Ireland; a study in nationalism

Preface To The Third Edition

THE IRISH REPUBLIC, 1919

lT is a plain fact, apparent to every one, that the affairs of Ireland have come to a climax in the past year. At the time this book was finished, June, 191 8, I believed that Irish affairs pivoted on the Rebellion of 1916, that the Rebellion had greatl? invigorated the national will; but I had no idea that the object of the Rebellion, an Irish Republic, was so soon to be a concrete popular ideal. Of this fact there can now be no doubt whatever. The Irish in Ireland did not support the Rebellion at large. Neither did the Irish in America. But the reaction of Britain on the Rebellion fired the will and the imagination of Irishmen and Irishwomen everywhere. An Irish Republic, absolutely independent of Britain, is definitely established as the " irreducible minimum " on which the great majority of the Irish people have set their hearts. Victory may come soon or it may come late; that depends on circumstances. The open object of national Ireland remains. This object is not home rule or fiscal autonomy or administration with a nationalist personnel or dominion semi-independence. Much less is it " federation." All these propositions have had something to be said for them; but their time is past. The Irish people have deliberately committed themselves to their ultimate aspiration. That is, absolute independence. They want an Ireland just as free of foreign sovereignty and foreign rule as the United States is. They want it without any softening of their meaning or any blinking of the national minorities in Ulster or scattered through the rest of Ireland. They want formal international recognition of their status as a distinct people, a people with special problems and special needs, with geographic entity and historic continuity. They want it on the very principles promulgated by responsible British and American statesmen during the late war. These principles they were urged to consider as binding and sacred. They do consider them binding and sacred. They ask and demand that they now be applied to Ireland.

This ascertainment of the Irish national will has been a slow process, and I do not think it could possibly have been accomplished but for the blunders of British statecraft in the last few years. Every one who knows American Revolutionary history, whether written by good patriots like John Fiske or Liberal sophists like Trevelyan, must admit the enormous aid that was presented to the Revolution by the gross political and social obtuseness of the ruling class in Britain. A similar obtuseness has driven Irishmen and Irishwomen of all sorts and conditions into the arms of Irish Republicanism. The Irish Republic is said by some to have been made in Germany. On the contrary, it has largely been made in England. George V cannot be made the scapegoat, after the fashion of George III. History will distribute the blame over whole governments and whole classes. But when it comes to be written how England " lost " Ireland, the animus of the Irish people will be seen to have mainly resulted from the obtuseness as well as the obliquity of British statecraft.

As a document relevant to this view of the case I submit the following book as it stands. I have been tempted to re-write it in the light of 19 19, using every argument in it to bear on the case for an Irish Republic. But the fact that it labored so hard in 191 8 to make out a case for governmental cooperation with Britain has perhaps a greater significance than any revised version could offer. This book was not intended to please Irishmen or Irish- Americans. It was not intended to gratify nationalist illusion or passion or to promote " sacred egoism." Its object, if I may venture to interpret it, was to pour light on obdurate facts that British statesmanship had never fairly recognized, and to urge that if British statesmanship did recognize these facts, attested by innumerable responsible witnesses, the best interests of the British empire might be reconciled with the best interests of Ireland. Many arguments, similarly conceived, were formulated in the American Colonies during the crucial years of pre-Revolution and actual Revolution. I must quickly assert that I was not so ambitious as to hope for direct results from this book. I only hoped that by formulating certain ideas I might promote in my own day and generation that species of good sense and good understanding for which so many American colonists in their own case had once labored. But I am perfectly willing now to admit that my cause was well lost. The facts that the English fail to recognize, the obdurate facts that the Irish must see accommodated or else perish as

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a nation, are definitely proven to be beyond the capacity of the Georges and Lord Norths of 19 19. The men who " lost " the American Colonies — lost, that is to say, their right to maim and cripple the American Colonies — exhibit legitimate descendants in these men who have " lost " Ireland. They talk of " secession." The answer is, the American Colonies seceded. And the wisdom of that escape from their interference cannot be confused with the folly of any attempted violation of honest constitutional union. The analogy between Ireland and England is not the analogy between the South and the North. It is clearly the analogy of the Revolution. The American Colonists were Separatists. So are the Irish; and for equal though not similar causes.

I have spoken of obtuseness and obliquity in British statecraft. I refer to the living present, not to the impotent past. A characteristic mixture of both is to be found in Lloyd George's late proposal of Irish conscription. Here was Lloyd George a professed believer in self-determination, a professed believer in the right of the Irish to self-determination — a right that had been denied by Lloyd George's political opponents. A situation occurred in France early in 19 18 that was analogous to a heavy draft on a man's resources. Britain had to meet a terrific demand on its man-power, had to dig down deep to meet the demand. At that moment of pressure and, let us say, panic, Lloyd George cast his eye on the trust fund of Ireland. Ireland, according to his own professed beliefs, was not at that time in possession of its right to self-determination. It was, in fact, the subject of a convention appointed

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by himself to discuss the proper terms of self-determination. But it was possible, physically possible, for the hand that could dig into Britain's man-power also to extend its fingers and seize the man-power of Ireland. No one could deny the physical power of the British to put through that theft. They could steal Irish man-power in the same way that Germany could steal its passage through Belgium. What did Lloyd George do? Did he say, I have in my hands the terms on which my Irish Convention agrees to conscription and I shall seek to meet those terms? No, he ignored the report of the Irish Convention. He said, We need men, Ireland has men and we'll take them. Self-determination? That's a moral question. This is an actual emergency. Our resources may not be equal to the emergency. Then, let us draw on Ireland. But of course Lloyd George had not the candor to say outright, " let us rob Ireland." He talked of Irish conscription-without-consent in those lofty terms that enable adroit politicians to lead the unanalytical Englishman by the nose.

So much for this obliquity of British statecraft. The obtuseness is not less patent. Lloyd George could not deliver the Irish goods except at a prohibitive cost to the British army; and he could not fulfil his promise to deliver the Irish goods except at a prohibitive cost to British prestige all over the world. If this man can promise to conscript the Irish in the teeth of all his talk about the rights of small nations, the Irish said, he is worse than a scoundrel — he is a fool. What will simple America think of Irishmen brought in manacles to France to fight for " the rights of small nations "? What will the Czecho-Slovaks think, who know what it is to be conscripted by a bullying empire? What will Russia think, which is already aware of England's duplicity in the secret treaties? What will educated India think, with its cynicism as regards British statecraft? The baseness of treating the Irish as Germany treated the Danes of Slesvig or as Austria treated the Bohemians — that was apparent to any man who really wanted the world made safe for democracy. But the obtuseness was evident in even worse degree. It had a depth which nothing of Lord North's could hope to rival.

I mention Lord North because I should like to fix American minds on both characteristic failures of British statecraft in dealing with the government of a white people. I am told that this book is unfair to the British empire, that no people have administered backward races like the British, that French cupidity and German brutality have ruined colonies right alongside colonies that exemplify triumphant British humaneness and good sense. Men like Norman Angell imply this. So do interesting witnesses like the great artist Joseph Conrad. If I were convinced that no race was ever called " backward " whom it did not pay to call " backward," I believe I could more easily agree with the imperialists, but even so, there is good reason to accept the enlightened Anglo-American estimate of the British as tropical administrators, and I also believe that Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa have an arrangement with Britain which is mutually beneficial. Still, the government of Ireland is " Crown Colony government " and the " backward " race in Ireland is not Maori or Zulu

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or Kaffir or Basuto. It is free, white and twentyone, and it knows it. This makes patent the imperial sin against democracy. The fact that Britain has planted and privileged certain non-Gaelic subjects in Ireland, and has loaded the dice to keep them in favor, creates the imperialistic situation which educated white folk simply cannot tolerate. A situation equally plain, escaped Lord North in dealing with the American colonists. A not less obvious situation escaped Lord Milner in his evil attempt to treat the Boers as inferiors. Again this imperialism applied to white men has continually escaped the English and Anglo-Irish administrators of Ireland, and is one reason why the imperial trilogy of " Ireland, India and Egypt " comes to the mind of every non-British critic to-day. The situation is too gross for British moral pretensions. British rule in Ireland means the inevitable sacrifice of the rank and file to a minority, and this in spite of every liberal Englishman's attempt to straddle the channel. So long as one's concern for the Irish people is the democratic concern, and not specifically the nationalistic, the greatest possible stress has to be laid on the hard position of Ulster. It was my own preoccupation with the democratic claims of the Ulster and Unionist minority that led me to advocate dominion home rule in this book. I felt then that the clue to Britain's failure in Ireland was its lack of single-mindedness. It had an eye to Irish interests, but a much shrewder eye to the subordination of Irish interests, and a consequent incapacity to deal with the Irish situation straightforwardly. I felt, however, that twelve o'clock had not yet struck in the hearts of the Irish people. And if the Irish

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people were willing to give Britain one more chance, it was possible in that way to obtain for the Unionist minority a very plain security under dominion home rule. This minority had a most powerful backing in England. Besides that, it had a place of its own in Ireland; and I felt that the million Unionists in Ireland had at least a squatter's claim which it would be inhuman as well as unpractical to ignore. This conviction, the main conviction which kept me from advocating an Irish Republic, I stated as explicitly as possible; and I urged what I considered to be the democratic minimum — namely, the status of a dominion.

The actual grounds on which I based this conviction have changed radically in the past year. Not only has Britain itself advocated an international status for minorities like Ulster, and so emancipated Irish conscience, but by the supreme test of its own principles during the war Britain has forfeited its claims on Irish consideration, and so has emancipated Irish will.

It may seem wrong to hold Britain to its war-principles, to apply those stern standards to the intimate life of the British isles. But why? Were those principles put on for show, without any sense of justice behind them? If so, the less the Briton talks about " justice," the better. If not, then the time has surely arrived for making good. There is nothing wrong with the liberal Britain that produced a document so statesmanlike as Labor and the New Social Order, or that gives Ireland such interpretative friendship as the Manchester Guardian and the London Nation and the Daily News. When the London Nation says:

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All Ireland stands between England and America, because all England stands between Ireland and the sun

— the Irishman knows that the cause of Ireland is understood. That understanding creates a profound obligation: it requires Irishmen to extend and maintain their goodwill. But even to such profound obligation there is a limit. When Ireland's friends in Britain prove powerless as against imperialists and reactionaries, the onus of Irish welfare falls upon Irishmen themselves. This, as I see it, is the climax to which affairs have been tending for years. The test of liberal good faith, consequently, is no new give-and-take proposal. It is the disinterested arrangement of a clean political separation. It is not Ireland that has botched the Irish settlement. It is Britain. Parnell and Davitt and Redmond did their level best to arrange constitutional give-andtake. Britain failed them. It is this that compels Ireland to distrust its own pliancy, on one hand, and to hold Britain to its war-principles, on the other. It must disappoint and aggrieve many good Britons, but the time has come to put a wholesome end to perpetual shilly-shally and delay.

Take the case of the Irish Convention of 19 1 7. This Convention, appointed to elicit the national will of Ireland, was a significant failure. But its real failure was not the failure to obtain unanimity inside the Convention. It was the determination not to permit the Irish people to deliver a free verdict on the form of government they desired. Britain did not say to Ireland, Appoint your own convention. Britain, through its prime minister, dictated to Ireland the membership of the convention that was to represent it, and furthermore

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pledged to Ulster that whatever happened Ulster would have its way. The Sinn Feiners were excluded, or a pitifully small and inadequate delegation of Sinn Feiners was excluded, because they would not agree beforehand to pledge themselves in favor of the overlordship of the British empire. Where, in this, was there any respect for the guiding principle of self-determination? The delegates to the Convention were in the main highly estimable men. They were also " safe " men. But the will of Ireland, as expressed a few months later in a general election, was shut out of this craftily organized body. Here, in a grand instance of modern British policy, there was the same typical doublethinking and double-dealing, the same reality of connivance and the same gesture of fair-play. I was not fully informed as to Britain's part in this Convention when I wrote of it in these pages. But if ever a great state exhibited its bankruptcy in the moral principles that go to lay the foundations of a sound polity, it was the Britain that with the aid of its censorship tried to impose on the world this counterfeit " national " convention.

What has Ireland to gain for its body or its soul by considering the will of Britain as to its form of government? Why should Britain be consulted? The material arguments need not be considered. Ireland is now supporting herself and contributing a hundred million dollars a year to Britain into the bargain. It has everything to gain materially by getting rid of British administrators, British police and British fiscal policy. But the pro-British in Ireland are human beings. I admit that I considered the will of Ulster an obstacle to Irish self-determination. I saw the Orangeman as a Tory whose protestations concerning his preference for Britain deserved to be taken respectfully. But since June, 1 9 1 8, the Tory minorities of Europe have with the warm acquiescence of Britain been compelled to subordinate their fortunes to the national will of many new republics. I had myself in this book founded the case for semi-independence on the best basis I perceived; and every argument which supported the claims of constitutional autonomy and semi-independence seems to me to have double the force in respect of absolute independence. Since June, 19 18, nothing has occurred to minimize Ireland's claim to self-determination. Much has occurred to strengthen it. To safeguard the Unionist minority in Ireland there is the public opinion of the English-speaking world. There is in addition the same formal safeguard that European minorities have, the beginning of an international machinery — and the Unionist minority has no more democratic claim than the Tories had in the American Colonies, while possessing all the latter's perverse willingness to support the misrule of British ministers. The accumulation of evidence and of feeling on these points, the long waiting in the stale atmosphere of English party politics, has nauseated my own soul even so far as dominion home rule is concerned, and I am one of those people to whom nothing is now acceptable for Ireland less than a clean slate of her own.

This position was not quite so definable in June, 1918, as it is a year later. In June, 19 1 8, it was possible to refuse the British a political moratorium in regard to Irish independence but only at the cost

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of lending' aid and comfort to Germany; and in June, 191 8, the end of the war was not in sight. For three months the Allies in France had been in the neck of the bottle and even in June it was not certain whether the German cork was being driven out or driven in. The mood of those months was not politically healthy. To keep it from becoming envenomed, however, it was absolutely necessary for Britain to show a morally courageous attitude toward the claims of Ireland. The failure to show that attitude, the failure to use the moratorium for anything except the dullest selfishness, was the beginning of the constitutional end.

That end, to my mind, has come. The last chance of constitutionalism was the Irish Convention under Sir Horace Plunkett, and that chance was sacrificed by Lloyd George's betrayal of the popular principle, on the one hand, and Ulster's betrayal of the social principle, on the other. Lloyd George's failure to secure popular sanction has already been referred to. Even more serious was the recalcitrance of the Ulstermen. Most of the Protestants of the South gave up the Union. They acknowledged the provisional character of their distrust of the Catholic Irishman. They acknowledged themselves ready and willing to throw in their lot with the national majority in a national parliament. Protestant bishoos as well as Catholic bishops accepted the realities of Ireland's entity. They joined in a petition against any savage " partitioning " of Ireland. But the Ulster delegates, under the direction of the LMster political machine, stood out for a Tefferson Davis policy of " dingy freedom," a freedom founded on the sacred princi-

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pies of political intolerance, religious prejudice and economic snobbery. The case of Ulster is the real case of secession, where the case of national Ireland is the case of the Revolution. The refusal of Lloyd George to trust Ireland coincided with the refusal of Ulster to trust Ireland. The result was something long foreseen and yet surprising when it arrived — the end of constitutionalism. Only British labor, it seems to me, could have averted that end, had it really been in the saddle. But British labor wasn't in the saddle, despite Woodrow Wilson's pretenses to that effect, and when it gets into the saddle its duty will no longer be that of working out political union. It will have the harder and nobler duty of working out healthy political separation in the spirit of fellowship and goodwill.

The constitutional end did not come immediately after the Rebellion of 191 6. Ireland was sufficiently involved in the war, had enough men there if nothing else, to keep the national will from fully realizing itself. But with the end of the war came a great purge of the Irish spirit. The Parliamentary party, as every one understood, no longer possessed a vision of Ireland. The question remained, Did the people of Ireland possess a vision of the Parliamentary party? The election of December, 19 1 8, settled that question forever. It was, in effect, a national plebiscite on self-determination; and in that plebiscite the historic Nationalist party, for forty years the dominant political instrument of the majority of the Irish people, was reduced to disreputable ruin. The collapse of the Nationalist party was catastrophic. It is only rivalled in sensational effect by the programme substituted for it.

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For many years Mr. Arthur Griffith had advocated the withdrawal of the Irish members from the British House of Commons. In order to preach that doctrine he subsisted on locusts and wild honey: in a nation of anxious conformists he was content to be an eccentric figure. He was like one unpatronized public chauffeur in a city alive with thriving hansom cabs. But with the British handling of the 191 6 Rebellion came Mr. Griffith's opportunity. In a very few months the grotesque machinery of Sinn Fein became most admirably practical. The patrons of the hansom cabs dwindled. The cabs and their drivers came to be seen with fresh eyes — crawling cabs, morose horses, drivers bloated and bleared. But this demolition of the Nationalists, this transference of the whole people to Sinn Fein, would never have been possible had not the British government itself contrived to foster these ideals all over Ireland.

How did the British government help to promote Sinn Fein all over Ireland? With the assistance, of course, of Woodrow Wilson. What Ireland needed to become a flaming fire of Republicanism was two things — one, the fuel of fresh British tyranny; two, the wind of idealism. General Maxwell first supplied the tyranny and Woodrow Wilson supplied the wind. After the Rebellion, which is analyzed at some length in the following pages, the urgent need of a better political policy was apparent to Herbert Asquith. He actually came to the Sinn Feiners seeking light, as a good humane Roman might have gone to the Early Christians the morning after the arena, asking how such untoward performances could be avoided in the future. But

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meanwhile the old-fashioned muzzle-loading militarist General Maxwell was arresting every mortal in Ireland who showed the slightest capacity for radical leadership and deporting them to England in the happy conviction that a little imprisonment under unpleasant circumstances would make them warm adherents of the empire. After these men were released and sent back all over Ireland with torches in their tails, re-arrest became the policy of the government. A " German plot " was " discovered." The government had no visible proof of a German plot, but they pretended to have proof of one, and they brought over a considerable number of Sinn Feiners to take a post-graduate course in their splendid imperial universities, the political prisons. Not one detail of this policy was lost on the Irish people. The war for " the rights of small nations " seemed to them very near home. The fact of Irishness became once more a taint in the nostrils of the governmental bureaucracy in Ireland. Irritation led in many cases to petty persecution, and persecution sometimes grew to outrage. With its back hand England bruised Ireland in the mouth so long as the war continued, and then it freely recommenced the old hideous game of making Irishness an offense against the crown. Troops were poured into Ireland as never before since 1798. The whole temper of the bureaucracy was the temper of exasperated authority seeking an excuse to vent its anger. And all through this period Lloyd George reaffirmed the rights of small nations and Woodrow Wilson declared for self-determination. I know that many British people have no more sympathy for the policies of the Lloyd George gov-

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crnment than similar British people felt for the policies of Lord North's government; and such British men and women refuse to execrate the Sinn Feiners or to decry the Rebellion. But hardly one among them, I beg leave to say, has gone much further than Pitt in the matter. No Edmund Burke has told England and the world what the present estrangement means. But indeed it is an estrangement not to be bridged by soothing and sympathetic words. There is now no union between England and Ireland. The absolute impossibility of enforcing conscription in Ireland destroyed once for all the fiction that the "constitution" is viable in Ireland. It is viable only with guns and bayonets behind it and that is a fact which an Edmund Burke would have the courage to recognize. He would see and say that the union had dissolved of its own corruption. He would weep no tear for it. And he would accept, as honest Britons ought now to accept, the plain business of emancipating Ireland from the British empire for ever. The argument of British military necessity, and the consequent sacrifice of Irish self-development to that military necessity — he would dismiss it for the vicious and cowardly doctrine that it is. The theory that Ireland stabbed England in the back during the world war he would meet with the facts and figures of Ireland's huge martial contribution, on one hand, and the history of the tiny Rebellion, on the other. And he would ask, If Ireland could have won its freedom by the aid of Germany, as the American Colonies won their freedom by the aid of France, who ought to be blamed for it — Ireland or England? The whine that Ireland stabbed England in the back is a miserable whine.

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It ought not to be raised by the empire that has refused for over thirty years to give the Irish people a petty measure of self-government.

This, I think, is substantially the view Americans take of it. I do not mean Americans who ape the English Tory. I mean ordinary, sensible, self-accepting, open-minded people. They regretted deeply the circumstances that led to the rebellion. They deplored the rebellion. But when the history of Ireland is adduced, they seldom or never feel that the Rebellion was " treachery." And on the great principle of Irish self-determination I think the American is not less receptive. In the past year I have spoken to various forum audiences in the United States on the subject of Ireland — in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and other cities — and it is my belief that, whether Sir Edward Carson will " brook no interference " or not, there is accumulating a sober conviction that the cure for Ireland demands separation from England.

This American acceptance of the idea of an Irish Republic is usually likely to be hesitant on one or two major issues of policy. First of all, Will a republic have to be forced down the Ulster throat? Second, Will the Catholic church dominate a Sinn Fein Ireland? The latter point, as I have met it, is the more frequent. To what I have already said in the pages that follow, it is perhaps important to add a word. Religion enters into politics everywhere. Who can conceive of a Roman Catholic president of the United States, or even vice-president; or a Hebrew president or an agnostic or atheist president? Yet so far as I can see, there is a real danger that the Catholic church will be egregiously influential in the

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new Ireland, especially in education and culture. And the narrowness of this has to be reckoned with, considering the amazing priggishness of which Irish idealists are capable ! But we crawl before we walk. The insularity of Ireland is a fact. Still, it can only change under the contacts that the fine adventure of independence must bring with it. To keep it British is to keep it undeveloped and disheartened and much more stiflingly insular.

As to Ulster, this is the supreme local problem of Sinn Fein. The international recognition of Ireland could be found to-morrow, in my opinion, if a fair proportion of Ulster Protestants and Presbyterians declared themselves republicans. The recalcitrance of Ulster does count with Americans. But if the Sinn Fein leaders can make manifest their plan for guaranteeing the rights of Ulster in every detail, then the stubborn behavior of the Covenanters will not seem reasonable or admirable elsewhere. The lion is stubborn, but so after all is the mule.

How much weight will be given to the proposal of a federation of English, Scotch and Irish " states " it is difficult to tell. The proposal, as I try to indicate in my comments on the Round Table group, is essentially an ingenious attempt to circumvent Irish nationalism. It means that Britain is still to sit on the Irish lid and, for the sake of the Anglo-Irish, to keep up the myth of Irish indocility and Irish intransigence. It is a revolting prospect, viewed democratically, and I do not believe it will hoodwink Americans.