The Nonconformist treason

Front matter

THG

NONCONFORMIST

TReAS ON

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE ....... V

I. THE SALE IS TREASON, AND THE TREASON IS

Chapter I. The Sale Is Treason And The Treason Is Nonconformist

" Our conception of a traitor Is a man who asserts that the law Is wrong and that he will forcibly set it to rights — for example, by Proclaiming THE Independence of a Province, by abolishing the office of king, or the privileges of particular classes, as the peerage." ^

Bearing this definition in mind, treason seems the aptest name for the conduct of the Cabinet Ministers who, having reduced one of the Houses of Parliament to impotence, are about to break the Union and make Ireland

1 Sir James Fitzjamea Stephen, 'General View of the Criminal Law.'

A independent in order that they may hold office for three years longer by means of the votes of the Irish Seceders. Abraham Lincoln would have called such conduct treason ; and, as the Government is Nonconformist, the treason is also Nonconformist — though, happily, there are many Nonconformists who are not traitors. From January 1906 to January 1910, the Nonconformist Members, under the presidency of Sir George White, the Baptist leader, met regularly and decided the action of the Government on every crucial question. We have not heard so much of those dictators since January 1910, when Mr Redmond became master of the situation. But in 1906 the Government was acclaimed Nonconformist by all the official voices of Nonconformity, and by that title it still deserves to be called. Its leading Ministers, whether like Mr Lloyd George and Mr Birrell they continue within the pale of Nonconformity, or whether, like Mr Asquith, they range themselves within the Established Church, with a leg on each side of the fence, are all standard-bearers of Nonconformity.

When they speak with premeditation, their deliverances are always sanctimonious. Mr Lloyd George is famous for his sermons in

Nonconformist pulpits ; Mr Birrell humorously supports the divines of the Baptist connection ; and Mr Asquith himself, the particular pride and glory of all the Nonconformists, recently delivered an eloquent eulogium of the Bible, which he gave us to understand that he accepts in toto as the direct revelation of God to man.

The last time the Nonconformists held power in this country was under Oliver Cromwell, and then they used the sword and gun to prevent the Pope of Home and his legate, Rinucini, backed up by Phelim O'Neill, the prototype of Jack the Hipper (see p. 130), and by Owen O'Neill, from running Ireland as a papist kingdom. But, since Cromwell, there have been great Nonconformists who were as keenly alive as the Protector, though in a different way, to the imperative need of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland, for instance, John Bright, Mr Joseph Chamberlain, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon — the greatest of latter-day Nonconformists.

There were never in British public life two warmer friends of Ireland than Bright and Chamberlain. Both hated oppression and injustice. Both advocated full political and religious equality as between Nationalist and

Unionist, Protestant and Catholic. Both were in favour of strengthening the tenant farmer against the landlord. Both were in favour of full equality of treatment as between Great Britain and Ireland. Yet each dissociated himself from Home Rule, because, besides being bad for Ireland, each believed it would prove the destruction of England, their native land, which each loved with an intensity tempered by sound judgment. Mr Chamberlain, by dissociating himself from it, forfeited the almost certain prospect of the Liberal leadership. " The whole scheme," wrote Spurgeon of Mr Gladstone's Home Bule Bill, "is as full of dangers and absurdities as if it came from a madman ! "

Mr Bright and Mr Chamberlain, as statesmen, recognised that the Boman Catholic laity have no voice in the management of their Church, and marked the contrast in this respect between them and the laity of the Free Churches of Great Britain, including the Established Churches of England and Scotland. Experience showed them that, in proportion as political and religious equality was perfected in Ireland, the strength of the Boman ecclesiastics became more pronounced, and social and political affairs became absorbed into religious affairs as the less is swallowed up in the greater. They saw that, under such a system, the inevitable result must be, as King Edward VII. put it to Professor Mahaffy, that the Pope would become the real sovereign of Ireland if the Koman Catholics captured the government of the country. The religious equality, for instance, accomplished theoretically by the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1870, had not produced religious equality in practice. And they were not the men to overthrow a Protestant religious ascendancy in order to set up the more galling sacerdotal tyranny of the ecclesiastics of Rome, from which, in times past. Nonconformists had done so much to set England free.

The typical representatives of political Nonconformity to - day have deserted the great principle of religious freedom for which Bright and Chamberlain stood, and, in alliance with Irish political Romanism, are stumping the country, week-days and Sabbath days, for the purpose of forcing the Lords and the Sovereign to put Ireland under the sway of that greatest of all sacerdotal tyrannies from which they themselves have escaped with infinite difficulty !

They are about to force the Protestant Irish, twenty-five per cent of Ireland's population, to swallow the camel of Romanism, while they themselves in England strain at the gnat of Anglicanism ! They are, by fraud and misrepresentation, forcing the majority of Englishmen to join them in their surrender to the threats of Mr Redmond and his played - out troupe of professional politicians and betray the industrious and law-abiding Irish Protestants to the secular and religious tyranny of Romanism. And, worst of all, they are doing this as part of a pact by which they continue to hold salaried office and appoint their friends to lucrative posts at the cost of the British taxpayers.

Mr Redmond has made them reconsider their position with regard to Romanism, and, in their eagerness to pay him his price, they have gone to lengths unheard of in their flattery of the Roman ecclesiastics. The expression " Church," as applied to the activities of the Roman system, let me say incidentally, is quite a misnomer. The " Church " consists of the ecclesiastics and the laity ; but, as the laity are dumb and powerless, except as agents of the hierarchy, it is the ecclesiastics, and not the

Church, that we have to do with in all matters of public concern. The flattery of Romanism by Nonconformists since the election of January 1910 has passed all bounds. Take, for instance, the following reported utterance of Mr Silvester Home, M.P., minister of the Congregationalist, Independent, or Cromwellian (!) denomination, taken from 'The New York Times.' Mr Home was given a luncheon by some Protestant ministers in New York last September, about the time that the Pope was about to appoint two new Irish Cardinals for the United States, and, in addressing his friends, he is reported to have spoken as follows : " The Church of Rome was right when she claimed imperial sway. Though I think she sought to gain her ends through means often unjust and far from praiseworthy, the glorious idea was exactly right, and to it all Churches must come. It was the idea that there was nothing outside the sweep of the Church, and that all Government and all Law must come TO THE Church as the Court of last RESORT. When we think about the History of the Roman Church, we

MUST admit that HER AIM HAS BEEN THE

ONLY TRUE ONE, FOR IT AIMED AT AUTH- ORITY ! " ^

The New York paper tells us that Mr Home's statement " puzzled the ministers for a few moments, and then there were some faint cheers ! "

Cardinal Manning, who used to preach the Pope's absolute supremacy over the consciences of the peasant and the monarch, never went farther than this Nonconformist minister and Member of Parliament, who declares that the ecclesiastics of Eome are right in claiming imperial sway, and maintaining that nothing is " outside the sweep " of their authority ! The Nonconformists are handing Ireland over to Eoman rule deliberately, and with their eyes open ! Dr Horton, whose amazing admissions I have quoted in the Preface, says that there may be nothing left for Irish Protestants after Home Eule but a GENERAL EXODUS. " We know only too well what a Catholic Parliament may mean," he writes.^ . . . We cannot feel confident or sanguine. ... If their fears should be realised, and Ireland, under Home Eule, should

1 ' New York Times,' Sept. 26, 1911 ; most prominent position in the paper.

THE TREASON IS NONCONFOllMIST. 9

become intolerable to them, I cannot help hoping personally that a certain shifting of population will take place. Irish Protestants will return to England and Scotland, transferring their industry and ability to the country "w^hose government and principles they prefer ! "

There is an alternative to flight ; but Dr Horton evidently thinks better of the general body of the Irish Protestants than to suggest that they would ever adopt it. It is that they should do as Mr Swift MacNeill, M.P., says that he has done, " throw themselves on the Catholic people " — and eke out a living by doing propagandist work for the Poman ecclesiastics. " My own personal experience," writes Mr MacNeill,^ " coincides with that of every Irish Protestant who has thrown himself ON THE Catholic people!" The Irish Protestants, happily, are not prepared to row in Mr MacNeill's galley !

These utterances of Mr Home's and Dr Horton's, amazing as they seem, do not differ generically from many of Mr Augustine Birrell's ; for instance, his denunciation of Henry VIII. at Peading a few years ago, for having suppressed the monasteries and executed the Abbot of Reading. Mr Home gives us the neo-Cromwellian, Mr Birrell the neo- Baptist view of Romanism. Both men gain by their alliance with Irish Romanism, one directly and the other indirectly. Mr Birrell draws £4500 a-year as Chief Secretary for Ireland, by the grace of Mr Redmond. Mr Home's brother, an ex-farmer from Shropshire, has just got a lucrative post from the Asquith- Redmond Government.

The neo-Cromwellian prophet is the intimate friend of the Chief Secretary. He is a man whose words are worth noting in every way. He is the son-in-law of, and co-worker with, the present Master of the Rolls, who attends his chapel or tabernacle, at Tottenham Court Road, and takes part in the work there. He is the friend of Mr Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who delivers addresses at his tabernacle. And lastly, he is the friend and intimate of the Prime Minister, himself one of those Congregationalists who attend worship and take the sacrament in the Church of England, while remaining in intimate alliance with the old sect. There are numbers of these people, with a leg at each side of the fence !

Mr Home, improbable though it seem, may deny that he used the precise words attributed to him by ' The New York Times,' one of the best journals in America. He was reported some weeks ago as having said in Wales that the Church of England was " a pagan institution." He contradicted and explained that he had only charged it with being pagan in some of its ordinances ! His friend, Mr Birrell, has also a weakness for saying that he has been misreported, yet both depend more on newspaper publicity, perhaps, than any two men in England, not excluding the theatrical profession.

All the leading papers of the United Kingdom recently reported Mr Birrell as having said at Skipton, on the authority of Mr Joseph Devlin, M.P., that " there was only one Roman Catholic in the employ of the Corporation of Belfast, and he was a scavenger ; " and also as having said that the people in the North of Ireland who differed from Mr Devlin and his friends, " had no more religion than billiard balls."

On the publication of this astounding statement, the Belfast Corporation pointed out that their Boman Catholic employees numbered nearly nine hundred, and that the amount of wages paid by them to Roman Catholics exceeded the amount of rates paid by the Roman CathoHcs of Belfast ! ^

Mr Birrell, having taken no notice of this, was asked in the House of Commons on December 7, by Sir John Lonsdale, M.P., " Why he stated at Skipton that the Belfast Corporation only employed one Roman Catholic, and that he was a scavenger ? " Mr Birrell flatly denied having made any such statement ; and soon afterwards, speaking at Manchester, said that Mr Bonar Law misquoted him in stating that he said that Ulster loyalists " had no more religion than billiard balls." But he did not furnish any concrete alternative to the statement the newspapers had attributed to him !

Sir John Lonsdale then inquired as to who reported the speech at Skipton, and found that it was not reported by an inexperienced local reporter, or by the representative of any party newspaper, but by the London representative of the Press Association, Mr Alfred Edward Hanscomb. And this expert shorthand-writer made an affidavit before a Commissioner for

1 The exact figures were : 870 employees, with wages amounting to £53,878 a-year.

Oaths, on December 9, in which he stated that he was present at Skipton and took a shorthand note of Mr Birrell's address, of which the following was a transcript : " These people have no more religion in these matters than billiard balls which meet in collision with one another on the billiard-table. Sometimes religion becomes associated with these disputes in the North. You'll find a strong feeling there. I am told that in the great city of Belfast, one of whose representatives is Mr Devlin, Nationalist, there is only one Roman Catholic in the employ of the Corporation, and he is a scavenger. (Laughter.) I don't vouch for it, but there are at any rate precious few." Mr Hanscomb declared on oath " that the said shorthand note was accurate and the above a true and proper transcript thereof" ^

Most people of experience will agree that the Press Association reporter, representing a non-partisan institution, an expert accustomed night after night to take down speeches in shorthand, is more likely to be accurate than Mr Birrell, eager only to win laughter and applause, and extremely unlikely to remember precisely what he said. Even if we had not

^ 'Morning Post,' Dec. 14, 1911.

the Press Association reporter's oath, the words ring hke Mr Birrell, the Baptist humourist, as we know him, and the calumny on the Belfast Corporation is almost as old as Mr Birrell himself.

All the leaders of Nonconformist political oratory nowadays, Mr Birrell, Mr Lloyd George, Mr Silvester Home, and others, pride themselves on the gift of fluent extemporary utterance, and are pre-eminently the class of men of whom it has been said that language has a great command over them. When brought to book for anything definite, the first impulse of such speakers is to say that they never said it. If any of the Unionist members taunted Mr Birrell with having compared Mr John E-edmond's party to Mark Antony's scolding wife, Fulvia, and wdth having said that, like her, they were " good being gone," it is highly probable he would indignantly deny it. Yet the words were not merely uttered but written in an essay on Charles Lamb, published by Elliot Stock, and re-published in the " International Library of Famous Literature." They are brought in quite gratuitously, too, and in a tone derogatory to the Irish Seceders, his present masters. Writing of Lamb's missing essays, he says : " Like the Irish Members, or Mark Antony's wife, the ' shrill-toned Fulvia,' the missing essays are 'good being gone.'"

But if Mr Birrell has called the Seceders scolds, he has atoned for it since he became their slave by calling the Ulster Members " carrion crows," and has at various times indulged in language towards every one in Ireland who does not happen to be a Roman ecclesiastic, or a Seceder, which would do credit to the shrill-toned Fulvia herself

It may seem hard for English people to believe, but I maintain it from experience, pace Mr Birrell, that there is no place in Ireland where Protestantism and Roman Catholicism get on so well together as in Belfast. There you will find Roman Catholics, in conversation, making kindly comments upon those leading Protestants whom the Seceders' newspapers would lead one to suppose were fanatical bigots and tyrants. The Roman ecclesiastics are kept In their proper place In Belfast. They are not allowed "the imperial sway" advocated by Mr Home, yet they do not surrender to the Protestants. The lay Romanists are asked to give up no religious

16 THE SALE IS TEEASON.

principle ; they get equal protection and privileges with Protestants ; and they develop an unusual amount of self-helpfulness, considering how they are handicapped by the ecclesiastics. Like Koman Catholic Ireland before the Union, they do well under Protestant rule, gaining by their contact with Protestantism, and are smarter than their co-religionists, who have it all their own way in the South.

Belfast Protestants, on the other hand, while friendly and neighbourly to the Roman Catholics, do not yield a jot of the Protestant platform as propounded by Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, or Bishop Bidley ; and, if the Protestants all over L'eland did the same, there would have been less religfious trouble in the past. Protestants in the Boman Catholic parts ought to know by this time how great is the mistake of thinking that, by watering down the principles in which they were born and bred, they can get the Boman Catholics to water down the Boman Catholic principles — forgetting the powerful army of celibate bishops and priests whose interest it is to keep the anti - heretic principles of the laity up to concert-pitch.

Chapter II. Dublin Prepares For Home Rule

Boss Croker lives in Dublin !

The Dublin Corporation at its last quarterlymeeting but one, on the recommendation of a committee, postponed the consideration of sites for proposed new municipal buildings until it should be possible to acquire portions of Dublin Castle ! i

Archbishop Walsh, at Ringsend a few weeks afterwards, said that, after Home Rule, the transfer of St Patrick's Cathedral would not take place as the result of a compulsory Act of Parliament, but he thought it possible that " some friendly arrangement might be come to," in which due regard would be had for existing vested interests ! Henry VIII. had confiscated the cathedral and its properties, he

1 'Irish Times,' Oct. 3, 1911. B said, without the authority of an Act of ParHament. And nothing apparently could be in better taste than that the Church of Ireland capitular body, which has been continuously in possession since the sixteenth century, should declare Archbishop Walsh to be the true heir and beneficiary and make way for him " by a friendly arrangement," when a Komanist Parliament and Executive have been established, with Roman police, Roman territorial regiments, and Roman judges and juries to see fair play !

The restoration of evicted tenants is the order of the day, whether the man in possession be a Protestant Dean and Chapter, or a Protestant Irish farmer. Where a " friendly arrangement " cannot be come to, other means are being adopted. A Protestant farmer in county Cork, who has been in his farm twenty-eight years, built a new dwelling-house, and purchased under the Wyndham Act, is now summoned to surrender house and land to the son of the tenant who gave up possession a generation ago. And, because he refuses to go out, those in his vicinity will not work for him, or sell to him, or buy from him, or even allow him to go freely about his business.

or permit him to attend worship in peace on Sunday. They keep him in terror of his life, threatening him by day and by night in public and private, and leading him such a life as we associate with times of civil war.^ He is under constant police protection, and the reality of his danger may be gathered from the fact that on December 7, 1911, the wife of a farmer named O'Mara was shot dead, and her niece seriously wounded, near Broadford, in East Clare, Mr William E-edmond's constituency. In answer to a knock, after nightfall, the woman had opened her door, and instantly shots were fired into the lighted kitchen by some persons standing outside. The newspaper accounts ended with the words, so characteristic of Irish crime : '* The police have no clue." ^

The Dublin Corporation, which is full of political wire - pullers, will stay its hand for Home Hule, but the agrarian murderer and boycotter will not. The farmers, who are the nation in the Nationalist provinces, do not count on Home Hule, and will feel no disappointment whatever when they hear that Mr Redmond's boasts have not come true,

1 'Irish Times,' Oct. 5, IQIL

2 'Daily Mail,' Dec. 9, 191 L

They have got, or are going to get, the land, and that is all they are concerned about. The wirepullers in Dublin are hungry for Government posts, but the hunger of the nation, which was for the land, is almost satisfied. If this Nonconformist treason should succeed, and the Union be broken. Great Britain will have surrendered not to an aggrieved people but to a junta of place-hunters aiming at a tyranny. They w^ant another agitation, and the passage of the first Home Rule Act will be the beginning of one which will end in the realisation of their dreams as epitomised in bronze on the new and unlovely Parnell monument unveiled in Dublin last October.

"NO MAN HAS A RIGHT TO FIX BOUNDARIES TO THE MARCH OF A NATION. NO MAN HAS A RIGHT TO SAY TO HIS COUNTRY: 'THUS FAR SHALT THOU GO AND NO FARTHER.' WE HAVE NEVER ATTEMPTED TO FIX THE NE PLUS ULTRA TO THE PROGRESS OF IRELAND'S NATIONHOOD AND WE NEVER SHALL."

This ungracious memorial, in which all the fire and fineness of Parnell's figure and features are missed, is the work of an American sculptor, and was erected mainly with money received from "Boss" Croker, of Tammany Hall fame, who is now settled in Dublin, and not unlikely, if Home Ptule should come, to be the " boss " of

Ireland. Mr Croker's presence is noteworthy, typical as it is of American influence in Roman Catholic Ireland. He is a devoted Koman Catholic, I understand, his adhesion to the Roman Church being evidence of a profound belief in its dogmas and the divine mission of its ecclesiastics to rule the world as the Vicegerents of Deity. He has taken action, and is so far in advance of Mr Home ; though, of course, Mr Croker could never give a more open charter to the Roman ecclesiastics than to say that their sway is "imperial" and that "all government and all law must come to them as the court of last resort."

One could find reasons, though of course not in Mr Croker's case, for conversion to Romanism just now in Ireland, inasmuch as no man, however able, can hope to carry through any scheme of public importance there, except under the segis of the Roman ecclesiastics. Mr Croker, having known the value of their political support in New York, where Tammany Hall and Irish Romanism are almost synonymous, cannot fail to appreciate it in Ireland. R-omanism is booming in the United States, which Irish Catholics call the Greater Ireland, and a Dublin Parliament would be in close affinity with the New York Corporation. Mr Croker is not Hkely to make any mistake about the power of the Roman ecclesiastics after Home Rule. Is not New York city home-ruled, and did it not turn out its citizens a million strong the other day to welcome Archbishop Farley when he came back with the Cardinal's hat from Rome, making public holiday, while all the steamers in the river blew their sirens ? In the deals between Mr Croker and the Roman ecclesiastics in New York, the Boss may have thought he was using the ecclesiastics, but, when he is dead and forgotten, the Roman ecclesiastics will still be in New York profiting by the use they made, and are making, of the politicians of Tammany Hall, and wielding greater power than ever over the terrified laity.

In Baltimore, too, they celebrated the birthday of Cardinal Gibbons, an Irishman, by a great public meeting at which President Taft was present and ex-President Roosevelt expressed a fervent wish that the United States might soon have, what it has never had, a Roman Catholic President. Cardinal Falconio, the Italian who directs and uses American Romanism at Washington, had just expressed a hope that they might shortly have a President who would be " an American subject of the Pope ! " It was proposed in the Baltimore Corporation to declare a public holiday, but the Cardinal graciously sent a note, saying that, " while he greatly appreciated the honour proposed, he hoped that the suggested action would not be taken, because he did not wish to interfere with the regular course of the public school system, or to cause the loss of wages to working people that a holiday of that kind would bring ! " The irony of this was superb, for the Roman ecclesiastics are waging war to the knife against the public school system, and the Cardinal had heard that the Protestants in the Corporation were going to oppose the motion for a public holiday !

Mr Croker, too, must have often seen the Federal troops turned out on Memorial Day, and, perhaps, he attended the "Field Masses" celebrated by Roman priests, at which the American soldiers " present arms at the elevation of the Host ! " Ireland under Home Rule will do far better than that. And " Boss " Croker, who is no mere discharged warhorse come to die in a Dublin paddock, but a powerful leader, dividing public honours with

Mr John Kedmond himself at the unveiling of the Parnell monument, and wise in his generation, has ranged himself definitely with the Roman ecclesiastics in Ireland. To win the Derby with an outsider, brilliant as the feat may be, can hardly be the limit of his ambition at this side of the Atlantic. Outside the Church, no man could hope to be a successful Boss in Nationalist Ireland. Parnell, the introducer of the Boss system into Irish politics, tried, and killed himself in the attempt. The Boss of a Dublin Parliament and Executive, with command of the jail and the scaifold, would be a greater man than the Boss of the New York Corporation. Even if Mr Croker does not stand for the position, Mr Redmond must find it useful to have a past master on the spot.