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December 1916
Ireland, 1916--And Beyond
by Henry W. Massingham
'They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake, and for all that,
they will think they are well paid.'--The Old Woman, in Cathleen-Ni-Houlihan.
In more than one period of the Anglo-Irish association it has been the
misfortune of England to forget Ireland at the moment when the relationship of
the two countries should have been closer and more sympathetic than usual. She
forgot her after the famine, and she forgot her when the great war broke out.
She had her excuse. The war had obliterated the whole field of her domestic
politics and destroyed or suspended her party system. But even then her
statesmen would have done well to remember that July, 1914, had been a time of
crisis for Ireland, no less than for her. She had watched the enlistment of at
least one hundred thousand Irishmen, answering to the ominous title of
'Volunteers.' She had found herself unable to fulfill her pledge of Home Rule
save under conditions which Catholic and Nationalist Ireland would not accept,
or which Protestant Ireland would resist by force. Her experience of Ireland
should have taught her the desperate seriousness of this sudden reincarnation
of the spirit of force. The Ulstermen had got their arms, and one of their
prelates had acclaimed the merciful Providence under which the gun-running
vessel, the Fanny, had reached her destination 'guided' by 'God's hand' and
'shielded by his fogs.' Ulster was ready, or affected to be ready, to put all
to the test of force.
"We envy not the sluggard's peace,
We grasp our trusty sword,"
sang one of the bards of Belfast of the incipient revolution.
The thunder was not all of the stage. Ulster's threat had all but demoralized
the British army, and it was at least an important element in the German
calculation of the part that England was likely to play in a European struggle.
In July, 1914, there was well-founded belief in the imminence of at least a
local civil war. In August, 1914, the smaller disturbance had been swallowed up
in the conflagration of the world. But the Irish problem remained, subject to
three new and serious aggravations. The first was the postponement of Home
Rule. The second was the weakening of the Irish Parliamentary party. The third
was the growth of Sinn Fein. All three causes were connected. If Mr. Redmond's
following had been a little stronger and younger, he might have wrested from
England a definite concession for Home Rule in return for his rally to the war.
This in turn would have drawn the vitality out of the growing movement of
revolt and turned its energies inward and to constitutional lines. Mr. Redmond,
never, like Parnell, a great personal force in Ireland, committed the generous
error of leaning too heavily on English opinion in face of an uncompleted
treaty of reconciliation with Ireland.
Nationalist Ireland was not unregardful of the cause of liberty in Europe; but
she was hardly prepared to stand in a body by England's side in a great war.
Nor was Mr. Redmond able to secure for her the romantic and individual share in
the campaign at which he aimed. He hoped for an Irish Brigade, commanded by
Irish officers. The brigade was never formed. Military etiquette stood in the
way, and the delicate task of recruiting for the volunteer armies was not
always intrusted to men who knew how to attract the political and religious
sympathies of the towns and countryside of the West and the South. Nor was
pro-Germanism quite absent. A section of the higher clergy, and some of the
parish priests, were friendly to Austria as the great conservative Catholic
power in Europe; a smaller section professed to find in Germany the champion of
the principle of authority in the State, as against French skepticism and
separatism. In a word, war distracted Ireland while it united England. The
latter was caught up in the whirlwind, while she was in the middle of a slow
and much-impeded bit of political evolution of her own. Events marched too
quickly for her.
Above all, the Ireland of the last ten years was herself the centre of an
attractive and disturbing intellectual movement of her own. The Victorian
revival of letters had died away. But Irish genius had rarely shone more
brightly. Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Moore, George Russell, and Lady Gregory
were acknowledged stars of literature and journalism. Behind them ranged a
peculiarly native and original flight of poetry and inspiration. The scholars
of the Gaelic League, and the younger poets who sprang from its revival of the
Irish tongue, owed nothing to English influences and traditions. Like so much
of Yeats and Synge, they were pure Celt. And they stood apart from Irish
parliamentary politics and in real, though not always avowed, hostility to it.
What was Westminster to them? The homes of their thought lay amid the heather
and cabins of Connemara and the rock-islands of the Atlantic coast, where the
old language and the old folk of Ireland lingered. These wastes they repeopled
with the delicate forms born of a half-tender, half-ironical and critical
spirit. But they could not banish the present. The new Irish poetic drama was
divided between the tendency to rebuke the romanticism of the national movement
and the impulse to invest it with a fresh apparel of beauty, woven of poetry
and legend. Who can say which was the stronger? The mockery of *John Bull's
Other Island*, the more savage satire of *The Playboy of the Western World*
condemned the revolutionary strain in Irish politics. 'Forget and work.--Learn
and adapt. --Go back to business and good sense,' was their message. But
neither could exorcise the idealism that looks through Irish poverty by the
windows of the soul. In *Cathleen-Ni-Houlihan* the idealism is undisguised. The
Sinn Fein rising yields no surprise in the light of that slight but wonderful
vision of the unreconciled Irish spirit. When the 'ships are in the bay' the
Irish boy is still minded to leave home and sweet-heart, as he left them in the
spring of 1916.
But it would be excessive to attribute Sinn Fein merely to the restless
memories of the past which flit through the Irish mind, in the vacancy of
unemployment and half-employment. Ireland, indeed, is still idle so far as her
intellectual life is concerned, and will be so until Home Rule, an organized
civil service, and a congenial educational system have filled the blank spaces
of her energies. But she might have settled down to wait for the Home Rule bill
to become a law but for the immense disturbance of the war. That brought with
it two evils, the Coalition and Conscription. The first largely overthrew the
Irish power in Parliament. When the two main British parties came into union,
the Irish control of our politics ceased to exist. Liberalism, the friend of
Nationalism, had fallen--or had apparently made friends with Unionism, its
enemy, Conscription, again, set up a strong belief in the intention of the
mixed government to draft the young Irish nation into the armies before it had
settled in its mind whether it would accept a treaty of peace with its old
master. Sinn Fein worked on this suspicion. The volunteers who broke away from
Mr. Redmond's control--and the majority seceded--were diligently practiced in
tactics designed to resist a house-to-house visitation of the recruiting
sergeants. Impatient Ireland was told that conscription had been decided on in
the secret session. In any case, with the postponement of Home Rule and the
certainty that either four or six Ulster counties would be excluded, the fixed
points of hope or calculation in Irish politics seemed to disappear. What could
the Home Rule bill set up? 'No real power of self-government; only a derived
and enfeebled assembly, subject to the concurrent legislation of England and to
concurrent taxation,' [The Sinn Fein Constitution] said the extremists. To this
Sinn Fein opposed the idea of Grattan's Parliament--the claim, namely, of the
people of Ireland ' to be bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the
Parliament of the Kingdom.' Given a coordinate parliament in Dublin, the Sinn
Feiners would have been content. McDonagh, one of the executed leaders, was in
the habit of declaring he would make peace with England on the day after the
King had been crowned in Ireland. The wilder spirits of the Irish Republican
Brotherhood, the evil genius of Sinn Fein, saw such an independent Ireland
arise from a German victory, and looked to a volunteer Irish army to guard and
guarantee it.
But the Nationalist Volunteer movement did not arise from the war; it was an
answer to the Ulster organization and was a more democratic copy of its method
and spirit. Under the scheme of partition, Nationalist Ireland saw the flower
of Irish Nationalism plucked away from the parent stem. Who was to look after
the rights and liberties of Catholic Ulster under an Orange administration? The
Nationalist Volunteers decided that they would. Who would keep the tender plant
of Home Rule in being? That, again, should be their care. The danger of
surrounding Mr. Redmond, Prime Minister of Ireland, with this unasked-for
bodyguard was obvious; he had not created it, but neither could he disband it.
Down came the European storm, blowing away the Ulster revolt and the threatened
schism in the army, but leaving the Nationalist Volunteers in the field.
Had time marched a little slower, had Anglo-Irish reconciliation gone a little
further, all might have been well, for Unionism was slowly edging toward an
acceptance of Home Rule. But there were violently hostile elements. Orange
Ulster had gone back to its drum-beating. Brought sharply face to face with a
parliament for all Ireland sitting in Dublin, it would not allow that so bad a
thing as Catholicism could turn out good men of business, fit to govern Ireland
and be put over the heads of the merchants and manufacturers of Belfast, the
inspirers and directors of the immense activity and success of the Northern
industries. Pride of wealth, of race, and religion made it at once skeptical
and intolerant of Home Rule. Nor, in spite of the secession of Sir Edward
Carson from the extreme tenets of Irish Unionism, has it to this day taken one
practical step toward conversion. It notoriously rebuffed Mr. Asquith on his
visit to Belfast. It is not at all certain that it will consent to follow Sir
Edward.
Yet the Ulster revolt aroused a deeper resentment in Liberal England than in
Nationalist Ireland. Looking backward, the more extreme Irish Nationalist may
have seen in it the rewriting of a famous page in Irish history, when the
Protestant North led in the battle of liberty and it was a not unnatural
instinct for Mr. Redmond and his colleagues to counsel tenderness in dealing
with it. They did not want to be responsible for coercing Irishmen, whether the
color they wore was green or orange. But the ominous fact was, not only that
Irishmen of all colors were getting in rifles, and that the country was
beginning to look like an armed camp, but that the Parliamentary party was
losing control of the situation. In the mere course of nature its strength had
passed its meridian. Its leaders were growing old, tired, and--in the view of
an intensely Irish Ireland--over-Anglicized. Westminster had worn them out. A
great Parliamentary figure, Mr. Redmond was never known and followed in Ireland
as Parnell was known and followed. With the organization of the
transport-workers, new economic questions had arisen in urban centres, with
which he was unfamiliar; and new leaders, hot and impatient men like Larkin and
Connolly, had arisen, to control or be controlled by them.
Mr. Dillon maintained a closer and firmer touch with the country, but he was
unsympathetic to the cooperative movement and the new scientific spirit in
agriculture, linked as they were, through the personalities of Sir Horace
Plunkett and Mr. George Russell, to the literary revival and to the more
temperate spirit and the moral teaching of the earlier Sinn Fein. Ireland began
to want a different kind of parliament from that provided by the Home Rule
bill, and different men to lead it. The Sinn Feiners themselves called for a
federation of county councils. Pearse, the most idealistic of their leaders,
was one of the few Irishmen who welcomed Mr. Birrell's Councils bill as a step
in this direction. New ideas and possibilities for Irish education, the vision
of a trained and organized race of farmers, were in their minds. The
Parliamentarians were forgetting Ireland at the critical hour, and to her great
misfortune Ireland forgot them.
Nor was Mr. Birrell, the Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant and the real governor
of Ireland, the man to piece together the sundering elements in Irish political
society. After years of office Ireland had tired him out. He had done two great
things for her. He had carried a Home Rule bill, and he had settled the great
problem of higher education, before which the leaders of the two opposing
schools of British policy in Ireland, Gladstone and Balfour, had equally
recoiled. That was enough work for his unambitious, literary, and pessimistic
temperament. The task of seeing Ireland through the interim period, during
which the Home Rule bill would become a law, was distasteful and difficult.
Distasteful, because it involved a series of small compromises in Nationalist
administration, and difficult because of the growing Orange revolt and the
unrest provoked by the war. It was necessary to govern to some extent with Mr.
Redmond, and yet how could there be true partisanship between him and Dublin
Castle? Some show of patronage Nationalism must claim, in view of the coming of
the new order, but not without weakening its public spirit and popular appeal.
Moreover Mr. Birrell felt that the half-acquiescence of the Executive in the
incipient Ulster rebellion had disarmed it for a ruthless dealing with the
Nationalist Volunteers. The Sinn Feiners were clever. They were careful to
follow their illustrious model. The gun-running at Howth was a close copy of
the Orangeman's exploit at Larne. Germany was the impartial provider of both
these highly providential gifts. A Liberal statesman was in a dilemma. How
crush a movement which its promoters identified with the law that was to
be--that is, Home Rule--after half-condoning a movement directed avowedly both
against the law that was and the law that was to come?
It would seem therefore as if Ireland, at the moment when she most wanted
government, was most lacking in its means and instruments. British rule was
gone or was going. Irish self-government, its inevitable substitute, had not
arrived. Even if the path to it had been a smoother one, it was doubtful if the
Home Rule bill was a vessel into which could be poured the ripening energies of
the people. Save in the towns, the standard of life was rising fast. No visitor
to the West could fail to be struck with the social changes wrought by Land
Purchase and Land Distribution, by the rehousing work of the Land Commission
and the Congested Districts Board, and the application of Old-Age pensions on
the English scale to a countryside where a flow of silver money was almost as
rare a thing as boots on the children's feet. The people began to feel a new
pride in themselves, and also to realize how narrow a life theirs must be so
long as Ireland remained at once poor and dependent. Had Sinn Fein been in
wiser hands, had there been no war and no Dublin strikes, had capital in the
South been led by a statesman rather than by a man of hard and despotic temper,
and had Mr. Redmond been able to add the flower of the new Irishmen to the
little band of intellectuals he had actually recruited; had Britain been
quicker and more generous, and Ulster less bigoted and self-sufficient,--in a
word, had time and tide been for the most unlucky of countries instead of
against her,--there might have been a promising start for Home Rule. The worst
did not indeed happen. The country districts refused to join the towns, even in
the one southern county where a rebellion was most to be dreaded; and the
crushing of the weak and divided rising was certain when the formidable ranks
of Volunteers shrank to the measure of a couple of thousand men and boys [I
should say that half the prisoners I saw in Kilmainham were under 20--THE
AUTHOR], and a short-lived strategy of street-fighting. Again England had her
chance in Ireland, and it is not certain that she has lost it.
The first steps were mistaken ones, for England failed to realize how
completely the rising was broken and how important it was for the main body of
Irish Nationalism to hold it in due perspective. Its extraordinary folly and
impatience, the inconsequence of its leadership, the evil of the German
association, were evident. But it had features bound to endear it to the Irish
man and woman who read the history of their country less in sequence than in
the flashlight of its romantic episodes. The Sinn Fein leaders were men of
piety and singleness of character. I have heard the story of their deaths from
an eye-witness: it was a study in unaffected courage and nobility of bearing.
Ireland heard of it almost before the echoes of the firing party's rifles had
died away; and the Catholic Church, faithful to her sons, has given it a
canonization of pity and sympathy. Had the dribble of executions been avoided,
or had it been stayed after the death of the signatories to the revolutionary
manifesto, Ireland's first impulse of repudiation would, I think, have remained
with her. If it changed to sorrow and anger, we must blame our want of
magnanimity, and see how the break in the reconciling policy can be mended once
more.
To this amending policy there are, I think, two main clues. The first is the
break up of the solid Unionism which had never advanced since 1886, when its
highest point was Mr. Chamberlain's conception of a grant of Home Rule based on
the relationship of a colonial provincial legislature to a Dominion or
Commonwealth parliament. There is again a Unionist Secretary for Ireland. But
it is known that Mr. Duke has gone to Dublin to promote a settlement of the two
inseparable questions of social order and self-government. His success with
Southern Unionism can hardly be doubted; three figures of the quality of the
Archbishop of Dublin, Sir Horace Plunkett, and Lord Monteagle could make a
treaty with Nationalist Ireland on a basis that would give the South and West a
conservative, but a fairly enlightened and representative, government. Ulster
remains; the wall of her local separatism is unbroken. Not so her old, fast
alliance with British Unionism. Whether Sir Edward Carson's understanding with
Mr. Redmond holds or no, the British Unionist party is under an unwritten but
ineluctable compact with the Nationalist leader to give him the full equivalent
of his support of the war and his tender of Nationalist aid for it. There is
only one limit. A Parliament for all Ireland will now, it is clear, have to
come through Ulster's disillusionment with partition, but also after fair trial
of that experiment. What she wants is to realize once for all that the trial
will be made, that is, that direct British government over two thirds of the
Irish people will soon determine, and that her choice will then lie between
acceptance of her lot in Ireland and a cramped and expensive life as an annexe
of Downing Street. This is the point which will test the statesmanship of her
leaders. Hitherto they have hardly been tried, for British Unionism has stood
between them and true responsibility. The time is coming when they will stand
alone.
The second clue to the future of Irish government is that which the rebellion
itself has afforded. Strategically the Dublin rising was based on a clever plan
of resistance to everything that a regular army could bring against the method
of the barricades--except artillery. The moment this was brought to bear on the
rebel lines by land and water, the fighting was at an end. The original
political miscalculation--for there was no inherent connection between Sinn
Fein and rebellion, and in its earlier stages the movement was both ethical and
political--was still more vital. I have suggested that the Sinn Feiners had not
entirely misread the Irish situation. Absolute separation was not their real
goal, but rather the organization of an Ireland cut away from the blight of
Anglicanism and 'West Britonism.' And they achieved one true point of
criticism. They saw that Ireland wanted something at once more practical and
more ideal than the kind of parliament that the Home Rule bill, both in its
first and in its amended form, could give her. The blunder of Sinn Fein was to
think it possible that two virtually coordinate parliaments could exist (in
dissension with each other) in London and Dublin. Obviously the disparity of
wealth, of power, would be too great. A self-governed Ireland could always
embarrass England. But England in isolation from Ireland or in hostility to her
could ruin her economically and politically so long as the British Empire
existed and we remained at the head of it.
The question is whether another and a better way is not open for the greater
and lesser unit, to walk together. Such a way has been opened by the suggestion
that a final settlement should come after the war, through the intervention of
the over-seas Dominions, and as part of a new Imperial constitution. Some such
work of federation is overdue, for the British Empire has clearly outgrown its
one sovereign Parliament on the banks of the Thames. That idea is the one
survival of Mr. Lloyd George's abortive scheme of partition. It implies
something more than a system of delegation from the Imperial Parliament, with
local assemblies sitting, say at Edinburgh, Dublin, and Cardiff. Our Imperial
constitution must assume Ireland to be a unit in the Empire, and give her both
a local representation and a share in the Imperial government. Her resulting
liberties would then come, not as a gift from the nation that broke Ireland's
Parliament, but from the union of states on which the stamp of her own exiled
genius is visibly laid.
But before the Empire takes on so great a responsibility, there is a question
which she must ask Ireland, and which Ireland must ask herself once and for
all--will she accept British citizenship? Why not? Even the Sinn Fein
constitution does not prohibit a free union with her old suzerain. Nor with the
defeat of Germany does any other possible future open up to her. Absolute
independence is a dream. But independence on the scale or after the likeness of
Canada, or New Zealand, in which thousands of Irishmen have a share, is no
dream, but a possible, and even a near, reality. Only in this way do we attain
a solution of the mixed problem of nationality and empire, which neither the
Home Rule bill, nor Mr. Chamberlain's plan of provincial self-government, nor
the Sinn Fein propaganda could yield. The existing deadlock in Anglo-Irish
politics might seem to forbid such an issue. But the entanglement, like the
blazing forest that lay in Siegfried's path to Brunnhilde, is more apparent
than real. Nationalists cannot force Home Rule against Ulster. But neither, in
face of Mr. Redmond's lavish gift of Irish youth for a British war, can Ulster
stop Home Rule. Is it in her interest to try? Ulster is Irish, not English. Her
trade looks on two great markets. The road to neither is in her hands or in
those of Ireland. For the day after the partition to which she is in effect a
consenting party, the Ulster commercial--who is a debtor to the Irish
peasant-farmer--must ask himself whether he really wishes to see his creditor
sole master of the finance and the administration of the West, the Centre, and
the South. His answer may not be immediate, but it is not doubtful. When it is
given, the story of old Ireland comes to an end and that of new Ireland
begins.
"Ireland, 1916--And Beyond" by Henry W. Massingham, The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1916; Volume 118, No. 6;
pages 839-845.
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