The Irish Republic; an analytical history of Ireland,1914-1918, with particular reference to the Easter insurrection (1916) and the German "plots." Also a sketch of De Valera's life by Harry J. Boland, his private secretary; a close-up view of Countess Markievicz, and a defense of Ulster by Ulstermen

Front matter

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Foreword

I am neither Roman Catholic nor Irishman. I am a member of the Presbyterian church by baptism. My forbears have been of the Baptist persuasion since the inception of that creed — ministers and builders of meeting houses.

I am of English blood. At times it pulls, strongly. I love the English landscape. I cannot forget the lane that "runs from Steyning to the Ring;" nor that other lane that lies so pleasantly across the fields to Shottery, hard by the thatched cottage in the fragrant Hathaway gardens. I can hear the rooks at Stratford in early spring, and see the limpid, gentle Avon that winds so peaceful-like by the churchyard. I can hear the skylarks above the fields of Dorking, out Surrey way, and across the Downs, by Leith Hill and Leatherhead, by Box Hill and Reigate and Ranmore Common. I can hear the bleat of sheep on Epsom, and the crowing of the pheasant cocks from the woods. There are plover in the meadows and poppies midst the corn, and up the Thames by Windsor, removed from London's greed and sweat, there are signets on the water, to be branded by the king. In the stately limes and larches is a choir of birds, and there is peace and pleasant shade neath the yew and the beech tree. There are primroses at every brookside, and marguerites beside the whin. Everywhere there are flowers. There is a smell in the air of ineffable sweetness. On every road of the island some noble or wicked deed was done — some that had better be forgot.

I love the heavy monuments and the cathedral churches — as architecture — and the things they hold. There are exceptions. Andre's bust in Westminster does not thrill me. I have kept "green" your memory, "Mother" England, but abhorred the greed and the ruthlessness of the Angle and the Saxon — the prodigality with which the ruling class has sent the youth of the land to battlefield and jungle for the sake of commerce, for the sake of pounds, shillings and pence.

I have been drawn to you at times, "Mother" England, for I am of your blood. But there is something in me you ken not of. I cannot forget it. I would not if I could. It is 1776! And right here, I and the men from Erin strike hands and understand. I think you ought to know this, for "I" am millions in this land of vast distances and home of independent men.

In those bleak, mid-winter mornings, a child, I scrambled through the snowdrifts to a little old school house, on the counxiv Foreword

tryside. We did not begin our A. K. C.'s with the singing of "God Save the King." Our morning exercises consisted of the narrative of the Boston Tea Party, the Psalm of Freedom at Bunker Hill and the Anthem of Yorktown. We were children. It sank deep, so deep we would not say it ever could depart from our hearts. It was there in the little roadside shack, on desks we had rudely carved our names, that we carved the name of Nathan Hale. And as the lonely winter months stretched their weary lengths, we heard how you set *fire to Washington ; how you plied Tecumseh with rum and then put pounds, shillings and pence in his wallet for the scalps of our ancestors. You ever were a thrifty one at bargaining! We learned to hate the name of king, as the child hates something out in the field that would hurt it, like the hate we had for a snake. These are strong words, but true. W^e were told that your kings were brutal, ferocious and immoral, always greedy and always oppressing, lashing and killing the poor whom they despised. On that we were fed. In our plain but clean homes on the fringe of the forest, where things by necessity were rude, there were old-fashioned oval pictures on the plain walls — pictures of Washington and Lafayette. Do you know one great sentiment that took this nation into the world war? Remember Pershing at the shrine in France. He said: "Lafayette, we are here !"

While we did not, we children, use strong language then, the thing which was put deep into our untutored minds, when we mentioned the name of your king, was the essence of that philosophy of abomination we used in later years in consigning things w^e abhorred to the nether clime.

The great war is over. We all have been brayed in the mortar. Seven million dead ! Two hundred billion debt ! Women and children by the millions dead of inanition and horror ! We — you and Uncle Sam — stood side by side at Armageddon. You would go farther. You would offer your hand. You desire the English-speaking peoples of the earth to come together, underi

*The English government immortalized Ross for his burning of Washington. It was held to be a brilliant exploit, to be gloriously commended. English school children today are so taught. The Encyclopaedia Britannica records the deed as follows ; "Ross was sent in connnand of a brigade to harry the coast of North America, and with 4,500 men and three light guns landed in Maryland. At Bladensburg the Americans stood to fight in a strong position, but Ross' men routed them (Aug. 24, 18H)' The same evening Washington was entered, and, the public buildings having been destroyed, the expedition re-embarked. This short and brilliant campaign excited:;th$ admiration of soldiers, critics and public alike, but the commander did not live to receive his reward. A few days later an expedition against Baltimore was undertaken ; skirmishing soon began, and one of the first to fall was Ross. A public monument was erected to his memory in St. Paul's Cathedral, and others at his residence at Roostrevor and at Halifax, N. S. His family was granted the name of Ross of Bladensburg by royal letters-patent."

Foreword xv

standing and understood ; not forgetting but overlooking ; not cringing-like but Christian-like. Do you mean it? Have you nothing u]i your sleeve?

Free Ireland ! ■ ■

Why do I — and "I" am innumerable multitudes of the United States who do not bear a crucifix or genuflect to Rome — as if by instinct feel such strong currents of sympathy for Ireland? Because Ireland's story is my country's story, flashing vividly across memory's screen, what your learned psychologists term the association of brain concepts. Ireland's plea visualizes again the little school house and the old master — a one-armed man. He had left the other arm on the battlefield, and a battlefield you would have turned against him and his and me and mine had you followed your secret desire. The old New England si>irit still lives — the spirit that despised tyrants and spit at kings.

"Mother" England, this is not the way of those who seek eternal bliss, this holding up against you through the generations the hate you so thoroughly deserved in 17/6, you and your stubborn old king. His name was George !

You would be a friend. You say as much. And how do you go about it to prove it, to disillusion us, to convince us that you and your king have mended your ways ? You said, when the world was on fire, you would agree with the American President to self-determination for the whole world. You said it when you were knocking at the door of the monastery and a monk would be. How have you kei)t that death-bed repentance, now that you have been snatched from the brink of the grave?

You have returned from the Conference of Peace with more spoils than ever your broad back was laden in your history of empire building. You cut and carved the world's map to your liking, and you made others like it. You have set the graven effigy of a Mikado on your mantel piece in token of your alliance ; you pampered the one nation in the world that might cause this nation of ours a great sorrow. You now are the most powerful empire in the world's history, but in your very strength is your weakness. Beware lest you are laying up treasure which will turn to corruption in your hands by the rust of hate. Great power is careless of its use. It is the natural law. The other nations of the earth will resent your bigness. They will, not alone through prejudice but through necessity and the yearning for autonomy, nurse the day when they can topple the giant from its pedestal, even as they toppled a Caesar, and a Wilhelm, and a Nicholas — unless you reform. For it seems not right that one small nation, a hundred families, say, should rule so much of the xvi Foreword

earth and so many million as you do — the rule of one nation by another nation. They will execrate what to them is your selfishness.

And of all the people of the earth, which family will hate you most, will arise wherever the habitation of a human may be found, to curse you, to pray God unceasingly for your undoing, for retribution? Whose words will be the hardest spoken by the human tongue? Ireland's! Not alone in these United States, where twenty million such dwell, besides the 1776 descendants, but in your possessions everywhere, they will treat you as a viper. They will multiply while your ruling class remains sterile. Their racial propagation alone w^ill smother you in time, for it is the religion of their women not to kill what God has made in His image.

Do you know how many O'Neill's there are in the world ? And every O'Neill knows that in the days of Elizabeth — "Good Queen Bess," the "Virgin" Queen — they made a map and on it they marked the spot, and, as they chortled, in jest, they said: "Here Shane O'Neill was slain." O'Neill is but one name. Do you remember how you exiled and cast out of Erin the flower of a race in your greed for land, and in your terrible bigotry ? Do you remember how you endeavored to blot from the pages of history their cherished tradition — how you forbade their religion ; how you broke the Staff of Patrick and the Cross of Columcille and profaned their national relics; how you burned their schools and gave their sacred books to the bonfire, while you hunted down their learned men ?

Do you remember how you abolished Irish industry and broke in pieces the inauguration chairs of their chiefs; how you tore up the law of a race, and trampled the codes of inheritance, of land tenure, or every sacred obligation between neighbors? Do you remember how you mutilated the very image of justice, how you made the love of a country and every attachment of race a crime, and reared a gallows for those who would use their mother tongue and clothe themselves in the raiments of their ancestors? Do you not now understand that to the four corners of the earth you banished these people, and that in the four corners of the earth they and their sons and their sons' sons and their women have taught the people of the earth to look upon you as an unholy thing? Grattan, the Protestant, prophesied in the dark days of long ago that you would come to an evil end — that what you trampled on in Europe would rise to sting you in America.

It is up to you. If you fail now we shall continue to have the Irish question in every nation on this footstool, growing in volume as the years go by. It will confuse our politics; it will confuse

Foreword xvii

your politics. The world will not know peace, however much you cry peace. Because you had your way at Paris every people whose aspirations were denied will blame you, openly and fftsidiously.

Hate is the inexorable heritage of war. It has been more than fialf a century since our Civil war, and that was merely an in- Jhernecine strife on a comparatively small scale. The hatreds bequeathed by that war have not yet been wiped out. Hate has fed j^e soul of every nation, great or small, that lost a war. That hate was visited upon the victor. Now the whole world has I'iieen at war, and the hate of all that section of the world that lost or was humiliated at Paris will be your heritage.

Ireland is your salvation, if you will but understand it. You must have done them a great wrong or they would not have resented through the centuries without ceasing your presence among Jfiem. They don't like you now. They never did. You are of another race. You are Saxon and Angle. They are Gael and ^elt. You hold their ancient lands by brigandage and not by theii approval. They want you to get out. Why don't you do it ?

Do you know, "Mother" England, what many Americans are saying, Americans who would be your friends if you would let them ? Listen : They are saying that you are the same old Jacob, though your hand is covered with hair; that you are filled with greed, even more than before the world war ; that you want the ifc venue from Ireland — that you have not changed at heart since ■ you tried the Stamp Act on our American colonies — that you merely have put on a new makeup. They are whispering, one tc another, that you are as bigoted as ever, and all swollen up with cant ; that you are the same old Pharisee, because you will not '{coerce Ulster." They are repeating by word of mouth that you have thirty thousand propagandists in America today, that you are ;;.4ming at a peaceful conquest of this land by a propaganda in- 6nitely more clever than the Germans employed to engraft "kulfiir" into the soul of all the peoples of the earth. They are saying that you want to take Bunker Hill out of our school books. iHany of our people, doubtless encouraged by the Gael amongsi us, feel that you have in your heart only contempt for us. They Delieve that Sir Edward Carson expressed truly what is in your %oul when he referred to the solemn act of our Senate as an act of "unparalleled efifrontery." You said the same to the 6ol- •^jnists of 1776 — "unparalleled efifrontery." Can't you understand even elemental psychology? Can't you get it through your head ttiat the use of the words "unparalleled efifrontery" is the very thing that will send millions of us back to Bunker Hill? This naxviii Foreword

tion, too, has a soul.

Never in your history were such obligations and such responsi- ^ bilities laid upon you. In every city, town and hamlet in all the United States, this hour, are men and women humming the march- -^j ing songs of old Ireland. And other men and women, filled with your stubbornness and bigotry, are hating them, even as you seem""' to hate them. Do you realize, "Mother" England, what you are doing with your Irish problem? Do you realize that you are turn-^^ ing the world into a house of intolerance — that you are arraying,^^ Protestant against Catholic and Catholic against Protestant — that' you are rekindling the hottest fires of bigotry since the sphere was)'^ reduced from chaos by your "no-coercion" alibi? Was it for this that the millions of Catholic and Protestant boys f rom - the four quarters of the earth stood at Armageddon to save your hide and ours?

Free Ireland ! Completely ! Take her into the family of na-^, tions. She will be your friend in a fortnight, as Cuba became ours. ^ She will produce in the greatest abundance what you must have*'*' in the greatest abundance — food. It seems that the great God put Ireland there to feed you. Her people know your people — " the common people — and they will love one another. She would not and will not harm you. She will be so thrilled with the'' dream of the centuries coming to pass that her hatred — and you know how much she has to hate you for — will turn to forbearance and her forbearance to sympathy and her sympathy to co-.'i operation. The real Ireland, as you know, is magnanimous and ,, cheerful when dealt with honorably. Even your obstinate old-^ Covenanters — from whom I come and whose kind burned the women at Salem — will find in their freed countrymen that gen--' erosity and that comraderie that have made them famous and ^ admired and loved in every nation under the heaven, save among"^'' your governing class. Here in America, "Mother" England, here^^ in Chicago, we get along like two peas in a pod — we Covenanters and Catholics — in business, in society, and in politics. We sliare'^ one another's human burdens. The\ are kind to our poor ; we are kind to theirs.

Think what it would mean to you as well as to the world to . be rid of the Irish problem. It would take away much of your';' trouble at home, your trouble in Australia, much of it in Africa^^ in Canada, and in the United States of America. You would begin to enjoy then what you might command by afifection butV never shall by force — the respect of the world. The English speaking peoples would come together, and we, while not for-^'-^ getting our traditions, we Americans of English blood would not

Foreword xix

longer "nurse our wrath to keep it warm." You would not need so large a propaganda force as you now have among us. You would not have to marry your empty titles to our silly little heiresses to maintain a speaking acquaintance. The coming of your prince would not then stir resentment among us, although we understand he is a "regular fellow." ^^'e are a plain people, and frown on the trappings of royalty, on resounding titles and honors bestowed upon your favored few in the perpetuation of your system of caste, while you smugly tolerate London's East End.

But we would try to understand you better. Being skeptical, even as they of old when they sought from the Master a sign, we ask that you prove by your deeds that we may know your heart is right, for your word does not excite us.

Free Ireland, as a beginning of your reconstruction, for the sake of world peace. Let them have their way, once. Trust them, once. They have trusted you many times, and to their sorrow. If they fail we shall have no more to say. Open the League doors to them, and then we all could come back to Old England or to Ireland, Saxon and Angle and Gael and Celt. We could ♦together go to Leopardstown, or Ballydoyle, or Punchestown or Limerick, or Phoenix Park, to see the jumpers go over the high hurdle. We could cast our flies in the Shannon or paddle on Killarney's lake. With good-natured jibe, the American, pointing across Belfast Bay, might ask: "About where out yonder did Paul Jones show you up?" And the companion from Ludgate Hill might reply : "Really, I don't recall Paul Jones ; I was thinking of Ross of Bladensburg." And then the two might smile and exclaim, "How in this world could we have been such silly asses?"

Cuba, lying on our doorstep, a hne base for enemy submarines, is a Catholic country. Cuba is the friend in its heart of the nation that never had a Catholic ruler.

Think it over, "Mother" England,

The Ahnv York Sun, July 2, 1919, printed the following editorial :

"The return of Mr. Lloyd George to London appears to have been a triumph. In the street on the way from Downing Street to Westminster, and in the House, the cheers and applause for the Prime Minister are said to have been unprecedented. All this does not surprise the watchers on this side of the Atlantic. If there was anything that Lloyd George went to Paris for and failed to get, then we have missed it. He jileased the dreamers of England by advocating the scheme of the League of Nations ; and then delighted the practical politicians with the performance of obtaining in the covenant of the league one vote each for the Empire,

XX Foreword |

Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and India^six votes as compared with the one vote allotted to the United States. - In addition to getting for Great Britain everything that the most . sanguine British imagination could covet in the way of colonial"' power — including an even firmer grip on Egypt than England has ever had — and the utter destruction of German influence in the *' eastern hemisphere, Mr. Lloyd George obtained the signature of the President of the United States to a pledge which, if Mr. Wil-'''^ son's hand and stenographic seal made it binding, would obligate j the United States to use to an unlimited extent its wealth and soldiers to preserve the British Empire intact. Mr. Lloyd George 4 brought to London two skulls. One is the dome, stolen by the Germans, of an African Sultan of unpronounceable name. Tht - other is the skull of Mr. Wilson's declaration that self-determination must be permitted to all nations, great or small. This the"* Welshman took in the battle of Paris, and he may write across the , brow Mr. Wilson's later announcement that the Irish question is a domestic problem. It may stand on the mantelpiece in Down-< ing street, in front of a framed copy of the late Fourteen Points or Principles. Small wonder, we say, that those who once yelle<^- "Limehouse !" called "Hurrah!" when Lloyd George came back to London with his trophies. The fact that the assent of the-'i United States Senate is necessary to the completion of certain parts of his victory cannot detract from the Prime Minister's remarkable accomplishment. He did all he could do and he per-1 haps expects that Mr. W^ilson w'ill be able to consummate the programme." i',

There was one nation at the Peace Conference that might have battered down the doors of the chambers of the -• "Big Four" and invited Erin to come in and lay her claims before the map-makers of our new world. That nation was the^^ United States of America. It flatly refused. Not only did it, , acquiesce in the British view on this question (as well as the British views apparently on all questions), but its representatives'-; seemed to have assumed an antagonistic attitude, for some unknown reason, toward Ireland's claim at the outset while smiling benignly on nearly all other ethnic strains in the universe. (China and India were notable exceptions with Ireland.) And this not-"^^ withstanding the fact that Ireland was the one "small nation" that had held a plebiscite since the signing of the armistice and^ had voted three to one for "self-determination." y.

What travail shall come upon the new world because of this dozing of the Eagle beneath the mane of the Lion, if trava'};jr' does eventuate, will be laid, accordingly, at the doors of th/j

Foreword xxi

nation, not alone for its failure to stand by its announced principles — fourteen of them — with respect to Ireland, but with respect to China and India and the peoples of Africa. If another world war engulfs the human family shortly, then we, the government of the United States, shall not be guiltless.

There was not the slightest chance of Ireland being considered by the British delegates, if left to their own devices. Before that delegation left London it was pledged by the solemn asseverations of its members to oppose Irish claims.

The "Big Four" of England at the peace table were Arthur James Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, Mr. Bonar Law, and David Lloyd George.

Mr. Balfour had been the consistent opponent of Republicanism in Ireland, as in all other British possessions, during his public career. From the Tory standpoint, England has not had a more successful empire builder since Disraeli's day. He is perhaps the one colossal intellect of present-day English statesmen. (We only wish the United States had a Balfour.) He is thoroughly British, which is not to his discredit as a Nationalist. Profound as are his state utterances, even his address before the United States Senate, Mr. Balfour's subjective mind always has seemed to be riveted to the central idea that when all is said and done the only thing that matters for the British Empire is more empire — commercial expansion, colonial expansion, the domination by his gracious majesty the king of as much of the earth's surface and its chattels as power and superior diplomacy can achieve. He is one of two conspicuous examples, as we now recall, of the "single-track mind." His, however, tracks toward home.

It is related that when Mr. Balfour visited the tomb of George Washington, after we had entered the world war, he was unusually thrilled with the notion that thereafter, the war having been won with our aid, Great Britain and the United States could control the commerce of the world! That was the true British statesman who knows when to soar and when to be practical !

When the supreme show-down came, Mr. Balfour was not what might be vernacularly termed crazy for a world made safe for democracy. He was chiefly concerned, it seems, with a world brought under the domination of King George's Empire.

Moreover, he has not the slightest sympathy with Ireland's Republican aspirations. \\'ith rare satire he summed up his attitude on this question long before the Peace Conference, when he referred to Ireland's claims as that "bitter fiction" that Ireland ei'er was a nation. He was committed, both by birth and training, xxii Foreword

to defend the royalists of Ulster against all comers.

Balfour has deserved well of his king!

Mr. Lloyd George, whatever his liberalism before the war, whatever his bitter fulminations against the men he afterward ' took into his cabinet, was committed in 1918 — after the armistice was signed — in opposition to Ireland's claim for self-government. In his election manifesto of November, 1918, on which he went before the electorate of the United Kingdom, he unetjuivocally declared that, if returned to power, he and his government would . not consent to the "coercion of Ulster." That was tantamount to saying that the Crown had accepted Ulster's ultimatum (that section of Ulster that really means it when it sings "God Save the King;" Sir Edward Carson's Ulster), that Home Rule would ' not be granted to Ireland except by a partition scheme.

It was the Ulster leaders of the Carson school, who first, in 1913 and 1914, openly preached sedition and rebellion, even an al- , liance with Germany to defeat Home Rule, mutiny in the English army, and what is now popularly characterized as Bolshevism. Mr. ■ Law was one of those who gave the English soldiers to understand that mutiny on their part in support of the Ulster royalists, and " against Republican Ireland, would be a commendable undertaking, if the government sought to proceed with its Home Rule law.

Bonar Law openly suggested mutiny at a time when German high officials were in Ulster, enjoying if not encouraging the Ulster rebellion, which was made effective as a threat > to the Empire, for the moment, by the 30,000 German rifles with which the Ulster rebels were armed, the details of which — Germany's part in the Ulster rebellion — will be set forth in a later chapter, with particular api)lication to the subsequent Easter insurrection (1916), in the South and West.

In a speech at Dublin, November 28, 1913, Mr. Bonar Law said: "I have said on behalf of the party — and only a week ago - it was repeated in language as plain as my own by Lord Lands- ^ downe and the party has endorsed it — we have said that if they first attempt to coerce Ulster before they have received the sanction of the electors, Ulster will do well to resist them, and we will support her in her resistance to the end. . . . There is another point to which I would specially refer. In order to carry out his despotic intention, King James had the largest , paid army which had ever been seen in England. What happened? There was a revolution and the King disappeared. Why? Because his own army refused to fight for him?"

In the House of Commons, March 23, 1914, Mr. Bonar Law " said : "The House knows that we on this side have, from the

Foreword xxiii

very first, held the view that to coerce Ulster is an operation which no government, under existing conditions, has a right to ask the army to undertake. And, in our view, of course, it is not necessary to say it, any [army] officer who refuses, is only fulfilling his duty. . . . The (juestion has been raised in an acute form, and in my Itelief nothing can save the army now, except a clear declaration on the part of the government, that officers will not be compelled — Hon. members : ('And men !') — and men will not be compelled — to engage in civil war against their will."

Three days later the Morn'wg Post, organ of the Tory forces, said : "The Army has killed the Home Rule bill, and the sooner the government recognized the fact, the better for the country."