Six days of the Irish Republic Part 11

Once having granted this, however, the civilian mind is free to make the inquiry--whether from morbid, scientific, dramatic, or emotional reasons matters little--as to what manner of men these leaders were, and what manner of minds gave the revolt its psychological aspect: but in that inquiry no criterion of loyalty except that of fidelity to their own personal convictions must be allowed to enter. Probably the most serious mistake usually made by Irish politicians is that of cla.s.sing successive rebellions as the acts of traitors or martyrs, according to their respective points of view, and certainly statesmen and thinkers could make no greater error in diagnosing the present one.

Rebellions are not the outcome of innate perversity of race, but purely scientific phenomena with objective causes. First, then, let us examine the men themselves who led the revolt, before we pa.s.s on to the literature that informed and inspired it.

Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt was not the founder of "Sinn Fein," nor was he the originator of the Labour Movement in Ireland: he found both ready-made and used them to serve his own ideals for the future of Ireland and thus can be termed a leader.

Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt is an Ulsterman of the old type that was the backbone of the Rebellion of '98, when the Presbyterians of the North tried to emulate those English and Irish exiles who, persecuted out of their native sh.o.r.es by High Church tyranny, had laid the foundations of American liberty under Was.h.i.+ngton.

That he is a man of character, and not the "bounder and scoundrel" the Press now makes him out to be, goes without saying, or otherwise he would not have received the honour of a t.i.tle at the hands of a grateful country: in fact, until his entrance into the troubled waters of Irish politics he was one of the most universally respected of our civil servants.

For ten years, from 1895 to 1905, for example, he was in the wilds of Africa, for the greater portion of his sojourn as Consul in Portuguese West Africa and then later in the Congo Free State.

After this he was sent to South America, and in 1909 he was appointed Consul-General at Rio de Janeiro. So trusted was he that when the British Government wished to investigate the labour atrocities on the Indians in the rubber forests of Peru, they chose Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt; and when his report was printed in 1912 it caused the profoundest stir, not merely in England, but throughout the civilized world.

This was surely a man of character and above the ordinary temptations of bribery, or else he would not in 1905 have received the C.M.G. and in 1911 knighthood--moreover, he was a man who may be said to have had ample opportunity of getting outside the narrow groove of Irish politics and seeing something of the Empire.

Yet while Irish politics had been moving with tremendous rapidity during his absence--the fateful years between 1895-1905--Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt seems never to have got beyond the Ulster of 1798--which I need hardly remind anyone conversant with history was as rebellious to England as was Wexford under Cromwell.

This _idee fixe_ began to appear at once upon his return to Ireland in the year 1913, when he found politics in a chaos of ferment, and seeing Sir Edward Carson preparing to appeal to arms and his supporters to Germany, he too "began to indulge in treason in the same spirit as Carson and the Curragh crew," as he himself described his att.i.tude of that time.

Possibly Germany was equally willing to sell her old rifles to both parties, but the war precipitated matters.

Autumn 1914 found Sir Roger (who, as we have already seen, had founded a body of volunteers in Ireland) in Berlin, where he was not only received at the German Foreign Office, but, in answer to an inquiry regarding the Kaiser's att.i.tude to Ireland, was a.s.sured by the Foreign Department and the Imperial Chancellor that "Germany would never invade Ireland with the object of conquering it," and that, "supposing the fortune of war should ever bring German troops to Ireland's coasts, they would land as the forces of a Government inspired by goodwill towards a land and a people for whom Germany only wishes national welfare and national freedom." That he was not acting in any way as the representative of the nation whose amba.s.sador he was supposed to be was amply proved by his repudiation after this adventure by the Irish leaders at home and such bodies as the Council of the United Irish League in America.

Such was the dream or delusion, however, which changed one of the most respected of British Consuls into a rebel traitor to the Empire. There is no need to insinuate selfishness or vilify his character, for he must have known his effort was bound to fail and counted the cost beforehand.

The great point to remember is that the Irish people were free to make their choice and use their judgment, and they decided against him, not personally, but on the merits of the case he put before them, and there was nothing to do but to pay the penalty; and it is better on the whole for Englishmen to accept Ireland's own verdict upon Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt than to place him in the same rank as those who really represented Ireland against England, failed, and paid the price only too willingly.

The same might apply equally well to P. H. Pea.r.s.e and James Connolly, neither of whom was by nature militant nor, indeed, "Separatist," save as a protest against not so much the theory as the reality of what went by the name of "Unionism." There seems a certain tendency among the middle cla.s.ses and the mediocrities of mind in Ireland to cla.s.s, ever since the days of Jim Larkin, the whole Labour Movement in Ireland as a species of hooliganism, though, strange to say, no one ever appealed more successfully or was received with more genuine enthusiasm in England than the socialist leader when he was pleading the cause of the children of the Dublin slums.

When Jim Larkin went to America, his mantle fell upon his right-hand man, James Connolly, and it is impossible to understand the rebellion without understanding the man who was a far more important, and will be a far more lasting, factor in the movement than Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt.

Cas.e.m.e.nt used the magic hope of German help, but it was Connolly who pointed to the concrete grievances that would make any rebellion welcome to the workers.

Yet there was nothing of the wild dreamer or the hysterical patriot about James Connolly, the Ulster organizer of the Transport Union, much less anything of the hooligan.

His proper place should have been within the ranks of the Parliamentary Party, like so many of the other leaders, especially the Sinn Feiners; and it is a very significant fact that, in spite of their national claims, two of the greatest economic movements Ireland has seen since Parnell should have failed to be a.s.similated by the politicians--but it reflects as much upon one as the other.

Probably when he wrote his last work, a pamphlet ent.i.tled "The Reconquest of Ireland," which was printed at Liberty Hall early in 1915, he had no idea that it would mean anything more than an upward economic struggle of the submerged cla.s.ses.

"The Labour Movement of Ireland," he wrote, "must set itself the Reconquest of Ireland as its final aim," and by the word "reconquest" of Ireland he means "the taking possession of the entire country, all its powers of wealth, production, and its natural resources, and organizing these on a co-operative basis for the good of all."

It is significant that there is no religious or political bigotry: the movement is right outside both Carsonism and Redmondism, as indeed their new flag, with its significant colours--green, white, and orange--symbolizes; and he repeats the hope of the United Irishmen at the end of the eighteenth century, "that our animosities were buried with the bones of our ancestors and that we could unite as citizens and claim the rights of man"--the first of which is to be able to live freely, that is, with the means of life no longer the property of a cla.s.s.

He had, in fact, realized "that the old lines of political demarcation no longer served to express any reality in the lives of the people." If anything, the new movement was antagonistic to them all, for in the summing-up he had observed: "In the great Dublin lock-out of 1913-14, the manner in which the Dublin employers, overwhelmingly Unionist, received the enthusiastic and unscrupulous support of the entire Home Rule Press was a foretaste of the possibilities of the new combinations with which Labour in Ireland will have to reckon."

As I read all this once again during the height of the rebellion, with the rattle of the maxims playing upon Boland's mills immediately behind me, where a couple of hundred of the men he had described were now fighting Labour's first war under the name of an Irish Republic, at once the whole aspect of the rebellion changed.

I still wondered, however, why it was that he had left the company of Wells and Webb and Booth, who were but his English counterparts after all, and the general policy of Fabianism, when I suddenly discovered the key not only to the man but to the movement as well, in his definition of prophecy: "The only true prophets are they who carve out the future which they announce."

This, then, was the key to it all. Every dreamer should also be a man of action, every soldier a volunteer to his own idealism; and at once I understood that strange combination between the "intellectuals" and the "workers" which formed such a unique feature of the rebellion, and which the prosperous citizens of Dublin--penned up in their houses for the first time hungry, and for the first time aware of the reality of life's struggle--could only blindly ma.s.s together under the name of "criminal lunatics," like the anarchists of Sidney Street in London some years before.

Much less could the pink-faced Derby boys understand--and so I suppose thought, because the crisis had synchronized with the European war and was aimed at a state of things tolerated by English rule, it was therefore only another indication of Ireland's double dose of original sin, which always drove her to disloyalty to her benefactor.

Dr. O'Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick, one of the ablest as well as the most independent thinkers in Ireland, has been mentioned as one of the forces of the rebellion--in fact, he was generally supposed to be one of the marked men of the Fein programme of suppression, being considered more dangerous to the realm than Connolly--in a word, he was looked upon as a red-hot Sinn Feiner. Yet if his famous Lenten pastoral be examined one will find it merely the broad Christian aspect of the war--nor would the cynical diplomatist, if we could get him to be candid, say he was far wrong in his facts.

Thus, for example, speaking of the only possible result of the prolongation of the war to final victory for either party, he says:--

"No one can foresee even the smallest part of the consequences of this war. One thing, however, is certain, that it will leave the world in a condition of the direst poverty. The destruction of capital is enormous, not in one country, but in all of them. If the war ceased to-morrow it would have impoverished all Europe beyond recovery for generations, but that poverty, by itself, will probably be the least of its evils. It will mean the paralysis of industry, the restriction of commerce, unemployment on a scale that has never been known before, and it is an anxious question how a hitherto powerful, well-paid, well-organized population of workers will submit to the altered state of things. We have had, from time to time, some ugly threatenings of socialism, but we may fear that they are no more than the first mutterings of the storm which will burst upon European society as soon as this war is over.

"This terrible danger, which may be on us within the next three or four years, may well be worse than the war itself, and deluge Europe again in blood. If anyone thinks that millions of working men, trained to arms in every country in Europe, will settle down peaceably to starvation in order to help to re-ama.s.s fortunes for their 'betters,' he may have a rude awakening."

It is his att.i.tude towards England, however, that has brought him into conflict with the recruiting authorities--yet what is the following pa.s.sage, taken from his famous Lenten pastoral, but the purely Catholic att.i.tude of a bishop who looks to the head of his Church for guidance, and seeing the Papacy neutral on the chaos, tries to keep the war fever from spreading to his own flock, for, after all, he spoke as a Churchman, not as a politician.

I think it is now universally admitted that Belgium was not the sole reason of our entrance, as it will not be the sole reason of our continuance, in the war; in a word, that it is really "British interests" that are at stake.

The learned Irish Bishop merely puts the case in so many words--had we not been engaged, the _Times_ might have said, "with the impartiality of the blunt, plain-speaking Englishman."

He writes: "Then see the case of the small nationalities on whose behalf many people have believed that the war is being waged.

"What good has it done for them? What part have they played in it except that of catspaws for the larger nations that used them? Belgium delayed the German advance for two weeks and gave time to the English and French armies to rally. For her pains she has been conquered and ruined. Servia began the war by an atrocious crime, and as reparation for it might weaken Russia's aims in the Balkans, she was encouraged to resist. She, too, has played her temporary role and has followed in the wake of Belgium. Montenegro is the next to go; and it would seem that the great belligerent nations look to themselves only, and use their weaker neighbours for their own purposes. This war is not waged by any of the great Powers as a quixotic enterprise for lofty ideals. 'Small nationalities' and other such sentimental pretexts are good enough for platform addresses to an imaginative but uninformed people, but they do not reveal the true inwardness of this war. All the belligerents have had practical and substantial aims in view. France wants her lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine; Russia wants Constantinople; England wants the undisputed supremacy of the sea and riddance from German commercial rivalry; Austria wants domination in the Balkans and an outlet on the aegean; Italy wants Trieste and what is called _Italia irredenta_; Germany wants a colonial empire and a powerful navy; and all these Powers have formed alliances and laid their plans for many a day, simply for the realization of their respective purposes.

"They planned and schemed solely for the sake of power and material gain. All the talk about righteousness is simply the cloak for ambition, and the worst of it is, that some of the belligerents have gone on repeating the profession of their disinterestedness until they have come to believe it themselves.

"Truth, and right, and justice have had very little to say to this war, which is an outbreak of materialism and irreligion. The peoples did not want this war; there is no hatred of one another amongst them: but the governing cliques in each country have led or driven them like sheep to the slaughter. G.o.d has been ignored; His law has been put aside; Christianity is not allowed to govern the relations of nations. And now the retribution is on them all. The fair dreams of victory and expanded empire and increased wealth and prosperity with which they set out have vanished long ago, and there is not a Government amongst them but is trembling for the day when it shall have to answer for its stewards.h.i.+p to its own people. If they knew as much in July 1914 as they do now, which of them would have plunged into war? And probably if the war goes on for another year they will curse the cowardice which kept them from manfully facing the problem of peace, for which every principle of religion and humanity, every interest, social, material, and political, of their countries, calls aloud."

All this, of course, goes to disprove that the Bishop of Limerick was a Sinn Feiner, but it also goes to prove that one cannot shake the foundations of international relations without stirring internal conditions to their very depths.

The clergy, however, were upon the whole, as they always are, with the Government, as was instanced in a hundred different cases during the rebellion.

Two of the leaders were typical of the old Fenians of darker days. One was Thomas Clarke, who earned his living by running a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop, but who was also engaged a lot in writing for many of the minor newspapers which were responsible for much of the propaganda which prepared the way for the rising.

The other--better known especially in the days of the South African War, when he was, like Colonel Lynch, one of the Nationalist heroes--was "Major" John McBride, who had actually raised an Irish Brigade to fight for the Boers against the British, and who must consequently have felt a very kindred spirit in Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt, who was merely repeating his tactics.

It shows how much Irish politics have progressed, however, that while all Nationalist Ireland is now watching the trial for high treason of Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt with indifference, the Nationalists of those days nominated McBride as Parliamentary candidate for South Mayo when a vacancy occurred by the resignation of Mr. Davitt.

He was at the time of the rising engaged as an official of the Dublin Corporation, and had been married to--and divorced from--Miss Maud Gonne, a patriot of much the same type as the Countess Markievicz.

It was he who had conducted the fight at Jacobs's factory.

McBride was really the one link between the two wars--the Anglo-Boer and the Anglo-German War, to use a Sinn Fein phrase--and if his later att.i.tude was now impracticable, it was certainly logical and consistent with itself.

The main difference, however, was in the circ.u.mstances, and these he, like many others, refused to admit had changed.

Thus ten years before he had gone to Paris as one of the delegates from the Irish Transvaal Committee to ex-President Kruger, who told him that "he would never forget how the Irish Brigade stood by the men of the Transvaal in their hour of need."

Captain William Redmond, M.P., now in the trenches with the British Army, had also been a delegate from Ireland, and had seen Oom Paul at the Hague in much the same spirit of sympathy; but then Home Rule was not upon the Statute Book, and if that "sc.r.a.p of paper" bound England, it was certainly no less binding upon Ireland, in that it had been freely entered into by her const.i.tutional representatives.

Probably McBride thought of the motto inscribed upon the flag that the Irish Brigade had used (later presented him by one of the officials of the Boer Republic), which ran:--