A Straight Deal Part 10

In Cork and Queenstown during the recent war, our American sailors were a.s.saulted and stoned by the Green Irish, because they had come to help fight Germany. These a.s.saults, and the retaliations to which they led, became so serious that no naval men under the rank of Commander were permitted to go to Cork. Leading citizens of Cork came to beg that this order be rescinded. But, upon being cross-examined, it was found that the Green Irish who had made the trouble had never been punished. Of this many of us had news before Admiral Sims in The World's Work for November, pages 63-64, gave it his authoritative confirmation.

Taking one consideration with another, it hardly seems to me that our debt to the Green Irish is sufficiently heavy for us to hinder England for the sake of helping them and Germany.

Not all the Green Irish were guilty of the attacks upon our sailors; not all by any means were pro-German; and I know personally of loyal Roman Catholics who are wholly on England's side, and are wholly opposed to Sinn Fein. Many such are here, many in Ireland: them I do not mean. It is Sinn Fein that I mean.

In 1918, when England with her back to the wall was fighting Germany, the Green Irish killed the draft. Here following, I give some specific instances of what the Roman Catholic priests said.

April 21st. After ma.s.s at Castletown, Bear Haven, Father Brennan ordered his flock to resist conscription, take the sacrament, and to be ready to resist to the death; such death insuring the full benediction of G.o.d and his Church. If the police resort to force, let the people kill the police as they would kill any one who threatened their lives. If soldiers came in support of the draft, let them be treated like the police. Policemen and soldiers dying in their attempt to carry out the draft law, would die the enemies of G.o.d, while the people who resisted them would die in peace with G.o.d and under the benediction of his Church.

Father Lynch said in church at Ryehill: "Resist the draft by every means in your power. Any minion of the English Government who fires upon you, above all if he is a Catholic, commits a mortal sin and G.o.d will punish him."

In the chapel at Kilgarvan Father Murphy said: "Every Irishman who helps to apply the draft in Ireland is not only a traitor to his country, but commits a mortal sin against G.o.d's law."

At ma.s.s in Scariff the Rev. James MacInerney said: "No Irish Catholic, whatever his station be, can help the draft in this country without denying his faith."

April 28th. After having given the communion to three hundred men in the church at Eyries, County Cork, Father Gerald Dennehy said: "Any Catholic who either as policeman or as agent of the government shall a.s.sist in applying the draft, shall be excommunicated and cursed by the Roman Catholic Church. The curse of G.o.d will follow him in every land. You can kill him at sight, G.o.d will bless you and it will be the most acceptable sacrifice that you can offer."

Referring to any policeman who should attempt to enforce the draft, Father Murphy said at ma.s.s in Killenna, "Any policeman who is killed in such attempt will be d.a.m.ned in h.e.l.l, even if he was in a state of grace that very morning."

Ninety-five percent of those Irish policemen were Catholics and had to respect the commands of those priests.

Ireland is England's business, not ours. But the word "self-determination" appears to hypnotize some Americans. We must not be hypnotized by this word. It is upon the "principle" expressed in this word that our sympathies with the Irish Republic are asked. The six northeastern counties of Ulster, on the "principle" of self-determination, should be separated from the Irish Republic. But the Green Irish will not listen to that. Protestants in Ulster had to listen in their own chief city to Sinn Fein rejoicings over German victories.

The rebellion of 1916, when Sinn Fein opened the back door that England's enemies might enter and destroy her--this dastardly treason was made b.l.o.o.d.y by cowardly violence. The unarmed and the unsuspecting were shot down and stabbed in cold blood. Later, soldiers who came home from the front, wounded soldiers too, were persecuted and a.s.saulted. The men of Ulster don't wish to fall under the power of the Green Irish.

"We do not know whether the British statesmen are right in a.s.serting a connection between Irish revolutionary feeling and German propaganda.

But in such a connection we should see no sign of a bad German policy."

Thus wrote a Prussian deputy in Das Grossere Deutschland. That was over there. This was over here:--

"The fraternal understanding which unites the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the German-American Alliance receives our unqualified endors.e.m.e.nt. This unity of effort in all matters of a public nature intended to circ.u.mvent the efforts of England to secure an Anglo-American alliance have been productive of very successful results.

The congratulations of those of us who live under the flag of the United States are extended to our German-American fellow citizens upon the conquests won by the fatherland, and we a.s.sure them of our unshaken confidence that the German Empire will crush England and aid in the liberation of Ireland, and be a real defender of small nations." See the Boston Herald of July 22, 1916.

During our Civil War, in 1862, a resolution of sympathy with the South was stifled in Parliament.

On June 6, 1919, our Senate pa.s.sed, with one dissenting voice, the following, offered by Senator Walsh, democrat, of Ma.s.sachusetts:

"Resolved, that the Senate of the United States express its sympathy with the aspirations of the Irish people for a government of its own choice."

What England would not do for the South in 1862, we now do against England our ally, against Ulster, our friend in our Revolution, and in support of England's enemies, Sinn Fein and Germany.

Ireland has less than 4,500,000 inhabitants; Ulster's share is about one third, and its Protestants outnumber its Catholics by more than three fourths. Besides such reprisals as they saw wrought upon wounded soldiers, they know that the Green Irish who insist that Ulster belong to their Republic, do so because they plan to make prosperous and thrifty Ulster their milch cow.

Let every fair-minded American pause, then, before giving his sympathy to an independent Irish Republic on the principle of self-determination, or out of grat.i.tude to the Green Irish. Let him remember that it was the Orange Irish who helped us in our Revolution, and that the Orange Irish do not want an independent Irish Republic. There will be none; our interference merely makes Germany happy and possibly prolongs the existing chaos; but there will be none. Before such loyal and thinking Catholics as the gentleman who said to me that word about "spoiling the ship for a ha'pennyworth of tar," and before a firm and coherent policy on England's part, Sinn Fein will fade like a poisonous mist.

Chapter XVII: Paint

Soldiers of ours--many soldiers, I am sorry to say--have come back from Coblenz and other places in the black spot, saying that they found the inhabitants of the black spot kind and agreeable. They give this reason for liking the Germans better than they do the English. They found the Germans agreeable, the English not agreeable. Well, this amounts to something as far as it goes: but how far does it go, and how much does it amount to? Have you ever seen an automobile painted up to look like new, and it broke down before it had run ten miles, and you found its insides were wrong? Would you buy an automobile on the strength of the paint? England often needs paint, but her insides are all right. If our soldiers look no deeper than the paint, if our voters look no further than the paint, if our democracy never looks at anything but the paint, G.o.d help our democracy! Of course the Germans were agreeable to our soldiers after the armistice!

Agreeable Germany!--who sank the Lusitania; who sank five thousand British merchant ships with the loss of fifteen thousand men, women, and children, all murdered at sea, without a chance for their lives; who fired on boat-loads of the shipwrecked, who stood on her submarine and laughed at the drowning pa.s.sengers of the torpedoed Falaba.

Disagreeable England!--who sank five hundred German ships without permitting a single life to be lost, who never fired a shot until provision had been made for the safety of pa.s.sengers and crews.

Agreeable Germany!--who, as she retreated, poisoned wells and ga.s.sed the citizens from whose village she was running away; who wrecked the churches and the homes of the helpless living, and bombed the tombs of the helpless dead; who wrenched families apart in the night, taking their boys to slavery and their girls to wholesale violation, leaving the old people to wander in loneliness and die; who in her raids upon England slaughtered three hundred and forty-two women, and killed or injured seven hundred and fifty-seven children, and made in all a list of four thousand five hundred and sixty-eight, bombed by her airmen; whose trained nurses met our wounded and captured men at the railroad trains and held out cups of water for them to see, and then poured them on the ground or spat in them.

Disagreeable England!--whose colonies rushed to help her: Canada, who within eight weeks after war had been declared, came with a voluntary army of thirty-three thousand men; who stood her ground against that first meeting with the poison gas and saved not only the day, but possibly the whole cause; who by 1917 had sent over four hundred thousand men to help disagreeable England; who gave her wealth, her food, her substance; who poured every symbol of aid and love into disagreeable England's lap to help her beat agreeable Germany. Thus did all England's colonies offer and bring both themselves and their resources, from the smallest to the greatest; little Newfoundland, whose regiment gave such heroic account of itself at Gallipoli; Australia who came with her cruisers, and with also her armies to the West Front and in South Africa; New Zealand who came from the other side of the world with men and money--three million pounds in gift, not loan, from one million people. And the Boers? The Boers, who latest of all, not twenty years before, had been at war with England, and conquered by her, and then by her had been given a Boer Government. What did the Boers do? In spite of the Kaiser's telegram of sympathy, in spite of his plans and his hopes, they too, like Canada and New Zealand and all the rest, sided of their own free will with disagreeable England against agreeable Germany. They first stamped out a German rebellion, instigated in their midst, and then these Boers left their farms, and came to England's aid, and drove German power from Southwest Africa. And do you remember the wire that came from India to London? "What orders from the King-Emperor for me and my men?" These were the words of the Maharajah of Rewa; and thus spoke the rest of India. The troops she sent captured Neue Chapelle. From first to last they fought in many places for the Cause of England.

What do words, or propaganda, what does anything count in the face of such facts as these?

Agreeable Germany!--who addresses her G.o.d, "Thou who dwellest high above the Cherubim, Seraphim and Zeppelin"--Parson Diedrich Vorwerck in his volume Hurrah and Hallelujah. Germany, who says, "It is better to let a hundred women and children belonging to the enemy die of hunger than to let a single German soldier suffer"--General von der Goltz in his Ten Iron Commandments of the German Soldier; Germany, whose soldier obeys those commandments thus: "I am sending you a ring made out of a piece of sh.e.l.l.... During the battle of Budonviller I did away with four women and seven young girls in five minutes. The Captain had told me to shoot these French sows, but I preferred to run my bayonet through them"--private Johann Wenger to his German sweetheart, dated Peronne, March 16, 1915. Germany, whose newspaper the Cologne Volkszettung deplored the doings of her Kultur on land and sea thus: "Much as we detest it as human beings and as Christians, yet we exult in it as Germans."

Agreeable Germany!--whose Kaiser, if his fleet had been larger, would have taken us by the scruff of the neck.

"Then Thou, Almighty One, send Thy lightnings!

Let dwellings and cottages become ashes in the heat of fire. Let the people in hordes burn and drown with wife and child. May their seed be trampled under our feet; May we kill great and small in the l.u.s.t of joy.

May we plunge our daggers into their bodies, May Poland reek in the glow of fire and ashes."

That is another verse of Germany's hymn, hate for Poland; that is her way of taking people by the scruff of the neck; and that is what Senator Walsh's resolution of sympathy with Ireland, Germany's contemplated Heligoland, implies for the United States, if Germany's deferred day should come.

Chapter XVIII: The Will to Friendship--or the Will to Hate?

Nations do not like each other. No plainer fact stares at us from the pages of history since the beginning. Are we to sit down under this forever? Why should we make no attempt to change this for the better in the pages of history that are yet to be written? Other evils have been made better. In this very war, the outcry against Germany has been because she deliberately brought back into war the cruelties and the horrors of more barbarous times, and with cold calculations of premeditated science made these horrors worse. Our recoil from this deed of hers and what it has brought upon the world is seen in our wish for a League of Nations. The thought of any more battles, tenches, submarines, air-raids, starvation, misery, is so unbearable to our bruised and stricken minds, that we have put it into words whose import is, Let us have no more of this! We have at least put it into words. That such words, that such a League, can now grow into something more than words, is the hope of many, the doubt of many, the belief of a few. It is the belief of Mr. Wilson; of Mr. Taft; Lord Bryce; and of Lord Grey, a quiet Englishman, whose statesmanship during those last ten murky days of July, 1914, when he strove to avert the dreadful years that followed, will shine bright and permanent. We must not be chilled by the doubters.

Especially is the scheme doubted in dear old Europe. Dear old Europe is so old; we are so young; we cause her to smile. Yet it is not such a contemptible thing to be young and innocent. Only, your innocence, while it makes you an idealist, must not blind you to the facts. Your idea must not rest upon sand. It must have a little rock to start with. The nearest rock in sight is friendship between England and ourselves.

The will to friendship--or the will to hate? Which do you choose? Which do you think is the best foundation for the League of Nations? Do you imagine that so long as nations do not like each other, that mere words of good intention, written on mere paper, are going to be enough? Write down the words by all means, but see to it that behind your words there shall exist actual good will. Discourage histories for children (and for grown-ups too) which breed international dislike. Such exist among us all. There is a recent one, written in England, that needs some changes.

Should an Englishman say to me:

"I have the will to friendship. Is there any particular thing which I can do to help?" I should answer him:

"Just now, or in any days to come, should you be tempted to remind us that we did not protest against the martyrdom of Belgium, that we were a bit slow in coming into the war,--oh, don't utter that reproach! Go back to your own past; look, for instance, at your guarantee to Denmark, at Lord John Russell's words: 'Her Majesty could not see with indifference a military occupation of Holstein'--and then see what England shirked; and read that scathing sentence spoken to her amba.s.sador in Russia: 'Then we may dismiss any idea that England will fight on a point of honor.' We had made you no such guarantee. We were three thousand miles away--how far was Denmark?

"And another thing. On August 6, 1919, when Britain's thanks to her land and sea forces were moved in both houses of Parliament, the gentleman who moved them in the House of Lords said something which, as it seems to me, adds nothing to the tribute he had already paid so eloquently.

He had spoken of the greater incentive to courage which the French and Belgians had, because their homes and soil were invaded, while England's soldiers had suffered no invasion of their island. They had not the stimulus of the knowledge that the frontier of their country had been violated, their homes broken up, their families enslaved, or worse. And then he added: 'I have sometimes wondered in my own mind, though I have hardly dared confess the sentiment, whether the gallant troops of our Allies would have fought with equal spirit and so long a time as they did, had they been engaged in the Highlands of Scotland or on the marches of the Welsh border.' Why express that wonder? Is there not here an instance of that needless overlooking of the feelings of others, by which, in times past, you have chilled those others? Look out for that."

And should an American say to me:

"I have the will to friendship. What can I personally do?" I should say:

"Play fair! Look over our history from that Treaty of Paris in 1783, down through the Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, and Manila Bay; look at the facts. You will see that no matter how acrimoniously England has quarreled with us, these were always family sc.r.a.ps, in which she held out for her own interests just as we did for ours. But whenever the question lay between ourselves and Spain, or France, or Germany, or any foreign power, England stood with us against them.

"And another thing. Not all Americans boast, but we have a reputation for boasting. Our Secretary of the Navy gave our navy the whole credit for transporting our soldiers to Europe when England did more than half of it. At Annapolis there has been a poster, showing a big American sailor with a doughboy on his back, and underneath the words, 'We put them across.' A brigadier general has written a book ent.i.tled, How the Marines Saved Paris. Beside the marines there were some engineers. And how about M Company of the 23rd regiment of the 2nd Division? It lost in one day at Chateau-Thierry all its men but seven. And did the general forget the 3rd Division between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans? Don't be like that brigadier general, and don't be like that American officer returning on the Lapland who told the British at his table he was glad to get home after cleaning up the mess which the British had made.

Resemble as little as possible our present Secretary of the Navy. Avoid boasting. Our contribution to victory was quite enough without boasting.

The head-master of one of our great schools has put it thus to his schoolboys who fought: Some people had to raise a hundred dollars. After struggling for years they could only raise seventy-five. Then a man came along and furnished the remaining necessary twenty-five dollars. That is a good way to put it. What good would our twenty-five dollars have been, and where should we have been, if the other fellows hadn't raised the seventy-five dollars first?"