine more closely the implications of the phrase "the independence
of Ireland." Their guide was P. H. Pearse, a man of great gifts, a high
and austere spirit filled with a great purpose. Through all his work, both
in English and in Irish, plays, poems and stories, runs the thread of an
ardent devotion to goodness and beauty, to spiritual freedom, to the faith
that tries to move mountains and is crushed beneath them. For many years
his life seems to have been passed in the grave shadow of the sacrifice he
felt that he was called upon to make for Ireland: he believed that he was
appointed to tread the path that Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone had trodden
before him, and his life was shaped so that it might be worthy of its end.

To Pearse the ideal Irishman was Wolfe Tone, and it is significant that
one of the first occasions upon which the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen
Army held a joint demonstration was a pilgrimage to Tone's grave at
Bodenstown. It was here that Pearse in 1913 delivered an eloquent and
memorable address in which he proclaimed his belief that Wolfe Tone was
the greatest Irishman who had ever lived. "We have come," his speech
began, "to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place
where Patrick sleeps in Down. Patrick brought us life, but this man died
for us." Pearse saw in Tone the greatest of all Irishmen because he saw
in him the most complete incarnation of the Irish race, of its passion for
freedom, its gallantry, its essential tolerance: and he urged his hearers
not to let Tone's work and example perish. Quoting Tone's famous
declaration of his objects and his means, of breaking the connection with
England by uniting the whole people of Ireland, Pearse concluded: "I find
here implicit all the philosophy of Irish Nationalism, all the teaching of
the Gaelic League, and the later prophets. Ireland one and Ireland
free--is not this the definition of Ireland a Nation? To that definition
and to that programme we declare our adhesion anew; pledging ourselves as
Tone pledged himself--and in this sacred place, by this graveside, let us
not pledge ourselves unless we mean to keep our pledge--we pledge
ourselves to follow in the steps of Tone, never to rest, either by day or
by night, until his work be accomplished, deeming it to be the proudest of
all privileges to fight for freedom, to fight not in despondency but in
great joy, hoping for the victory in our day, but fighting on whether
victory seem near or far, never lowering our ideal, never bartering one
jot or tittle of our birthright, holding faith to the memory and the
inspiration of Tone, and accounting ourselves base as long as we endure
the evil thing against which he testified with his blood."

To show that Wolfe Tone was a revolutionary, that he aimed at the complete
overthrow of English ascendancy in Ireland and at the severing of all
political connection between the two countries, that he believed in an
Ireland in which the designations of Catholic and Protestant should be
swallowed up in the common bonds of nationhood--all this needed no
proving, for it was matter of common knowledge with all to whom Tone's
name was known. But it was necessary to do more than this. Pearse had to
show in the first place that Tone might be taken as the normal and
classical representative of the Irish national ideal, and in the second
place that he was no mere ordinary constitution-monger but a teacher of a
philosophy of nationality, valid not for his own age only, but always,
capable of furnishing guidance in the just and orderly upbuilding of a
modern community, of satisfying at once the claims of the nation and the
claims of its humblest member. To this task he gave the last months of his
life: the last four "Tracts for the Times" were from his pen: the first
was written at the end of 1915, the last in March, 1916, a fortnight
before the Rising. The first of these four pamphlets was entitled
"Ghosts," a title borrowed from Ibsen. It is an exposition of the national
teaching of five Irish leaders, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, James Fintan
Lalor, John Mitchel and Charles Stewart Parnell, all of whom held and
taught that the national claim of Ireland was for independence and
separation; their ghosts haunt the generation which has disowned them,
they will not be appeased till their authority is again acknowledged. A
few sentences will make the thesis of this tract (and to some extent of
the following tracts) clear. "There has been nothing more terrible in
Irish history than the failure of the last generation. Other generations
have failed in Ireland, but they have failed nobly; or, failing ignobly,
some man among them has redeemed them from infamy by the splendour of his
protest. But the failure of the last generation has been mean and
shameful, and no man has arisen from it to do a splendid thing in virtue
of which it shall be forgiven. The whole episode is squalid. It will
remain the one sickening chapter in a story which, gallant or sorrowful,
has everywhere else some exaltation of pride.... Even had the men
themselves been less base, their failure would have been inevitable. When
one thinks over the matter for a little one sees that they have built upon
an untruth. They have conceived of nationality as a material thing whereas
it is a spiritual thing.... Hence, the nation to them is not all holy, a
thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that a man dare not sell or
dishonour on pain of eternal perdition. They have thought of nationality
as a thing to be negotiated about as men negotiate about a tariff or about
a trade route.... I make the contention that the national demand of
Ireland is fixed and determined; that that demand has been made by every
generation; that we of this generation receive it as a trust from our
fathers; that we are bound by it; that we have not the right to alter it
or to abate it by one jot or tittle; and that any undertaking made in the
name of Ireland to accept in full satisfaction of Ireland's claim
anything less than the generations of Ireland have stood for is null and
void.... The man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a "final
settlement" anything less by one fraction of an iota than separation from
England will be repudiated by the new generation as surely as O'Connell
was repudiated by the generation that came after him. The man who in
return for the promise of a thing which is not merely less than separation
but which denies separation and declares the Union perpetual, the man who
in return for this declares peace between England and Ireland and
sacrifices to England as a peace-holocaust the blood of 50,000 Irishmen is
guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish
nation, that one can only say of him that it were better for that man (as
it were certainly better for his country) that he had not been born." The
pamphlet concludes with a historic retrospect of the Irish struggle for
independence till the end of the seventeenth century, of the Anglo-Irish
claim for independence in the eighteenth century, and with quotations from
the five great Irish leaders since the last decade of that century joining
in the same claim.

The next tract, "The Separatist Idea," was a detailed study of Wolfe
Tone's political teaching. Tone was not merely a "heroic soul," he
possessed an "austere and piercing intellect," which, "dominating Irish
political thought for over a century," had given Ireland "its political
definitions and values." Tone had written in his _Autobiography_, "I made
speedily [in 1790] what was to me a great discovery, though I might have
found it in Swift or Molyneux, that the influence of England was the
radical vice of our Government, and that consequently Ireland would never
be either free, prosperous or happy until she was independent and that
independence was unattainable whilst the connection with England existed."
In a pamphlet called "An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland"
Tone (signing himself "A Northern Whig") had tried to convince the
Dissenters "that they and the Catholics had but one common interest and
one common enemy: that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced
and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them, and that,
consequently, to assert the independence of their country, and their own
individual liberties, it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to
consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation and to form for the
future but one people." In his earlier years Tone had not been a
Republican, but Republicanism was the creed which he finally professed. He
defined the aim of an Irish Constitution as the promotion of "The Rights
of Man in Ireland." To secure this end reliance must be had not on a
section of the nation but on the nation as a whole. "If the men of
property will not support us," he said, "they must fall: we can support
ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the
community--the men of no property." "In this glorious appeal to Cæsar,"
comments Pearse, "modern Irish democracy has its origin." Tone then was
not merely a Republican and a Separatist but a Democrat prepared for a
democratic and revolutionary policy.

In his next tract "The Spiritual Nation" Pearse analyzed the national
teaching of Thomas Davis, who was to him the embodiment of the idea of the
spiritual side of nationality. Davis was a Separatist (Pearse puts this,
by quotation from his writings, beyond reasonable doubt) but he laid
stress more upon the spiritual than upon the material side of Irish
independence. He saw in nationality "the sum of the facts, spiritual and
intellectual, which mark off one nation from another," the language, the
folklore, the literature, the music, the art, the social customs. "The
insistence on the spiritual fact of nationality is Davis's distinctive
contribution to political thought in Ireland, but it is not the whole of
Davis." To secure spiritual independence, material freedom is necessary,
and such freedom can only be found in political independence. One
rhetorical paragraph of Davis's makes his attitude clear. "Now,
Englishmen, listen to us. Though you were to-morrow to give us the best
tenures on earth--though you were to equalise Presbyterian, Catholic and
Episcopalian--though you were to give us the amplest representation in
your Senate--though you were to restore our absentees, disencumber us of
your debt, and redress every one of our fiscal wrongs--and though, in
addition to all this, you plundered the treasuries of the world to lay
gold at our feet and exhausted the resources of your genius to do us
worship and honour--still we tell you--we tell you in the name of liberty
and country--we tell you in the name of enthusiastic hearts, thoughtful
souls and fearless spirits--we tell you by the past, the present and the
future, we would spurn your gifts if the condition were that Ireland
should remain a province. We tell you and all whom it may concern, come
what may--bribery or deceit, justice, policy or war--we tell you, in the
name of Ireland, that Ireland shall be a nation."

In the last pamphlet, "The Sovereign People," Pearse essayed the hardest
task of all. It was introduced by the short preface, dated 31st March,
1916, "This pamphlet concludes the examination of the Irish definition of
freedom which I promised in 'Ghosts.' For my part I have no more to say."
It is told that he entreated the printer to have it published at once: he
wished his last words, the final manifesto of his party, to be in the
hands of the public before he went into the Rising. The tract is an
attempt to establish, on the basis of the writings of James Fintan Lalor,
the thesis that the independence claimed for Ireland is of a republican
and democratic type. He expressed his views clearly and unequivocally upon
such questions as the rights of private property, the individual ownership
of the material resources of the community, and universal suffrage.
Pearse's views as expressed in this pamphlet are seen to be practically
identical with those of James Connolly, and there is little doubt that it
was upon the basis of some such understanding that Pearse's followers and
those of Connolly joined forces at the last. "The nation's sovereignty,"
the exposition runs, "extends not only to all the men and women of the
nation, but to all the material possessions of the nation, the nation's
soil and all its resources, all wealth and all wealth-producing processes
within the nation. In other words, no private right to property is good as
against the public right of the nation. But the nation is under a moral
obligation so to exercise its public right as to secure strictly equal
rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation.... No class
in the nation has rights inferior to those of any other class. No class in
the nation is entitled to privileges superior to those of any other
class.... To insist upon the sovereign control of the nation over all the
property within the nation is not to disallow the right to private
property. It is for the nation to determine to what extent private
property may be held by its members and in what items of the nation's
material resources private property may be allowed. A nation may, for
instance, determine, as the free Irish nation determined and enforced for
many centuries, that private ownership shall not exist in land, that the
whole of a nation's soil is the public property of the nation.... There is
nothing divine or sacrosanct in any of these arrangements; they are
matters of purely human concern, matters for discussion and adjustment
between the members of a nation, matters to be decided on finally by the
nation as a whole; and matters in which the nation as a whole can revise
or reverse its decision whenever it seems good in the common interests to
do so.... In order that the people may be able to choose as a legislation
and as a government men and women really and fully representative of
themselves, they will keep the choice actually or virtually in the hands
of the whole people ... they will, if wise, adopt the widest possible
franchise--give a vote to every adult man and woman of sound mind. To
restrict the franchise in any respect is to prepare the way for some
future usurpation of the rights of the sovereign people. The people, that
is the whole people, must remain sovereign not only in theory but in
fact.... It is in fact true that the repositories of the Irish tradition,
as well the spiritual tradition of nationality as the kindred tradition of
stubborn physical resistance to England, have been the great, faithful,
splendid, common people, that dumb multitudinous throng which sorrowed
during the penal night, which bled in '98, which starved in the Famine;
and which is here still--what is left of it--unbought and unterrified. Let
no man be mistaken as to who will be lord in Ireland, when Ireland is
free. The people will be lord and master." These theses are enforced by
quotations from Lalor, the most outspoken Democrat and Radical in the
tradition of Irish nationalism. The pamphlet concludes with a defence of
John Mitchel (who adopted Lalor's teaching) against the charge of hating
the English people. "Mitchel, the least apologetic of men, was at pains to
explain that his hate was not of English men and women, but of the English
thing which called itself a government in Ireland, of the English Empire,
of English commercialism supported by English militarism, a thing wholly
evil, perhaps the most evil thing that there has ever been in the world."

On Palm Sunday, 1916, the Union of Irish Labour and Irish Nationality was
proclaimed in a striking fashion. In the evening of that day Connolly
hoisted over Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army, the Irish
tricolour of orange, white and green, the flag designed by the Young
Irelanders in 1848 to symbolise the union of the Orange and Green by the
white bond of a common brotherhood. On Easter Monday the Irish Republic
was proclaimed in arms in Dublin.




AFTER THE RISING.


There are many interesting topics of enquiry in connection with the Easter
Rising: but they relate to points of detail or affect the responsibility
of individuals; they do not concern the history of Sinn Fein. The Rising
was the work not of Sinn Fein, but of the leaders of the Republican Party
in the Irish Volunteers and of the Citizen Army. Of the signatories to the
proclamation of the Republic only one had any sort of connection with Sinn
Fein and he had been a reforming, rather than an orthodox, Sinn Feiner.
But the general public, some from mere instinct, others from a desire to
discredit a movement which they disliked and feared, persisted in calling
the Rising by the name of the "Sinn Fein Rebellion," and substituted "Sinn
Fein" for "Irish" in speaking of the Volunteers. In truth it would have
been impossible for Sinn Fein, even if it had wished to do so, to
repudiate all responsibility for the Rising. It had from the beginning
proclaimed the independence of Ireland, not (it is true) in the form of an
Irish Republic, but in the form of a National Constitution free from any
subordination to the Parliament of England: it had renounced the idea of
an appeal to arms in view of the certain failure of an armed rising: but
it had not repudiated revolution upon principle and it had admitted that
in certain contingencies Ireland might with propriety appeal to arms to
secure its independence. The only criticism it could make upon the Rising
would have been that it was a well-intentioned error of judgment, the
error of men who had mistaken their means and their opportunity for
accomplishing an object good in itself. It is highly improbable that any
such criticism would under the circumstances have been made in public by
the leaders of Sinn Fein: in any case they were not afforded the
opportunity to make it, for they were arrested and deported as part of the
measures of repression taken after the Rising had collapsed.

At the time of the Rising Ireland was still far from being either Sinn
Fein or Republican. The prestige of parliamentarianism had been shaken and
its strength impaired: expectations had been disappointed, but the reasons
for the failure were still the subject of keen discussion, and the Sinn
Fein explanation was by no means universally accepted. Convinced
Republicans were a minority, insignificant except for their ability and
fervour. The mass of Nationalists felt disturbed and uneasy. It was plain
that their cause was losing ground, and that mere pre-occupation with the
war was not the sole reason for the growing indifference of England to the
government of Ireland. Nationalist Ireland was represented (by people who
affected to speak more in sorrow than in anger) as having disowned the
patriotic lead of Mr. Redmond and as failing in its duty, and this view
was clearly becoming the prevalent view in England. The policy pursued by
the War Office towards Nationalist recruits (a policy described by a
member of the War Cabinet as "malignant") was slowly killing recruiting,
and the decline of recruiting was claimed to be a justification of the
policy that produced it, and that by people perfectly well aware of the
facts. The favour shown to the Ulster Volunteers had not induced them to
go in a body to the war: but while they were reported to have done
magnificently, the National Volunteers were held to have done little and
to have done it with a bad grace. The advent of the Coalition Government,
which included some of the bitterest enemies of Irish Nationalism, did not
mend matters. Mr. Redmond, it is true, was offered a seat in the Coalition
Cabinet and declined the offer. It seemed to many Irishmen at the time
that Mr. Redmond might very well have accepted it: that having stretched a
point in promising Irish assistance in the war out of gratitude for a
coming recognition of Irish claims, it was a mere standing upon ceremony
to refuse to stretch another point and enter an English Ministry. But Mr.
Redmond decided in view of the state of feeling in Ireland that he had
gone as far as was prudent. His generous enthusiasm had received a shock,
first in the hints of Irish disapproval at his failure to take full
advantage of his opportunity, secondly when he came into contact with the
cold hostility of the War Office. His slowly waning influence in Ireland
might have vanished if he had advanced farther on the path of
unconditional co-operation. It had been for years a maxim--the maxim--of
the Nationalist Party to accept no office under the Union Constitution,
and no office under the Crown until the claims of Ireland had been
conceded. These claims had not been conceded, and the prospect that they
would ever be conceded was growing fainter. Had he represented Ireland
under an Irish Constitution, even a Provisional Constitution, the case
would have been different: Nationalist Ireland would have followed him, as
England then followed Mr. Asquith: but to enter the Cabinet under the
circumstances as the representative of Ireland seemed to be merely to
forfeit by his entry the only ground upon which he had a claim to enter
it. His decision left the way open to the almost unfettered activities of
the opponents of his policy both in England and in Ireland. The strength
of England in time of war, the readiness of her public men to subordinate,
within limits, the strife of parties to the interests of the Commonwealth,
meant the weakness of Ireland in the end. It was loudly proclaimed in
England that the happy co-operation of days of stress must not be allowed
to be broken up when peace dawned: that the strife of parties must be
mitigated when war was over: but Ireland knew that she had been in later
years their chief battleground, and that any mitigation of their quarrel,
while it might be to the advantage of English public life, could only be
brought about at the expense of her national hopes. And in Ireland the
Executive, pursuing a fixed anti-national policy, tempered only by the
prudence, the theoretical liberalism, or the bland indifference of
successive Chief Secretaries, could henceforth count on the steady backing
of friends in power over the water.

The Rising came like a flash of lightning in an evening twilight,
illuminating and terrifying. It was not entirely unexpected: those whose
duty and those whose pleasure it is to suspect everything had been uneasy
for some time. The few people who were in touch with the inner circles of
the Irish Volunteers had long known that something was in progress. But
the authorities had nothing definite to go upon, and the majority of
Irishmen knew nothing definite about it. When news came that Dublin had
been seized, that an Irish Republic had been proclaimed, and that troops
were hurrying across from England, the prevailing feeling was one of
stupefaction. Even the Unionist newspapers, never at a loss before in
pointing the Irish moral, were stunned for the moment. When the facts
began to be realized, Unionist and Nationalist joined in a common
condemnation of the Rising, which, unable to accomplish its professed aim,
could have no real effect beyond that of hampering the Allied cause. Later
on Nationalists began to fear and Unionists to hope that it meant the
death of Home Rule, or at least its postponement to an indefinite future.

When the Rising was crushed and the leaders and their followers had
surrendered it is questionable whether the fortunes of Republicanism in
Ireland had ever been at so low an ebb. All their plans had miscarried;
their very counsels had been contradictory and confused. German assistance
had disappointed them; the country had not supported them; and the army
had made an end of their resistance and had brought their strongholds
about their heads: their leaders were in custody, not even as prisoners of
war: all of their followers who had shown that they could be counted on
were either dead or in gaol. There was no district in Ireland that had not
sent men to the war: many of them had died at the hands of the Germans to
whom the Republican leaders had looked for aid, many of them were risking
their lives every hour; it was not from the friends and neighbours of
these men that sympathy for the Rising could have been expected. Sinn Fein
was involved in the general feeling; if it had not fomented the Rising,
what had it done to discourage it? Was it not the stimulus which had
spurred more daring spirits into action?

A bruised reed never seemed less difficult to break or less worth the
breaking. It was decided to break it _ad majorem cautelam_.

Four days after the surrender Pearse and two others after a secret trial
were shot in the morning: the next day and the next others were shot.
There was a pause of three days, and the shooting was resumed till
thirteen had paid the penalty. After the thirteenth execution, a
proclamation was issued that the General Officer Commanding in Chief had
"found it imperative" to inflict these punishments, which it was hoped
would act as a deterrent and show that such proceedings as those of the
Rising could not be tolerated. Two more executions followed, that of James
Connolly and another. At the same time arrests took place all over the
country. Three thousand prisoners who had taken no part in the Rising were
collected, many of them as innocent of any complicity in the affair as the
Prime Minister. To have been at any time a member of the Irish Volunteers
was sufficient cause for arrest and deportation. They were taken through
the streets in lorries and in furniture vans at the dead of night and
shipped for unknown destinations.

In a normally governed country, a strong Government enjoying the support
of the community has a comparatively easy task in dealing with an
unsuccessful rebellion, if a rebellion should occur. It can shoot the
leaders, if it thinks them worth shooting, or do practically what it
pleases with them, and gain nothing but credit for its firmness or
clemency (as the case may be). But in a country not normally governed (and
no one either inside or outside Ireland considered the Irish government to
be normal) the matter is more intricate. If the Government is united, has
clean hands and unlimited force, and is prepared to employ force
indefinitely, it may do as it pleases: but few Governments are in this
position and those which are not have to pick their steps. In the case of
the Easter Rising the Government began by going forward with great
confidence beyond the point whence retreat was possible and then
determined very carefully to pick its steps back again. At first it acted
"with vigour and firmness": it handed the situation over to the care of a
competent and tried officer, who proceeded to treat it as a mere matter of
departmental routine. He was alert, prompt and businesslike. He did not
hesitate to take what seemed "necessary steps" or to speak out where
speaking plainly seemed called for. He let it be known that he had come to
act and he did what he had come for.

During the week of the executions an almost unbroken silence reigned in
Ireland. The first hint that anything was wrong came on the cables from
America. The men who were shot in Dublin had been accorded a public
funeral in New York. Empty hearses followed by a throng of mourners had
passed through streets crowded with sympathisers standing with bared
heads. Anxious messages from British agents warned the Government that a
demonstration like this could not be disregarded. The executions were
over, but the Prime Minister decided to go to Ireland to enquire into the
situation on the spot. When he landed the tide of Irish feeling had
already turned.

The catastrophic change of feeling in Ireland is not difficult to explain.
The Rising had occurred suddenly and had ended in a sudden and hopeless
failure. The leaders and their followers had surrendered, and the
authorities held them at their absolute disposal. The utter hopelessness
of any attempt to establish a Republic, or effect any other change in the
government of Ireland by armed force, especially at such a time, had been
clearly demonstrated. England held Ireland in the hollow of its hand.
After four days' cool deliberation it was decided to shoot the leaders.
They were not brought to open trial on the charge of high treason or on
any other charge: the authorities who carried out the sentence were those
who passed judgment upon their guilt and the only people who ever heard or
saw the evidence upon which the judgment was based. They were shot in
batches: for days the lesson was hammered home in stroke after stroke that
these men were entitled neither to open trial and proof of their guilt
before execution, nor to the treatment of captured enemies. The conclusion
drawn by Nationalist Ireland was that if they had been Englishmen they
would have been tried by English courts and sentenced by the judgment of
their countrymen: that if they had been Germans or Turks they would have
been treated as prisoners of war: but that being Irishmen they were in a
class apart, members of a subject race, the mere property of a
courtmartial. The applause of Parliament when the Prime Minister announced
the executions was taken to represent the official sanction of the English
people and their agreement with this attitude towards Ireland. It was
resented in Ireland with a fierce and sudden passion: a tongue of flame
seemed to devour the work of long years in a single night. After the
execution of Pearse it would have been vain to argue against him that he
had appealed to Germany for aid and invited to Ireland hands red with the
blood of Irish soldiers: the reply would have been that he might have done
so or he might not; that it had never been proved what he did; that he had
acted for the best; that

  What matters it, if he was Ireland's friend?
  There are but two great parties in the end.

The Prime Minister, less than a month after the Rising, spent a week in
Ireland prosecuting enquiries: they resulted in two conclusions, one that
"the existing machinery of Irish government" had broken down, the other
that a unique opportunity had offered itself for a settlement.
Negotiations for the desired settlement were, on the Prime Minister's
invitation, begun by Mr. Lloyd George. He contented himself with taking up
the first settlement that came to hand, the old proposal for partition;
but during the negotiations he left the idea in the mind of the
Nationalist leader that the partition proposed was only temporary and in
the mind of the Unionist leader that it was to be permanent. Each asserted
that Mr. Lloyd George had been explicit in his statement, and the
unexplained discrepancy wrecked the negotiations. Even had they succeeded
between the parties principally concerned, they would never have led to
anything; for the Unionist members of the Coalition when there seemed to
be a risk of agreement, declared that they would have no settlement at
all. The Prime Minister and his deputy yielded and reconstituted "the
existing machinery of Irish government" by reappointing the former Viceroy
and replacing the Liberal Chief Secretary by a Unionist. Apparently their
chief object was not so much to make the Government in Ireland acceptable
to Irishmen as to make it less objectionable to Unionists. The result in
Ireland was what might have been foreseen. Any idea there may have been
that the English Government was really desirous of establishing peace and
justice in Ireland vanished like smoke. Mr. Redmond warned the Government
of the consequences of their "inaction" (if any policy which was steadily
producing the most profound revulsion in Irish feeling could be described
by that word) but the Government was obdurate. It refused to release the
interned suspects, it refused to treat them as political prisoners, it
refused to mitigate the application of martial law: and gave as its reason
the fact that the state of the country still "gave cause for anxiety." The
only party that had no cause for "anxiety" as to its future was Sinn Fein.

The resentment at the execution of the leaders of the Rising had not
confined itself to the indulgence of feelings of rage and sorrow. It had
led to an eager inquiry into what it was that had caused these men to do
what they did. People who had hardly heard of Sinn Fein before wanted to
know precisely what it was and what it taught: people who had not known
Pearse and Connolly when they were alive were full of curiosity about
them, their principles and their writings. Much of this curiosity was
morbid and led nowhere: but a great deal of it led large numbers of people
very far indeed. Sinn Fein pamphlets began to be in demand: a month after
the Rising it was hardly possible to procure a single one of them. But if
they could not be bought, thumbed and tattered copies were passed from
hand to hand: their teachings and the doctrines of Sinn Fein were
discussed all over Ireland. The (to many) surprising fact became known
that the Rising was not an attempt to help Germany or to put Ireland into
German possession, but to free Ireland from all foreign influence: that
the leaders proclaimed themselves followers of Tone and Mitchel and Davis
and Parnell, that they claimed that Irish Nationalism meant according to
these exponents (and no man in Ireland ventured to question their
authority) Irish independence, nothing less and nothing more. The instinct
for freedom, the feeling that the existing Government of Ireland had not
for a hundred years fulfilled the primary functions of government, became
a reasoned and rooted conviction that something more was needed to mend it
than mere Home Rule. The price that Ireland had been asked to pay for Home
Rule, that it was still pertinaciously pressed to agree to, the partition
of Ireland, seemed an unforgivable treachery beside the fair prospect of
an Ireland one and indivisible, in which Orange and Green, Protestant and
Catholic were united in the love and service of a common country. The
policies of the past, barren as they now seemed of content and substance,
were abandoned for the new promise of a commonwealth in which all Irishmen
should be equal, in which the worker saw a prospect of a better and a
fuller life than without it he could hope to have. This had been the ideal
of the Rising; but it was the bitter truth that the Rising had not brought
it any nearer, and that no Rising seemed likely to be any more successful.
Sinn Fein with its policy of self-reliance, of refusing to recognize what
it hoped by so doing to bring to nothing, of distrust of all policies of
reaching freedom by an acknowledgment of subjection offered the means of
realizing what the Rising had failed to bring nearer. But Sinn Fein could
not be accepted as it stood: offering the Constitution of 1782 it had
failed to carry with it more than a few doctrinaire enthusiasts: agreeing
to the constitution which the leaders of the Rising died for it might (and
did) carry the country with it.

All this was going on under the operation of martial law. Members of
Parliament did not know it: the Competent Military Authority had no
suspicion of it. It was believed that all that was required to "appease"
the country, to restore confidence in the Government, to bring back the
happy days when Ireland was "the one bright spot" was to release the
prisoners and resume negotiations for a "settlement." In December, 1916,
the Asquith Ministry fell. According to its successors it had carried the
art of doing nothing to its highest perfection: they were going to do
everything at once. The new Prime Minister made vague promises of an
attempt to settle the Irish question in the immediate future, and finally
on Christmas Eve all the interned prisoners except those undergoing penal
servitude, were sent back to Ireland. They were received with an
enthusiasm which must have proved disquieting to the believers in
compromise and negotiation.

Everything began again precisely where it had left off. The prisoners had
been requested to give a pledge that, if released, they would cease to
engage in political propaganda objectionable to the Government. This they
had stoutly refused to do, and they had been released at last without
conditions. Apparently it was supposed that the operation of martial law
and the promises of the new Government would exercise a moderating
influence: but martial law was only a standing challenge, and the
sincerity of the Government was no longer believed in. If it had been even
moderately sincere it might have rallied to the side of compromise those
large numbers of men who in every country have an instinctive dread of new
and untried policies and leaders. But it was soon plain that a Prime
Minister pledged to everybody was pledged to nobody.

By the middle of February, 1917, the Sinn Fein leaders were at work again.
_Nationality_ reappeared as a weekly paper. It appealed no longer to a few
enthusiasts but to a wide public eager to learn more of the only movement
which promised anything definite. Before the Rising Sinn Fein had seemed
to aim at the impossible by means beyond the powers of average human
nature: it did not seem possible that any large body of Irishmen should
try to secure independence by the hard path of Sinn Fein, when there was a
prospect of something (to all outward appearance) nearly as good to be
gained by recording a vote for the right man at elections. It was now
plain to the average Nationalist that the parliamentary prospect held no
promise: that the Irish Parliamentary Party were no longer listened to,
and that the sworn enemies of Irish nationality were in the seats of power
both in Ireland and in England. Mr. Redmond, confronted alternately in
England by the iron insolence of the Tories and the smiling sinuosities of
the Prime Minister, manned his guns to the last: but he had no longer the
support of the country. The country was beginning to rally to the party
which alone seemed to be the party of fixed principles: which had another
standard by which to measure national rights than the temporary
possibilities, varying from month to month, offered by the difficulties
confronting English Ministers: the party which did not entreat but
demanded. Sinn Fein did not promise now any more than in the days of its
obscurity that national freedom could be won by the anaemic struggles of
the division lobbies in the House: it warned its followers that the way
would be long and steep, that to shun the steep places was to miss the
track, and that the path did not cross the water. It had said this before,
but it said it now to ears ready to receive it. If men had died for
Ireland (men asked) facing the old enemy, what lesser sacrifice could be
called too great? A wave of enthusiasm which no appeal to policy or
prudence could withstand swept over the country when the new campaign
began.

_Nationality_ with a tenacity of purpose that nothing seemed able to
disturb began its new series with the old lesson, the decay of Ireland
under the Union. As if there had been no Rising, no imprisonments, no
threats of summary repression, the doctrine was again proclaimed with
deadly deliberation that the Union had destroyed and was destroying the
prosperity of Ireland even in those districts which clung to it with most
affection. The population of Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down was steadily
declining under a system which the inhabitants declared essential to their
continued existence. It asserted the right of Ireland to prevent food
being exported from the country to feed strangers while the country that
supplied it was left to starve, and proposed the formation of a Watch
Committee for every seaport in the country. The very first number
contained a statement of the policy of an appeal no longer to a Government
pledged to disregard it, but to the Peace Conference which must be
summoned on the conclusion of the war. The advertisement of the Irish
Nation League, a body independent of Sinn Fein, already showed how far
Sinn Fein principles had spread in Ireland. "The Irish Nation League
claims the right of Ireland to recognition as a Sovereign State. It
asserts too and claims Ireland's right to representation at any
International Peace Conference. It offers determined and resolute
resistance to any attempt to enforce Conscription.... It calls on the
Irish people to rely on themselves alone.... Members elected under the
auspices of the Irish Nation League will remain under the control of its
Supreme Council and will only act at Westminster when the Council so
decides. Never again must power be placed in the hands of a parliamentary
party to mislead the country or to sacrifice opportunities." In March
_Nationality_ announced the formation of a National Council to support the
admission of Ireland to the Peace Conference and "to safeguard the general
interests of the nation." But though admission to the Peace Conference was
the political objective of Ireland for the moment it was not regarded as
its ultimate or only aim. The Peace Conference was an opportunity to be
made use of when circumstances brought it about, a precious and unique
opportunity, but Ireland's main and serious work was to develop her own
resources and her own powers of resistance. Accordingly, though Sinn Fein
declared repeatedly its intention of carrying the Irish case before the
Peace Conference, its main work was still to organize and consolidate
opposition to the two chief measures now openly proclaimed as in
contemplation, the partition of Ireland and the enforcement of
Conscription. Both these measures were in contradiction to the claim that
"the only satisfactory settlement of the Irish Question now is the
independence of Ireland." And it was not hard to show that the professed
objects of the war were incompatible with the policy of refusing
self-government to Ireland. "When England declared," wrote _Nationality_,
"that she entered this war with the object of asserting the freedom of
Small Nations the Lord delivered her into our hands."

There were not wanting signs that the Sinn Fein policy was rapidly
becoming the policy of a Nationalist Ireland. By the summer of 1917 at
least a dozen Irish newspapers were declared exponents of the Sinn Fein
policy. An election for North Roscommon in February had resulted in the
return of the Sinn Fein candidate by an overwhelming majority. The next
contested election was in May and was by common consent regarded as a test
election. It was a straight fight between the Parliamentary Party and Sinn
Fein. Each party put its full strength into the contest and Sinn Fein won;
the majority, it is true, was a small one but it was more useful than a
large one, for it was both an endorsement and an incentive. The
_Manchester Guardian_ frankly declared that the Sinn Fein victory under
the circumstances was equivalent to a serious defeat of the British Army
in the field.

The reply of the Government to the result of the North Roscommon election
had been the re-arrest and deportation of some of the released prisoners,
to whom a number of others, some of them prominent Gaelic Leaguers, were
added; the Chief Secretary defended this action by saying that he had
decided "although there can be no charge and although there can be no
trial" that it was better for these men to be out of Ireland than to be in
it. The Parliamentary Party, opposed upon principle to Sinn Fein, saw that
measures such as these meant its ultimate and complete triumph, but no
arguments could move the determination of the Government to rely upon
force. They seemed to feel that force was the only weapon that was left
them and that they might as well use it at once; while Sinn Fein could
point to the employment of it as evidence of its own reiterated but
constantly challenged contention as to the real attitude of all English
Governments towards Ireland. And had the Prime Minister and his advisers,
whoever they may have been, deliberately set themselves to prove to
Ireland that they were not the wise representatives of an enlightened and
friendly democracy (which the Parliamentary Party had up to this
represented them to be) but the jealous and implacable guardians of a
subject and hated race (which Sinn Fein had always asserted that they
were) it is very doubtful whether they could have bettered their record in
a single detail. The Parliamentary Party, fighting for its life, with the
ground in Ireland slipping from under its feet, appealed pathetically to
its old services and old friendship, to the memory of the Irishmen who had
fallen in the war, to the opinion of moderate men, to prudence and
justice; it could not deflect by one hair's breadth the course chosen by
the Cabinet. The fact seems to be that the Tory members who had always
hated the Parliamentary Party saw the chance of paying back old scores and
embraced it regardless of the consequences; while the Liberals, real and
so-called, thought the Parliamentary Party's influence was waning in
Ireland, and threw them over without remorse: they had got as much out of
them as was to be got, and for the rest they might shift for themselves.
It was very difficult to believe that (as the Prime Minister said) the
"dominant consideration was the war" and that preoccupation with it was
the reason for his refusal to attend to the Irish problem. Everybody knew
that Ministers, when they were interested, found time for many other
things than the prosecution of the war. What was done and what was not
done, and the reasons given both for action and for inaction, only served
to deepen the impression of the insincerity of the Cabinet.

Almost simultaneously the Parliamentary Party and Sinn Fein resolved upon
an appeal from the English Ministry and the English Parliament to bodies
that might be presumed to be less partial. The Irish Party withdrew from
Parliament and sent a Manifesto to the United States (now on the verge of
its declaration of war) and the self-governing Dominions. Sinn Fein
summoned a Convention to meet in Dublin to assert the independence of
Ireland, its status as a nation, and its right to representation at the
Peace Conference. This was the first, but it was not to be the only,
occasion upon, which the policy of the Parliamentary Party was moulded,
against its will, by the pressure of facts, into a tacit acknowledgment of
the justice of the Sinn Fein contention, that parliamentary action was
useless. The only difference was that while Sinn Fein held that it always
was and always would be useless, English policy being what it always had
been, the Parliamentary Party held that the Cabinet had by its action
since the Rising destroyed the efficacy of the normally useful and
legitimate means of reform.

The effect of this joint appeal from the Cabinet to the impartial opinion
of English-speaking countries and belligerent nations was to induce the
Prime Minister to bring forward "proposals" for the settlement of the
question. He proposed the exclusion of six counties of Ulster from the
Home Rule Act, if and when it became operative, the exclusion to be
subject to reconsideration after five years; the immediate establishment
of an Irish Council (in which the excluded counties were to have the same
number of delegates as all the rest of Ireland put together) to legislate
for Ireland during the war; and a reconsideration of the financial clauses
of the Act. Failing the acceptance of this solution, the Prime Minister
saw nothing for it but to summon a representative body of Irishmen to
suggest the best means of governing their own country.

The Prime Minister's proposals, whether the product of his own or of some
equally ingenious but equally uninformed brain, were promptly rejected by
everybody: his concluding suggestion was, after some delay, judged worthy
of a trial, the Ulster party stipulating expressly for freedom to refuse
to submit to any findings of the Convention with which it did not choose
to agree. They were practically informed by the Leader of the House of
Commons that their dissent was incompatible with "the substantial
agreement" which alone would justify the Government in giving effect to
the findings of the Convention.

To claim that the setting up of the Convention was a sincere attempt to
solve the problem of Irish Government is to make a demand upon faith which
it might be noble, but would certainly be extremely difficult, to grant.
The incorporation in the letter by which the Prime Minister suggested it
of an official proposal of heads of a settlement could serve no other
purpose than to indicate that a particular solution had found favour with
the proposer in advance: and to allow the Ulster Party the right of veto
was to perpetuate and sanction the attitude which everybody in the Three
Kingdoms knew to be the very obstacle which the Convention was blandly
invited to surmount. It says much for the general desire of Ireland for
peace and settlement that the outcome of the Convention (compassed by
secrecy which it was declared a criminal offence to violate while it sat)
was awaited generally with an anxious and almost pathetic expectation.

Sinn Fein promptly refused to take any part in the proceedings. It had
been formally invited to do so, but as five places only were assigned to
it, a number far below that to which its actual strength in the country
was known to entitle it, it was not intended that it should have very much
weight in the conclusions. Besides, the only solution which it was known
to favour, the independence of Ireland, was the only solution which it was
not possible for the Convention by the terms of its reference to suggest.
In a leader, declining on behalf of the Sinn Fein Party to participate in
the proceedings, _Nationality_ said, "Ignoring the Convention which is
called into being only to distract Ireland from the objective now before
her, to confuse her thought, and to permit England to misrepresent her
character and her claims to Europe, Sinn Fein summons Ireland to
concentrate her mind and energy on preparation for the Peace Conference,
where, citing the pledges given to the world by Russia, the United States,
and England's Allies, it will invoke that tribunal to judge between our
country and her oppressor and claim that the verdict which has restored
Poland to independent nationhood shall also be registered for Ireland."
The Executive of Sinn Fein also formally and unanimously declined to enter
the Convention unless (1) the terms of reference left it free to decree
the complete independence of Ireland; (2) the English Government publicly
pledged itself to the United States and the Powers of Europe to ratify the
decision of the majority of the Convention; (3) the Convention consisted
of none but persons freely elected by adult suffrage in Ireland; (4) the
treatment of prisoners of war was accorded to Irish political prisoners in
English prisons.

Of these proposals the first would have been rejected by the Government,
the second by the Ulster Party, and the third by the Parliamentary Party,
which by this time was aware that such a method of choosing
representatives would leave it almost without representation. The
Government to "create an atmosphere" not merely accepted but improved on
the fourth condition: the political prisoners were released
unconditionally. It is significant of the way in which "atmospheres" are
created in Ireland that though the prisoners were released unconditionally
on June 17th, a meeting held in Dublin to demand their release, on June
10th, was prohibited by Proclamation, and an attempt to hold it ended in a
riot in which a policeman was killed.

While the Convention was preparing to perform the duties which were to end
in nothing, Sinn Fein was engaged in the task of rallying the country to
its side. The death of Major Willie Redmond had created a vacancy in East
Clare: the Parliamentary Party had selected its candidate to succeed him:
but in little over a month after the release of the prisoners Mr. de
Valera, who had been sentenced to penal servitude for his share in the
Rising, was elected by an overwhelming majority. The leader "To the Men of
Clare" in which, the week before the election, _Nationality_ recommended
him to the electors, was suppressed by the Censor. During the same month
another vacancy occurred by the death of the member for Kilkenny City, and
as a preliminary to the election the authorities suppressed the _Kilkenny
People_, the editor of which was chairman of the convention called to
select a Sinn Fein candidate, who was promptly returned. Some idea of the
appeals which Sinn Fein was making to the electors may be gathered from
the leader "To the Electors, Traders and Taxpayers of Kilkenny," in which
_Nationality_ urged the return of its candidate. It began with a quotation
from a memorandum addressed in 1799 to Mr. Pitt by Under-Secretary Cooke,
"The Union is the only means of preventing Ireland from becoming too great
and too powerful," and by a quotation from another memorandum to the same
statesman, "By giving the Irish a hundred members in an assembly of six
hundred and fifty they will be impotent to operate upon that assembly, but
it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority." Figures were
given of the value of the trade between Great Britain and a number of
countries in 1914, the trade with Ireland being nearly as valuable as that
with the United States, twice that with France and nearly twice that with
Germany. It went on: "It will be seen that with the exception of the
United States, England has no customer nearly as big as Ireland....
England has had the market to herself for generations; Sinn Fein proposes
that England should not continue to monopolise that market longer. Ireland
has £150,000,000 worth of trade to do with the world each year,
£135,000,000 of which is restricted to England. In return for part of that
trade the other countries of Europe would gladly give Ireland facilities
in their markets and Ireland would compel England to pay competitive
prices.... So long as Ireland sends members to the English Parliament and
relies upon that institution, England will plunder Ireland's revenues and
monopolise Ireland's trade at her own price."

Meanwhile the growing popularity of Sinn Fein was leading to a revival of
the Irish Volunteers. Drilling was resumed and, though frequent arrests
were made and the Government declared its intention at all costs of
putting it down, it became more and more popular. Irish Volunteers even
took possession of the streets of Dublin, in defiance of military orders,
and kept the line of the procession on the occasion of the funeral of
Thomas Ashe who had died as the result of forcible feeding and inattention
in Mountjoy Prison. Though Sinn Fein held itself distinct from the
Volunteer Organization it did not refuse to extend some indirect
assistance. It printed a letter of Mr. Devlin's, addressed from the House
of Commons in July, 1916, to a correspondent, which was "captured" and
read to a Convention of the National Volunteers in Dublin in August, 1917.
In the letter Mr. Devlin had discouraged the importation of arms into
Ireland for the National Volunteers, some of whom had assisted the troops
in keeping order during the week of the Rising. This was of course
intended to discredit Mr. Devlin in the eyes of the National Volunteers
whose continued allegiance to the Parliamentary Party was now open to
grave suspicion. In fact the prospect of their junction with the Irish
Volunteers, a highly significant indication of the trend of opinion,
decided the Government to disarm them. On the morning of the 15th August
every place in which the National Volunteers had stored their arms was
raided by the military. The only outcome of this action, combined with the
steady and obstinate refusal to seize the arms of the Ulster Volunteers
(the only political party in Ireland now left in possession of arms), was
to alienate any sympathy remaining for the Government in the ranks of the
National Volunteers. Had there been the least pretence of impartiality
shown it might have been otherwise: but to disarm all Nationalists of any
shade of national politics, while designedly and openly leaving the
Unionists armed to the teeth, was a proof, now indeed hardly necessary, of
the insincerity of official professions. The disarming of all sections of
Nationalists gave an excuse for the practice of raiding for arms which now
became common and often led to deplorable results. Innocent people were
killed, either designedly or by accident, and the blame for the murders
was laid upon the shoulders of Sinn Fein. When a return to the policy of
physical force seemed threatened some of the ecclesiastical authorities
took alarm, and issued warnings against breaches of the law of God and
resistance to constituted authority. Murder was of course never
countenanced by Sinn Fein: but as regards resistance to constituted
authority, there were two sides to the question and Sinn Fein was not at
all inclined to allow the ecclesiastical authorities to dictate its
policy. Cardinal Logue might declare that the Sinn Fein programme was
insane, but it was persisted in without regard to his opinion. Sinn Fein
was always jealous of ecclesiastical interference: it welcomed gladly the
co-operation of ecclesiastics as Irishmen, but it was determined to keep
its own policy in its own hands.

While the Government Convention was sitting behind closed doors Sinn Fein
decided to hold a Convention of its own, consisting of delegates freely
elected by Sinn Fein Clubs throughout the country, and to lay its
proceedings and conclusions before the country. The Convention met on
November 1 and unanimously elected Mr. de Valera as the President of Sinn
Fein, a position which Mr. Griffith had held for six years. The election
was significant: it meant on the one hand that Sinn Fein thus silently and
without any formal repudiation of its previous constitutional attitude
accepted the Republican programme: it meant on the other hand that the
party of the Rising now publicly and officially accepted the Sinn Fein
policy and programme as distinct from the policy of armed insurrection.
Mr. de Valera had already in a reply to the warnings of the bishops denied
that another Rising was in contemplation: he had also in a speech at
Bailieboro' (28th October, 1917), replied to the kindred charge of
pro-Germanism: "The Sinn Fein Party were said to be pro-Germans, but if
the Germans came to Ireland to hold it those who are now resisting English
power would be the first to resist the Germans." The Constitution adopted
by the Convention sets out at great length the policy and objects of Sinn
Fein: its solution of the constitutional problem is as follows: "Sinn Fein
aims at securing the international recognition of Ireland as an
independent Irish Republic. Having achieved that _status_ the Irish people
may by referendum freely choose their own form of government. This object
shall be attained through the Sinn Fein Organization which shall in the
name of the sovereign Irish People (a) deny the right and oppose the will
of the British Parliament or British Crown or any other foreign Government
to legislate for Ireland; (b) make use of any and every means available to
render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection by
military force or otherwise. And whereas no law made without the authority
and consent of the Irish people is, or ever can be, binding on the Irish
people, therefore in accordance with the resolution of Sinn Fein, adopted
in Convention, 1905, a Constituent Assembly shall be convoked, comprising
persons chosen by the Irish constituencies, as the supreme national
authority to speak and act in the name of the Irish people and to devise
and formulate measures for the welfare of the whole people of Ireland." It
will be noticed that the _status_ of an independent Republic is claimed
not because Republicanism is the ideal polity, but because such a status
will leave Ireland free to choose either that or any other form of
government; further that the new movement expressly links itself to the
Sinn Fein of pre-war days by a formal recognition of its identity with it
and by the express adoption of its methods; and lastly that the means by
which independence is to be achieved are defined as "any and every means
available," the party being pledged neither to nor against any particular
method.

One of the methods upon which Sinn Fein now relied to achieve success was
not the method of its earlier years. This was frankly acknowledged by its
leaders. In an article on the Convention summoned by Count Plunkett to
meet in the Mansion House in Dublin after his election for North
Roscommon, _New Ireland_ (which was next to _Nationality_ the leading Sinn
Fein weekly) wrote as follows: "In the years 1903--1910 the policy of Sinn
Fein was a policy of self-reliance in the strictest sense of that term. It
directed us away from Westminster and towards Ireland. It was
revolutionary inasmuch as it sought to displace existing British
institutions and substitute Irish institutions to which the Irish people
would respond.... The newer Sinn Fein is not quite the same as the old: it
varies in one essential characteristic. Whereas the old Sinn Fein directed
the Irish people towards self-improvement as a basis of national strength
and made it quite plain to us that many sacrifices might possibly be
demanded, there is no trace in the newer Sinn Fein of these qualities. The
older Sinn Fein deprecated the reliance upon any external source of
strength and urged upon us the advantages of self-reliance and passive
resistance. The new Sinn Fein places some of its faith at least in
external bodies and does not inculcate the older doctrine of self-reliance
and passive resistance. It is not, however, Sinn Fein that has changed so
much as the world forces that condition such changes. The old policy
flourished in a period of world peace and was in consequence disposed
rather towards a long drawn out struggle: the new policy is specially
devised to take advantage of the present temporary state of affairs." This
may not be very carefully worded, and it is certain that Sinn Feiners as a
body would not have accepted it as a complete and accurate statement of
the change in the Sinn Fein programme: but it is a statement (although a
careless statement) by a Sinn Fein paper of an important fact--that an
appeal to the Peace Conference was not an exercise of "self-reliance" but
the adoption for the time of a totally different policy. It was in effect
an admission, not that the policy of self-reliance was a failure, but that
it had not yet been a success and was not so likely to be successful in
the immediate future as an appeal for outside understanding and sympathy.
The Parliamentarians had appealed to the sympathy and justice of England:
Sinn Fein had declared such an appeal to be futile and had refused to
join in it. It was now prepared to issue its own appeal for help and
justice not to England but to the Peace Conference. Ever since the Rising
the interaction of the two Nationalist parties upon each other's policy
had become more and more marked, though they still maintained to one
another an attitude of hostility and contempt. If Sinn Fein seemed to
change (at any rate for the time) its policy of strict self-reliance into
one of an appeal for outside assistance, the Parliamentary Party had shown
a disposition no longer to rely upon appeals to English parties and to the
English Parliament but to call upon a wider audience to judge its cause.
While they still differed upon nearly every other point, they were agreed
in this, that to appeal to the Government of 1917 was a waste of time. The
appeal to the Peace Conference was destined to fall upon deaf ears but
this was not at the time believed to be possible. The Allied statesmen
seemed to be committed beyond any possibility of denial or evasion to "the
rights of small nations," "government by the consent of the governed" and
other formulae of national freedom. In reply to cynical suggestions that
these formulae might possibly be discovered to be (to the regret of their
authors) inconsistent with the "realities" of politics, _New Ireland_
simply answered: "We frankly admit that we have faith and hope in the
force of the great moral principle of justice to the nations and in its
ultimate power of bringing back order to the chaos and tragedy of Europe
and of imposing itself upon reactionaries."

But as a matter of fact, in spite of the energy with which the idea of an
appeal to the Peace Conference was taken up and discussed, in spite even
of such sweeping statements as that quoted above from _New Ireland_, Sinn
Fein had at most agreed to graft a new and temporary policy on to the old
stem. It still inculcated self-reliance, the education of the Irish people
in questions of national economics, national finance and national policy:
it still urged the employment of all the means which could be employed by
Irishmen in Ireland to enforce and secure national independence. The
columns of _New Ireland_ itself make this perfectly plain; and even in
later references in that paper to the appeal to the Peace Conference and
the hopes founded upon it, the editorial language is much less sweeping
than when the idea was fresh in its fascination. The concentration of
thought upon the Peace Conference was also exercising in another direction
a modifying influence upon Sinn Fein. The old idea of the independence of
Ireland was being gradually enlarged. It was no longer confined to the
purely negative idea of freedom from foreign control: it assumed the more
positive form of an Ireland entering its place in a great community of
European nations, equally free and mutually dependent, bound to each other
for the preservation of liberty and civilization. It was hoped that the
appeal to the Peace Conference would result in the recognition of Ireland
not merely as a nation to which the Conference was bound to see justice
done, but as a brother and comrade in a new European Confederation for the
advancement of democratic freedom. In this, Sinn Fein (though the fact is
often obscured) merely represents the form, moulded by special conditions,
which an aspiration, common to many of the democracies of Europe, had
assumed in Ireland.

The winter of 1917--18 gave Sinn Fein an opportunity to show that the
policy of "self-reliance" had not been abandoned entirely. During that
winter the shadow of famine hung over Europe and every nation was engaged
in the effort to avert it from its own shores by rigid conservation and
economy of its food supply. From Ireland, under the final control of the
English authorities, food continued to be exported recklessly. Cattle,
oats and butter were shipped in large quantities to England, though it was
known that the food supply of Ireland would barely suffice for its own
necessities till the middle of summer. The independent and Labour members
of the Irish Food Control Committee protested against this: but, being a
purely advisory body and subject to the English Food Controller, the
Committee found that all their advice was overruled (as one of the members
put it) "by the man higher up." The independent members resigned in
disgust, leaving the work of the committee to the officials. Sinn Fein
began at once to organize an unofficial food census of Ireland: members of
the Sinn Fein Clubs were invited to put at the disposal of the central
organization their local knowledge of the food supplies of their immediate
neighbourhood. It was the first opportunity on a large scale which the
Republican organization had to show what its powers and capabilities were
and what body of real support it had in the country. The Chief Council
(Ard-Chomhairle) of Sinn Fein called upon producers of, and dealers in,
necessary foodstuffs to "co-operate in the imperative duty of saving Irish
people from starvation by selling only to buyers for exclusive Irish use":
it urged the workers in the country, on the railways and at the ports, to
refuse to co-operate in the exportation of food and called upon the public
to treat food exporters as common enemies. The Food Committee established
by the Sinn Fein Council sent circulars to the clergy of all denominations
soliciting their help both in conserving the food supply and in making
suitable arrangements for its distribution. It was not very easy either to
secure a food census or to induce those who made money by the export of
food to forego their profits. The principal export of potatoes was from
Antrim, Down, Derry and Tyrone, counties in which Sinn Fein had very
little prospect either of getting the requisite information from the
farmers or of inducing them to forego their profits. English dealers were
willing to pay large prices for Irish produce and Irish farmers were
apparently willing to go on selling until, as _New Ireland_ put it, there
would be nothing left in Ireland to eat except bank notes. The situation
was in all essentials what it had been during the closing years of the
eighteenth century when (as Arthur O'Connor pointed out) Ireland was
supplying the belligerents of Europe with food and leaving her own
population to starve, while the traders waxed wealthy. The only difference
was that, the inducement then being a bounty paid by Parliament on
exported corn, the inducement now was a bounty paid by the purchaser in
England in the form of an enhanced price. It was a situation which, as the
Labour Party was quick to point out, could not be met by any unofficial
organization however energetic, such as the Sinn Fein Food Committee, but
required official action. The Labour Party demanded that the Irish Food
Control Committee should be strengthened and vested with executive powers,
no longer remaining subordinate to the London Controller: until this was
done, private or unofficial advice or action was merely playing with the
question. Whether Sinn Fein exerted, any but a slight influence on the
export of food may be doubted; but it certainly managed the other part of
its task--the distribution of the available supplies--with a certain
skill. Measures were concerted for purchasing supplies in counties where
food was relatively abundant and sending it to agents in districts where
it was scarce. The usual abuses which attend attempts to supply food to a
poor population could not, of course, be entirely eliminated, but on the
whole the experiment seems to have been generally successful. In Ennis,
for instance, the local Sinn Fein Club established a Sinn Fein market to
which farmers brought their potatoes: the club purchased them at the
current price and distributed them to 150 poor families at cost: each
family was provided with a card endorsed with the quantity of potatoes
necessary for its needs and on presentation of the card received the
potatoes. The scheme was financed by some prominent men in Ennis who
advanced the necessary capital, the Sinn Fein Club being at the cost of
the working expenses of the scheme: there was "no credit and no charity."
Although this and similar schemes worked fairly well, and undoubtedly
relieved the situation appreciably in many districts, they were open to
the objection brought by the Labour Party that they were ineffective as
compared both with genuine co-operative effort on the part of the people
themselves and with official action taken by the County Councils or
municipal authorities. They were, besides, likely to give rise to the
question which _Irish Opinion_ (the Irish Labour weekly) put "Is the
object political or economic?" There is no doubt that the fact that Sinn
Fein was actively promoting measures of relief, while official action
tended to produce a situation approaching to famine, was used as an
argument in favour of the Sinn Fein policy in general. It was hardly to be
expected either that Sinn Feiners should not use the argument or that the
public should not think that there was something in it. The Labour Party's
criticisms were, from the economic point of view, perfectly sound. An
Irish Food Control Committee with executive powers, authority in the
hands of locally-elected bodies to conserve and distribute local supplies
of food, was ideally the proper scheme: but the proper scheme was, as
usual, unattainable and Sinn Fein was doing what was perhaps the only
thing that could be done under the circumstances. And though the Labour
Party urged its criticisms, it did not withhold its assistance and hearty
support to the Sinn Fein scheme.

The result was to increase the growing popularity of Sinn Fein. It was
seen that it had another than the purely political aspect, that its
principles of self-reliance were capable of being applied with a success
limited only by the amount of popular support which they could command. It
was, at any rate, plain that if the people who controlled the food
supplies were all believers in Sinn Fein principles there need be no
prospect of famine in Ireland, and the action of Sinn Fein (inadequate
though it may have been) at any rate contrasted favourably with the
indifference and inefficiency of the official bodies appointed by the
Government and with the helplessness of other political parties.

The popularity of Sinn Fein was further increased by the continued
activities of the Irish police authorities against its more prominent or
active adherents. If the Cabinet had decided to create an "atmosphere" for
the Convention by the release of the prisoners sentenced to penal
servitude for their share in the Rising, an opposite "atmosphere" was
being systematically generated by the Irish Executive. People were being
arrested all over the country for offences incomparably less serious from
every point of view than those committed by the people who had been
released. The conclusion was drawn that the Government, while anxious to
make a display to the world of impartiality and good will by a spectacular
act of clemency, was in reality determined to regard the active support of
Sinn Fein as a serious offence in the case of men too little before the
eyes of the world for their arrest to lead to widespread comment or
indignation. Their action was held to be an indication of their resolve to
prevent the spread of Sinn Fein principles until the Convention should
have presented a report palatable to the Cabinet: and Sinn Fein instead of
suffering by this action simply grew in its own esteem and in the eyes of
others.

The result of the South Armagh Election early in 1918, in which its
candidate was defeated, only spurred Sinn Fein to further exertions. The
election indicated more a desire "to give the Convention a chance" than a
deliberate judgment of the electorate in favour of the Parliamentary as
against the Sinn Fein policy. But a "chance given" to the Convention was
in reality an opportunity denied to Sinn Fein. The Convention was to
produce a scheme for the government of Ireland "within the Empire." A
tolerable and workable scheme produced unanimously (or nearly so) by the
Convention would undoubtedly (or so it was thought) have to be accepted
by the Cabinet; if such a scheme were accepted and put into operation, the
feeling of relief in Ireland would have been so deep and so general as to
deal to Sinn Fein, just when it was beginning to gain the ear of the
country, a blow from which it might take long to recover, if it should
recover it for a generation. It was felt that a Sinn Fein victory in South
Armagh would mean that the Convention might for all practical purposes
adjourn indefinitely, while a victory for the Parliamentary Party meant
that it was given the opportunity, so far as Nationalist Ireland
represented by this constituency was concerned, of producing a scheme of
self-government wide enough to win the support of all Irishmen really
desirous of a reasonable step in advance.

Sinn Fein decided in the circumstances to put the real opinion of Ireland
on the question of independence to a definite test before the Convention
should have time to report in favour of something attractive to moderate
men, if offered, but falling short of independence. On St. Patrick's Day
"monster meetings" were held all over Ireland, attended by the Volunteers
who mustered in force and by crowds which were certainly enthusiastic. At
all of these meetings the following resolution was put in Irish and in
English and, according to the reports, passed everywhere with practical
unanimity: "Here on St. Patrick's Day we join with our fellow-countrymen
at home and in foreign lands in proclaiming once more that Ireland is a
distinct nation whose just right is sovereign independence. This right has
been asserted in every generation, has never been surrendered and never
allowed to lapse. We call the nations to witness that to-day as in the
past it is by force alone that England holds Ireland for her Empire and
not by the consent of the Irish; and that England's claim to have given
the Irish people 'self-determination' is a lie: her true attitude being
shown by the recent ministerial statement that 'under no circumstances
could any English Government contemplate the ultimate independence of
Ireland'." In Dublin, Belfast and Clare these meetings were proclaimed and
could not be held--at least on the appointed day. In Belfast Mr. de Valera
addressed the meeting at 11 o'clock on the night preceding, but when
midnight struck the gathering was dispersed by the police. But a "monster
meeting" is a thing of varying dimensions: even "monster meetings" held
simultaneously all over Ireland may not be attended by more than a
fraction of the population. To put the matter beyond doubt it was decided
to institute a plebiscite in favour of independence and to publish the
numbers who in each townland declared themselves in favour of it. While
the plebiscite was being taken Sinn Fein had again an opportunity of
"testing the feeling of the country" at a parliamentary election. Mr. John
Redmond had died on the 6th of March. He had fought for his policy to the
last with tenacity and dignity: through a long life he had displayed the
courage which once led the small and faithful band who refused to betray
Parnell: he had come to accept the limitations imposed upon his policy by
English feeling with a pride which preferred to regard them as the
dictates of statesmanship: he never lost his courtesy, his confidence or
his belief in human sincerity. To Sinn Fein he had opposed an unbending
hostility, and the temptation to replace him in the representation of
Waterford by a Sinn Feiner was too great to be resisted. Sinn Fein
sustained a heavy defeat at the poll, and this second reverse within a few
months was taken to indicate the turning of the tide in favour of Mr.
Redmond's policy. It really meant no more than that the electors of
Waterford thought, what many other people thought with them, that the
attempt to oust Mr. Redmond's son from sitting for his father's
constituency was a breach of the decencies of public life. Certainly the
language which some of the party used in speaking of Mr. Redmond was
inexcusable and deserved the rebuff which it received.

But the report of the Convention, laid upon the table of the House of
Commons early in April, overshadowed plebiscites and the results of
contested elections. Upon its reception by the Government the whole future
of Ireland seemed to turn. But the report was difficult to master. The
Chairman of the Convention claimed that it had "laid a foundation of Irish
agreement unprecedented in history," but the actual record of the
proceedings seemed at first blush open to a somewhat different
interpretation. The Nationalists had, it is true, offered large
concessions to the Unionists, but they were themselves divided upon
questions of principle of the very first importance; and while some of the
Unionists were content to accept what was offered, provided the
Nationalists met the concession of this acceptance by a concession
infinitely greater, the Ulster Unionists appeared to have succeeded in
committing themselves to nothing. If the Government were to attempt to
legislate for Ireland on the basis of the report the Ulster Unionists were
certain to produce the "pledges" that they would not be "coerced" and too
many responsible people had given these pledges to make the prospect of
legislation for Ireland a comfortable outlook for anybody. But not only
was the report difficult to interpret, not only did its publication put
Ministers in an awkward position: it came at a most unfortunate time. The
military prospects of the Allies were clouded, and the Government had
decided to make a fresh call upon the man-power of the country. It was
known that in their perplexity they had considered the possibility of
extending Conscription to Ireland, and to do so, equally with refraining
from doing so, seemed to be a step of doubtful expediency.

The situation was complicated; but the handling of it by the Prime
Minister was more complicated still. He elected to treat the question of
Home Rule and the question of Irish Conscription concurrently while he
declared that they were not interdependent. He justified the application
of Conscription to Ireland on the merits: men were needed in France and
there were men to be had in Ireland: the Home Rule Act, accepted by the
Parliamentary Party and placed on the Statute Book, had given to
Parliament the right to legislate for Ireland upon matters of Imperial
concern. As for the Convention, he refused to regard the report as
disclosing that there had been "substantial agreement," nevertheless he
announced that the Government would bring forward immediately such
proposals for the future government of Ireland as seemed to be just. It
was common belief that so far as the Convention was concerned a failure to
arrive at "substantial agreement" absolved the Government from all
obligation to legislate upon its proposals; an intention of legislating
all the same appeared to be prompted by the desire to offer something in
the way of compensation for the unpalatable proposal of Conscription. But
the Premier insisted that any such interpretation of his proposal was
erroneous: the two measures had nothing whatever to do with one another:
each stood upon its own merits and each must be passed regardless of the
other. But, having elected to take Conscription first, and having
announced his intention of forcing it through Parliament in spite of
criticism and of putting it into operation in Ireland in spite of
opposition, he indulged himself in a glimpse at the prospects of a
conscribed Ireland: "when the young men of Ireland," he said, "have been
brought in large numbers into the fighting line, it is important that they
should feel that they are not fighting for the purpose of establishing a
principle abroad which is denied to them at home." But as if in fear that
this might imply some remote connection between Ireland's duty to fight
and Ireland's right to be given the benefit of the principle it was asked
to fight for, the Premier gave the most convincing proof of his sincerity
in saying that Conscription for Ireland and Home Rule for Ireland did not
"stand together"--Conscription was passed into law and Home Rule was
dropped.

It is difficult to conceive a course of action more nicely calculated to
demonstrate on a large scale the principal theses which Sinn Fein had been
preaching for years. The demonstration was carried into every household in
Ireland in a form in which it could no longer be ignored. Conscription had
not been a palatable measure in England, and it had not been put into
force until the English people had agreed with practical unanimity that
they must submit to it: but the choice had been their own and no
Government would have ventured even to propose it until the English people
had made up their minds beforehand to accept it when it should be
proposed. In Australia it had been discussed and rejected; and no one
either in England or anywhere else had questioned the right of the people
of Australia to decline to conscribe themselves, though the interests of
Australia were as vitally involved in the issue of the war as the
interests of England. Ireland, on the other hand, while it was opposed to
Conscription, had no choice offered to it in the matter. It was decided
upon by a Cabinet of which no Irishman was a member and it was to be
enforced in spite not merely of the protests of Ireland but of the grave
warnings of a large number of Englishmen. To the argument that Ireland,
being an integral part of the United Kingdom, must submit to the
legislation of Parliament whether it liked it or no, it was pointed out
that this argument had not been enforced against Ulster four years before;
that when Conscription had first been enforced in England it had been
admitted by Parliament that Ireland was a special case; that to assert
that Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom was to beg the
very question in dispute, since the national claim of Ireland had always
been a claim for independence. Again, if the Home Rule Act was relied upon
(as the Premier relied upon it) to prove that Ireland had accepted the
authority of Parliament in Imperial matters and acknowledged its supreme
jurisdiction in all matters pertaining to war and peace, it was pointed
out that the Government which now invoked it had persistently refused to
put it into operation. Yet the Premier, who, more than any other single
man, had shown himself hostile in deed, while friendly in word, to Irish
claims, himself admitted that Irishmen serving in the army in the then
condition of Irish affairs would be fighting abroad to enforce a principle
denied in the government of their own country. The conclusion which Sinn
Fein drew was that the English Government was prepared in defiance of
public feeling, justice and constitutional practice to enforce
Conscription upon Ireland by naked force: that it had no intention of
granting Ireland any form of self-government, and that it was the duty of
Irishmen to organize "an effective and protracted resistance." But, though
prepared to resist, it continued to argue. It pointed out that the Irish
Parliament, whose powers had been transferred by the Act of Union to the
Parliament of England, had possessed no power of Conscription and could
not transfer a power which it did not possess; any power of Conscription,
therefore, possessed by Parliament over Ireland must rest upon some other
basis, if it existed at all: that there was no legal process by which a
man could be deprived of life or liberty except on conviction for a crime:
and that this was why, even in the case of Conscription in England, Mr.
Asquith, a good constitutional lawyer, "was careful to declare that he
based the conscription of Englishmen on the basis, not of State duty or
compulsion, but of the universal assent of the English people." If this
assent was lacking, as it undoubtedly was, in the case of Ireland, it
followed that to enforce Conscription was an act of naked injustice.

But no elaborate argument was needed to rouse a people convinced at last
that they were in the vortex of Charybdis. They resented what now appeared
as the duplicity with which for months their attention had been
deliberately and elaborately focussed upon the alluring mysteries of the
Convention while they drifted quietly and securely towards the edge of the
whirlpool. They saw the cloudy structure of the Convention melt and float
away, disclosing what it had covered; and they prepared for a desperate
struggle.

The feeling was not confined to Sinn Fein. The Parliamentary Party left
Westminster in a body and crossed to Ireland to help in the national
resistance. The Labour Party joined hands with them and with Sinn Fein in
the universal crisis. It involved for the Parliamentary Party a tragic and
fatal break with the past. It was the end of all their hopes, of all their
influence, of their very existence; and as they joined the Sinn Fein and
Labour representatives round the table of the Mansion House Conference,
summoned by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, they must have felt that they were
invited by virtue of what they had once been rather than by virtue of what
they were; they were there as the men who had relied on the broken reed,
"whereon if a man lean it will go into his hand and pierce him."

After its first meeting on April 18th, the Mansion House Conference issued
the following declaration:--"Taking our stand on Ireland's separate and
distinct nationhood and affirming the principle of liberty that the
Governments of nations derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed, we deny the right of the British Government or any external
authority to impose compulsory military service in Ireland against the
clearly expressed will of the Irish people. The passing of the
Conscription Bill by the British House of Commons must be regarded as a
declaration of war on the Irish nation. The alternative to accepting it as
such is to surrender our liberties and to acknowledge ourselves slaves. It
is in direct violation of the rights of small nationalities to
self-determination, which even the Prime Minister of England--now
preparing to employ naked militarism and force his Act upon
Ireland--himself officially announced as an essential condition for peace
at the Peace Congress. The attempt to enforce it will be an unwarrantable
aggression, which we call upon all Irishmen to resist by the most
effective means at their disposal." On the same day the Conference decided
to ask the co-operation of the Irish Catholic Bishops who had been
summoned by Cardinal Logue to meet at Maynooth. The Bishops, after hearing
a deputation from the Mansion House Conference, issued at once the
following manifesto: "An attempt is being made to force Conscription on
Ireland against the will of the Irish nation and in defiance of the
protests of its leaders. In view especially of the historic relations
between the two countries from the very beginning up to this moment, we
consider that Conscription forced in this way upon Ireland is an
oppressive and inhuman law, which the Irish people have a right to resist
by every means that are consonant with the law of God. We wish to remind
our people that there is a higher Power which controls the affairs of men.
They have in their hands the means of conciliating that Power by strict
adherence to the Divine law, by more earnest attention to their religious
duties, and by fervent and persevering prayer. In order to secure the aid
of the Holy Mother of God, who shielded our people in the days of their
greatest trials, we have already sanctioned a National Novena in honour of
Our Lady of Lourdes, commencing on the 3rd May, to secure general and
domestic peace. We also exhort the heads of families to have the Rosary
recited every evening with the intention of protecting the spiritual and
temporal welfare of our beloved country and bringing us safe through this
crisis of unparalleled gravity."

Many Sinn Feiners sincerely deplored the step which the Conference had
taken in calling upon the Bishops for an official manifesto. Its wording
seemed to rule out of existence the section of Irish Nationalists who
belonged to the Protestant faith and to identify a national question with
a particular creed. Certainly as a mere question of tactics the manifesto
was of doubtful wisdom. It was certain to raise, and it did raise, the cry
of the "priest in politics." From the mouths of the Ulster Party the
criticism might be disregarded, for they had themselves four years before
induced the Protestant churches in Ulster to pass official resolutions
against Home Rule. But it was different when the English newspapers began
to raise the "No Popery" cry and to write as if Sinn Fein were a purely
Catholic party which it had never ceased to protest it was not. But in
fact the vexed question of the relation of the Church to the civil power,
a question not to be disposed of in a sentence, did not fairly arise from
the Bishops' pronouncement. The main gist of it was contained in two
propositions neither of which was theological: the proposition that
Conscription was an oppressive and inhuman law was (whether right or
wrong) an ordinary statement of opinion upon a purely mundane matter: the
proposition that such a law might be resisted by any means consonant with
the law of God was the statement not of theology, whether Catholic or
Protestant, but of ordinary ethics, accidentally theistic. But the
concluding sentences of the manifesto threw their light backwards upon the
essential statements, and the resistance to Conscription was represented
as one more incident in the long struggle between free institutions and
the power of the Roman Church.

Nationalist Ireland, however, needed no incentive from the Bishops to
resist. It was presented with a clear cut issue which could not be evaded,
which the Cabinet by its decision had raised in its most acute form. If
Ireland submitted quietly to Conscription then it acknowledged that it
stood to the British Parliament in exactly the same relation as did
Yorkshire or Middlesex: if, on the other hand, Ireland were a nation, even
if it were a nation within the British Empire, it had the right to decide
for itself on a question involving issues so vital to its future. This was
the alternative which Sinn Fein put in vehement and passionate language
before the country and the reply of Nationalist Ireland was practically
unanimous. Nearly every Nationalist in Ireland took the anti-Conscription
pledge "Denying the right of the British Government to enforce compulsory
service in this country, we pledge ourselves solemnly to one another to
resist Conscription by the most effective means at our disposal."

But not only was the intention of the Government to enforce Conscription
regarded as a challenge to Ireland, as a denial of its nationality; a
deeper purpose was supposed to lie behind it. The record of the Government
during the war in its dealings with Ireland had not been such as to
persuade Nationalists of any section that it was either friendly or
sincere. It was believed that, coupled with the desire to obtain recruits,
and the intention of treating the Irish claim to a national existence as a
thing of no consequence in order to secure them, there was the desire
further to deplete Ireland of its Nationalist population and render its
government by England easier in consequence. This belief did not always
find public expression, but it existed and had much to do with the
vehemence of the resistance. Apart from this consideration, the motives of
the opposition and the feelings with which it was connected were
succinctly given by _New Ireland_. "At the basis of the opposition to
Conscription stand the moral rights of Ireland, the very rock as it were
of Irish nationality, the rights to choose her own future and to protect
her people from the horrors of the European War. If there were any
statesmanship left in England to-day it would look to creating harmony
between Ireland and England, knowing that the real interest of nations is
built thereon. Real statesmanship would grant Ireland the fullest
liberty, knowing that the friendship of Ireland is essential, and that it
can only be based on the fundamentals of national honour, namely, liberty
and justice. Instead English politicians vainly imagine that coercion, the
press gang, and the train of consequent tragedy will somehow win the
allegiance and support of Ireland."

The most spectacular demonstration of protest was made by the Irish Labour
Party. A conference of fifteen hundred delegates convened in Dublin by the
Irish Trades Union Congress, in adopting a resolution to resist
Conscription "in every way that to us seems feasible," asserting "our
claims for independent status as a nation in the international movement
and the right of self-determination as a nation as to what action or
actions our people should take on questions of political or economic
issues," called upon Irish workers to abstain from all work on April 23rd
as "a demonstration of fealty to the cause of Labour and Ireland." This
was the first occasion in Western Europe on which it had been decided to
call a general national strike: and the strike in Ireland was general
except in North-east Ulster. The Labour Party however had a point of view
somewhat different from that of Sinn Fein. Labour was opposed to
Conscription on principle, and would have, unlike Sinn Fein, opposed it
even if agreed to by an Irish Parliament. Their view had been clearly
expressed more than a year before when, after two years of silence, Irish
Labour began again to publish a weekly paper. _Irish Opinion_ in its first
number, published on December 1st, 1917, had said, "We shall resolutely
oppose the conscription of Irish people, whether for military or
industrial purposes. The very idea of compulsory service is abhorrent to
us and we shall assist in every way every effort of our people to resist
the imposition of such an iniquitous system upon us."

However neither minor differences on the subject of Conscription nor,
indeed, major differences upon other points, prevented all sections of
Nationalist opinion from assisting each other heartily in the crisis. A
common statement of Ireland's case against Conscription was drawn up for
publication and the Lord Mayor of Dublin was deputed to proceed to America
to lay the protest of Ireland before the President of the United States.
The Government showed no signs of yielding to the opposition. The Lord
Lieutenant known to be opposed to the policy of the Cabinet was recalled,
and his place was taken by Field Marshal Lord French with whom Mr. Shortt
was appointed Chief Secretary, one of a considerable number of "English
Home Rulers" who have at various times been appointed to the post of Chief
Secretary for Ireland by virtue of their profession of the belief that no
such post should be permitted to exist, and whose conduct in it has been
such as might be expected from such persons. It was announced with
official emphasis that no opposition would deflect the Government from its
purpose. The Lord Mayor of Dublin was refused permission to leave Ireland
until he should first have submitted for the approval of Lord French the
memorial which he was charged to convey to the President of the United
States. But nothing altered the opposition to Conscription, and the
Government had to be content with the suspension of the sword.

When the formidable nature of the task they had undertaken dawned upon the
Lord Lieutenant and his Chief Secretary, it was decided by the Irish
Government to cut the sinews of the opposition by the arrest of those who
were chiefly responsible for fomenting it. But it was clearly impossible
to clap the Catholic Bishops and the Mansion House Conference into gaol in
a body. It was plain that Sinn Fein was the chief centre of the trouble,
being the only political party whose principles furnished a logical ground
for opposition to the conscription of Ireland by Act of Parliament. The
two Sinn Fein members of the Mansion House Conference, Messrs. de Valera
and Griffith, with a number of less prominent Sinn Feiners, were deported
and imprisoned. But this was a course which required some explanation.
They were not the only people prominent in the Anti-Conscription campaign;
and in any case English public opinion while, on the whole, indignant with
the attitude of Ireland towards compulsory service, was becoming somewhat
uneasy as to happenings in Ireland and inclined to question the entire
wisdom of the Irish Executive. Accordingly, it was asserted that the
arrested Sinn Feiners had been guilty of complicity in a German plot. The
ex-Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, during whose tenure of office the
discovery of the plot (it was said) began to be made, publicly and flatly
denied all knowledge of it, and expressed disbelief in its existence. The
Premier announced that he had seen the evidence (which nothing, however,
would induce him to divulge) and that it was even as the Irish Government
had said. Public opinion however was still unsatisfied, and the Irish
office issued a statement on the subject in which the Chief Secretary
argued ("for even though vanquished he could argue still") from the
history of Sinn Fein for the previous three or four years, and from
certain financial transactions between Count Bernstorff and some
Irish-Americans before America entered the war, that some person or
persons in Ireland had been in communication with Germany for a
treasonable purpose. However that may have been, there was no direct
evidence connecting any of the prisoners with any of these transactions,
and in fact nearly all of them had been in gaol in England at the time
when the transactions took place. The official statement was pitilessly
analysed in a pamphlet published by _New Ireland_ entitled "The Plot:
German or English?" the only result of the whole affair being that
official credit in Ireland received its last shock. No further attempts
were made to provide non-political reasons for political arrests: it was
judged better that the Executive should rely upon the extraordinary powers
conferred upon it by the Defence of the Realm Act (though the machinery
provided by what was known as "the ordinary law" in Ireland seemed
sufficiently complete without it) to arrest, without the necessity of
charge or trial, any persons who made themselves prominent for the
advocacy of Sinn Fein or Republican politics. In July Sinn Fein, the
Gaelic League, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Volunteers were declared to be
"dangerous associations" to which Irish men and women would in future
belong at their own risk. Concerts, hurling matches, literary
competitions, were prohibited all over Ireland by military force when they
were held under the auspices of persons politically obnoxious to the
Government. Government became a matter of having enough troops in the
country to ensure that the Executive was able to do precisely what it
pleased. Ireland was treated frankly as hostile and occupied territory,
and the last pretence of constitutional government was finally abandoned.

The reply of Sinn Fein to the arrest of Mr. Griffith for complicity in the
"German Plot" had been his triumphant election for East Cavan. This was
almost the last seat which the once powerful Parliamentary Party ventured
to contest. Its co-operation with Sinn Fein in the question of
Conscription had been, not an alliance but an operation conducted in
common, and on other points each was at perfect liberty to pursue its own
path. But the junction of forces had only succeeded in bringing into clear
relief the essential incompatibility of the Sinn Fein and the
Parliamentary policies, and it became evident that the Irish public would
have to choose definitely which it should finally adopt. Sinn Fein, which
refused to compromise on the essential principle of Ireland's distinct and
independent nationhood, could argue with considerable force that on this
assumption alone could Ireland object to Conscription with confidence and
moral justification--that if Ireland were not a nation, but a province or
a dependency, then the resistance to Conscription was legally and morally
without a sound basis. It was extremely difficult for the Parliamentary
Party to counter this argument: and in point of fact some of them did not
try to counter it but frankly dissociated themselves from the
Anti-Conscription policy. It was perfectly clear that the Home Rule Act
reserved such powers to Parliament as to make the conscription of Ireland,
as part of a general measure of Conscription for the United Kingdom, a
step which Parliament would legally be entitled to take and which, once
the Home Rule Act was accepted by Ireland as satisfactory (and the
Parliamentary Party had declared that it was) Ireland would have no moral
right to resist. The Party began to shift its ground: it could no longer,
in view of Irish feeling, remain advocates of a settlement which made
Conscription possible: it would not go the whole way with Sinn Fein and
declare that no settlement would be satisfactory which did not acknowledge
the right of Ireland to independent nationhood, to self-determination and
the right to choose its own form of government. The Party settled down
unofficially to the advocacy of a form of Home Rule which should ensure to
Ireland piecemeal and in detail, by enactment of Parliament, as large an
independence as was possessed by the self-governing Dominions, without the
formal and definite renunciation of the right of Parliament to decide the
extent to which Ireland should be independent. This of course left the
question of principle precisely where it was. But on the question of
principle Sinn Fein was adamant, and Nationalist Ireland supported Sinn
Fein by an overwhelming majority.

The relationship between Sinn Fein and the Hierarchy was more enigmatic
and gave rise to much speculation. One view was that Sinn Fein had
'captured' the Hierarchy, another was that the Hierarchy had 'captured'
Sinn Fein. Neither view was, of course, correct. Individual bishops may
have sympathized (individual priests certainly sympathized in large
numbers) with Sinn Fein: but it is certain that quite a large number of
priests and bishops did not. While it is true that resistance to
Conscription could not logically be justified except upon the principles
of Sinn Fein, bishops had the same right to be illogical as members of the
Parliamentary Party. Under the stress of the moment, in the desire to save
their flocks from the danger that threatened them, they had joined forces
with a party which before that they had not approved of and which they
were not bound to approve of afterwards. Sinn Fein, at any rate, was under
no illusion as to the feelings of some of the Bishops. The curate of
Crossna, Father O'Flanagan, had taken a very active part on the side of
Sinn Fein in the East Cavan election. Shortly afterwards he was deprived
by his bishop, the Most Rev. Dr. Coyne, of all his faculties as a priest,
including the right to say Mass. The technical offence for which he was
punished in this way was that of having addressed meetings within the
boundaries of three parishes in Cavan without first obtaining the
permission of the local parish priests. Everybody knew that the real
reason for his punishment was not the technical offence but the fact that
his speeches had been strongly (and even violently) Sinn Fein. The people
of Crossna retorted by shutting up the parish church and refusing to allow
Mass to be said in it by anyone else. _Nationality_, in reporting the
facts, said of Father O'Flanagan: "He has been condemned to the most harsh
judgment that can be meted out to a priest by his bishop and until that
wrong has been set right Sinn Fein will stand by Father O'Flanagan"; and
practically every Sinn Feiner in Ireland agreed with these words. When
bishops seemed (as many of them did) to go out of their way to criticise
in pastorals and public letters the policy or the tactics of Sinn Fein,
their action was resented and openly, even stringently, criticised in the
Sinn Fein papers: but all this was done not only without any trace of
anti-clericalism (in the proper sense of the word) but with what sometimes
seemed an almost exaggerated deference to the office and sacred functions
of the bishop as such. As a matter of fact the Catholic Church in Ireland
during the nineteenth century has always been on the side of law and
order. It has had a strong bias towards constituted authority, as was to
be expected from a branch of the most conservative institution in the
world. It excommunicated the Fenians, it opposed the Land League, it
condemned the Rising. It is hardly too much to say that Ireland would have
been ungovernable but for the influence of the Church. It raised its
voice against outrage and murder in language beside which the
denunciations of politicians sound tame and flaccid. If it has meddled in
politics (as it has) it has done no more than the Protestant Churches in
Ireland, every one of which is "in politics" up to the neck.

And the co-operation of Labour and Sinn Fein in the opposition to
Conscription by no means meant either that Labour had become Sinn Fein or
that Sinn Fein had adopted the Labour programme. In fact its relation to
Labour is a problem which Sinn Fein has been very long in solving. The
alliance between Republican Volunteers and the Citizen Army in the Rising
effected no more than a temporary and partial union. The very first number
of _Irish Opinion_ had some very open criticism of the attitude of Sinn
Fein to Irish Labour. The Sinn Fein Convention of November 1st, 1917, had
passed two Labour resolutions, one of which affirmed the right of Labour
to a "fair and reasonable" wage: the other was in favour of Irish Labour
severing its connection with British Trades Unions. On the first of these
_Irish Opinion_ remarked: "The resolution of the Sinn Fein Convention
conceding to Irish Labour the right to fair and reasonable wages was not
by any means encouraging. It was a resolution to which the assent of even
Mr. W. M. Murphy might have been secured. It did not go far enough, and it
bore upon the face of it timidity and trepidation. The Labour demand
to-day goes rather beyond fair and reasonable wages: the British
Government is prepared to offer, in fact has actually offered, some share
in direction to British Labour. This being so, there is not much to be
gained from Mr. de Valera's statement in his Mansion House speech 'that in
a free Ireland, with the social conditions that obtained in Ireland,
Labour had a far better chance than it would have in capitalist England.'
'Our Labour policy,' continued Mr. de Valera, 'is a policy of a free
country, and we ask Labour to join with us to free the country. We
recognize that we can never free it without Labour. And we say, when
Labour frees this country--helps to free it--Labour can look for its own
share of its patrimony.' We agree that 'to free the country' is an object
worthy of all the devotion that men can give to it, but at the same time
we would urge that, pending this devoutly-to-be-wished-for consummation,
men and women must live and rear the families upon which the future
Ireland depends. What Mr. de Valera asks in effect is that Labour should
wait till freedom is achieved before it claims 'its share of its
patrimony.' There are free countries, even Republics, where Labour claims
'its share in its patrimony' in vain. We can work for freedom, and we
will, but at the same time we'll claim our share of our patrimony when and
where opportunity offers." This is to put the issue squarely. Labour was
not going to commit itself blindfold to any policy of "ignoring"
indiscriminately all "English law," when by recognizing it any practical
advantage was to be gained. Labour had too keen an eye to the realities
of life to refuse a gift from the left hand because the right hand had
smitten it or picked its pocket. It was prepared to settle its account
with the owner of both hands when opportunity offered, but, for the
present, "a man must live." "Fleshpots or Freedom" might form an
attractive motto for the front page of _New Ireland_, but Labour saw no
virtue (since Freedom's back was turned anyhow) in leaving the pots
untasted on a point of honour. The resolution calling upon Irish Labour to
withdraw from association with English Labour was flatly ignored. Irish
Labour was, and intended to remain, international: it was not going to
refuse co-operation with Labour in France or Belgium--it appointed
delegates to the Stockholm Conference--and it saw no reason to refuse
co-operation with Labour in England. Besides, without the help of English
Labour it felt unable to stand alone. And Labour, while it sympathized
with the demand for Irish independence, did not wish to commit itself to
any step which would make it more difficult than it need be to win the
co-operation of the Unionist workingmen of Belfast and the North.
Curiously enough, while Sinn Fein was calling upon Irish Labour to
withdraw from membership of English Trades Unions, the Unionist leaders in
Ulster were trying to induce Belfast Labour to do the same thing: but
while Sinn Fein objected to the English Labour Party because it was
English, the Ulster politicians objected to it because it was in favour of
Home Rule. Among the Sinn Fein papers, _New Ireland_, while faithful to
the resolution of the Convention, saw most clearly the reasons which
explained the Labour attitude and, while expressing the hope that a
severance from the English Unions would eventually occur, pleaded for
toleration and for, in the meantime, a free hand for Labour.

But the Sinn Fein difficulty in regard to Labour lay deeper than any mere
question of tactics. The leaders of Irish Labour might be Republicans, but
they were also largely Socialists, and where Socialism is suspected the
Church has to be reckoned with. James Connolly, the revered leader of
Irish Labour, had been (though he died a sincere Catholic) supposed to
have come into conflict with the Church for his opinions on social
questions. His associate, James Larkin, had more than once furnished a
text for some very plain speaking in pastorals and from the altar for the
alleged subversive and immoral tendency of his teaching on Labour
questions. During the General Election of 1918 a sentence from James
Connolly's writings, which had been quoted on a Sinn Fein election poster,
was the subject of a bitter and prolonged controversy, during which Sinn
Fein was challenged by a militant Churchman either to repudiate Connolly's
political philosophy or to declare itself opposed to the authoritative
teaching of the Church. Sinn Fein, very wisely, did neither: but it was
felt very generally that while this might be wisdom for the moment, it was
not wisdom for all time: and Sinn Fein has still to formulate its social
philosophy.

The conclusion of the war made no difference in the government of Ireland
except that more troops might be expected to be available for the
maintenance of law and order. Martial law was not relaxed or revoked: the
Competent Military Authority retained unimpaired over large areas of
Ireland the power to arrest and imprison (often for long periods) persons
charged with every variety of offence which could be interpreted as
dangerous to the prestige and efficiency of that form of government which
is best administered under the sanction of a courtmartial. Men, women and
children were arrested upon charges not specified and committed to prison
for periods impossible to ascertain either from the authorities who sent
them, or the authorities who kept them, there. It was under such
circumstances that Ireland was asked to take part in the Victory Election
of 1918. The electors of Great Britain were asked to give a "mandate" to
the British representatives at the Peace Conference, and "to strengthen
their hands" in exacting from the Central Empires and their Allies the
full measure of punishment. Ireland decided to give a "mandate" which was
neither asked for nor desired and to "strengthen the hands" of the Peace
Plenipotentiaries in demanding that for which the war had ostensibly been
fought--the freedom of small nations. It was known that the Parliamentary
Party would retain only a fraction of the seats it once held and that Sinn
Fein would be in a majority. For a time it seemed as if the verdict of the
majority might be weakened by the intrusion of Labour candidates who,
though most of them were Sinn Feiners in point of fact and all of them
were bound by the Labour Party not to attend Parliament except when
ordered by the Labour Congress, would give no pledge of absolute and rigid
abstention from the English Parliament and were Labour candidates first
and Sinn Feiners afterwards. At one time it seemed as if an acute conflict
between Sinn Fein and Labour might occur. But the Labour Party,
recognizing the extreme importance of Ireland having an opportunity of
delivering an unequivocal verdict in the most important election that had
been held for a generation, finally agreed to withdraw its candidates and
to allow the electorate to decide on the political question only. The
decision was conclusive on the question. Out of 106 members returned for
Irish constituencies, 73 were Sinn Fein candidates, pledged to abstention
from the English Parliament and to the claim of Irish independence.




CONCLUSION.


The months before the European War broke out saw Nationalist Ireland
practically unanimous in its support of the Home Rule legislation of the
Liberal Government, ready to be reckoned as a part of the British Empire,
prepared to acknowledge the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, content
with an Irish Parliament charged only with the control of a number of
matters of domestic concern. Though the policy of the Home Rule Act had
been definitely and deliberately adopted by the English electorate, it was
defeated by threats of armed resistance on the part of a minority of
Irishmen, backed by promises of support from a minority of Englishmen, and
by the refusal of the Liberal Government either to vindicate its own
constitutional authority or to appeal to the country to do so for it. The
Government put itself in the position of seeming to prefer in England the
conciliation of its enemies to the satisfaction of its friends, and in
Ireland to acknowledge the claim of a minority to veto the legitimate
expectations of the majority. Occupying this position at home, it plunged
into a war in Europe to vindicate "international morality" and "the rights
of small nations," as a protest against the doctrine that the force of
arms is superior to the force of justice and law. The month after the war
ended saw Nationalist Ireland still claiming and still denied (in
obedience to the same obstructing forces) the right of self-determination:
but the self-determination sought was no longer that in which before the
war it had been content to acquiesce. It held that the war, which it had
done something to win, had secured to the weaker nationalities (if the
public and reiterated professions of the victors were not meant
deliberately to deceive the world as to their intentions) the right to
their own national existence, independent of the claims and the interests
of the stronger nations by whom they had been subjugated. It held that
during the war the rights, the interests, the feelings and the liberty of
Ireland had been treated by the English Government with so much
indifference and disdain as to make the future subordination of Ireland to
English domination a prospect distasteful to Irishmen and a position
injurious to Irish interests. It revived the claim of Ireland to
independence, declaring that it was justified alike by history and by the
common consent of Europe and America, and as a first step in the assertion
of that claim refused for the first time since the Act of Union to send
representatives to sit in the English Parliament. The forces which
produced so serious an alteration in the attitude of Ireland have been
described in the foregoing pages.

At the end of the war the only part of Ireland whose political outlook
remained unaltered was the Unionist North-east. Upon the indurated surface
of its political conscience nothing that had happened either in Ireland or
out of it had produced the least effect. Alone in Europe the Ulster
Unionist seemed to regard the war as a detachable episode with (so far as
he was concerned) no political implications. He adopted the same
standpoint, used the same language and expected it to meet with the same
approving response from the same people. The changed attitude of other
people was attributed by him to treachery, to disloyalty, to lack of fixed
principle. By an adroit use of his opportunities during the war he managed
to secure his position: he could point to the loyalty alike of those of
his political faith who had enlisted and of those who had not enlisted:
the former had done their duty to the Empire--the latter had performed
their duty to the Government by providing it with a perpetual incentive to
the conscription of Ireland. He had collected "pledges" from all who cared
to give them that his position would be respected. To rely upon the
"pledge" of a politician as a bulwark against the advance of political
ideas may seem a somewhat imbecile proceeding: but it was not in his case
so imbecile as it looked. He was shrewd enough to see that what European
statesmen were doing was not by any means in accordance with what they
were saying, and he decided (distrusting "ideas" of all kinds) to stake
his future upon the relative permanence of things as they were rather than
upon the doubtful advent of things as they ought to be.

Sinn Fein was the opposite of all this. It appealed alike from force and
from fact to an ideal justice. Unable to win independence from a power
both strong enough to coerce it and interested for economic and military
reasons in retaining its hold upon Ireland, it refused to ask for
"pledges" which it felt sure would be broken, even if given, it refused to
plead its case before a court whose interests were engaged against it in
advance. It preferred to appeal to its rights, though there was no
tribunal before which its plea could come. It hoped that at the Peace
Conference the principle of self-determination could not be insisted upon
as against Germany, without Germany claiming that it should be
acknowledged in the case of Ireland. To its dismay and (it would seem) to
its surprise Germany was not represented at the discussions: the Peace was
dictated by a body in which none but the victors were represented and of
which the object was not so much to establish a principle as to enforce a
settlement, even at the risk of establishing a precedent. The claim of
Sinn Fein that Ireland should be represented at the Conference as an
interested party was brushed aside, contemptuously by the representatives
of England and France, shamefacedly by the representative of America. The
League of Nations which the Peace Conference set up was expressly
constructed to prevent interference with the sovereign rights of its chief
members as they existed at the time it was constructed: the right of
England to retain whatever dominion it pleases over Ireland is guaranteed
by the League of Nations in advance. Disappointed of the hopes placed in
the Peace Conference and the League of Nations, Sinn Fein has to rely
either on the interference in its favour of some Power whose friendship
England cannot disregard (an interference rendered less easy than it was
by the very League of Nations which was expected to make it easier) or on
the gradual and silent force of European opinion, or on the result of some
future war.

Sinn Fein takes its stand upon the proposition that Ireland is a nation
and upon the assertion that all nations have a just claim to independence.
The proposition cannot be controverted except by arguments which go to
prove that no such thing as a nation exists, and the assertion that all
nations have a just claim to independence is like the assertion that all
men have a right to be free: each is admitted in principle, but the
principle is subject in practice to so many modifications that to say that
a nation is free is to say what may mean as many different things as there
are nations called free. A nation may be politically free and economically
dependent, or vice versa: each of these conditions may be of various
degrees on each side: and each of these again may be combined with varying
degrees of moral, social and intellectual dependence.

Sinn Fein aims at the complete political, the complete economical and the
complete moral and intellectual independence of Ireland. It has first to
secure independence of England, and, having secured that, to avoid falling
into dependence on any other Power. Its immediate problem is the means of
securing independence of England. To induce England to acknowledge the
independence of Ireland (to force her being out of the question, unless
allies are to appear in the future) is no solution, as is abundantly
proved by the history of their relations: the independence acknowledged in
1783 was recalled in 1800 and has been denied ever since. To induce the
League of Nations, as at present constituted, to acknowledge the
independence of Ireland is out of the question: if it were reconstituted
so as to make it possible for it to do so, mere recognition of
independence would be useless, unless the League were in a position to
guarantee that it would continue to be recognized.

The means at the disposal of Sinn Fein at present hardly seem adequate to
accomplish its object. It may bring about the moral and intellectual
independence of Ireland: it may secure a certain measure of economic
independence: but to secure political independence, in face of the forces
ranged against it, seems impossible. But what it cannot do for itself may
in the future be done for it by the moral forces of which it is a
manifestation. It may in the future be recognized by the conscience of
mankind that no nation ought to exercise political domination over another
nation. But that future may still be as remote as it seemed in the days of
the Roman Empire.


  Printed at The Talbot Press
  89 Talbot Street, Dublin




Transcriber's Notes:

The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these
letters have been replaced with transliterations.

The following misprints have been corrected:
  "ulimate" corrected to "ultimate" (page 26)
  "of of" corrected to "of" (page 207)
  "adressed" corrected to "addressed" (page 237)








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