John Redmond's Last Years Part 6

A new phase in Irish history had begun, of which Sir Edward Carson was the chief responsible author.

CHAPTER IV

THE RIVAL VOLUNTEER FORCES

The first stir of a new movement in Nationalist Ireland outside the old political lines came from Labour--from Irish Labour, as yet unorganized and terribly in need of organization. On August 26, 1913, a strike in Dublin began under the leadership of Mr. Larkin. It had all the violence and disorder which is characteristic of economic struggles where Labour has not yet learned to develop its strength; it opened new cleavages at this moment when national union was most necessary: it was fought with the pa.s.sion of despair by workers whose scale of pay and living was a disgrace to civilization; and after five months it was not settled but scotched, leaving dark embers of revolutionary hate scattered through the capital of Ireland.

One incident showed some of the consequences ready to spring, even in England itself, from the action taken in Ulster. Mr. Larkin at the end of October 1913 was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for sedition and inciting to disturbance. A fierce outcry ran through the Labour world in Great Britain; by-elections were in progress, and Government was angrily challenged with having one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for Labour and another for the Unionist party. To this pressure Government yielded, and Mr. Larkin was liberated after a few days in jail.

But in Ireland more formidable symptoms soon made themselves manifest.

Captain J.R. White, son of Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith, was a soldier by hereditary instinct and had won the Distinguished Service Order in South Africa. But some strain in his composition answered to other calls, and upon Tolstoyan grounds he ceased to be a soldier, without ceasing to be a natural leader of men. His first public appearance was at a meeting in London in support of Home Rule addressed by a number of prominent persons who were not Roman Catholics. But his interests were plainly not so much Nationalist as broadly humanitarian; freedom for the individual soul rather than for the nation was his object: and he suddenly enrolled himself among Mr. Larkin's allies. His proposal was outlined to a great a.s.sembly of the strikers gathered in front of Liberty Hall: Mr. Larkin set it out. They must no longer be "content to a.s.semble in hopeless haphazard crowds" but must "agree to bring themselves under the influences of an ordered and sympathetic discipline." "Labour in its own defence must begin to train itself to act with disciplined courage and with organized and concentrated force.

How could they accomplish this? By taking a leaf out of the book of Carson. If Carson had permission to train his braves of the North to fight against the aspirations of the Irish people, then it was legitimate and fair for Labour to organize in the same militant way to preserve their rights and to ensure that if they were attacked they would be able to give a very satisfactory account of themselves."

Thus began in a small sectional manner a national movement which led far indeed. Mr. O'Cathasaigh, from whose _Story of the Irish Citizen Army_ I quote, attributes the failure of that purely Labour organization chiefly to the establishment of the Irish Volunteers.

This was a development which Redmond on his part neither willed nor approved, yet one which in the circ.u.mstances was inevitable. Who could suppose that the formation of combatant forces would remain a monopoly of any party? There was no mistaking the weight which a hundred thousand Ulster Volunteers, drilled and regimented, threw into Sir Edward Carson's advocacy. As early as September 1913, during the parliamentary recess, Redmond received at least one letter--and possibly he received many--urging him to raise the standard of a similar force, and pointing out that if he did not take this course it might be taken by others less fit to guide it. The letter of which I speak elicited no answer. It was never his habit to reply to inconvenient communications--a policy which he inherited from Parnell, who held that nearly every letter answered itself within six months, if it were let alone. Certainly in this case it so happened. Long before six months were up, facts had made argument superfluous.

Wisdom is easy after the event, and few would dispute now that the const.i.tutional party ought either to have dissociated itself completely from the appeal to force, or to have launched and controlled it from the outset. Neither of these lines was followed, and the responsibility for what was done and what was not done must lie with Redmond. Yet, as I read it, the key to his policy lay in a dread, not of war, but of civil war. To arm Irishmen against each other was of all possible courses to him the most hateful. It opened a vision of fratricidal strife, of an Ireland divided against itself by new and b.l.o.o.d.y memories.

Moreover, though he had, as the world came to know, soldiering in his blood--though the call to war, when he counted the war righteous, stirred what was deepest in him--by training and conviction he was essentially a const.i.tutionalist: he realized profoundly how strong were the forces behind const.i.tutionalism in Great Britain, how impregnable was the position of British Ministers if they boldly a.s.serted the law with equality as between man and man. Where he was mistaken was in his estimate of the Government with which he had to deal, and especially of Mr. Asquith. Speaking to his const.i.tuents early in the New Year of 1914 he said, "The Prime Minister is as firm as a rock, and is, I believe, the strongest and sanest man who has appeared in British politics in our time." The verdict of history might have borne out this judgment had Mr.

Asquith never been forced to face extraordinary times. In the event, it was Mr. Asquith's lack of firmness and failure in strength which drove Redmond into belated acceptance of a policy modelled on Sir Edward Carson's.

As early as July 1913 the demonstrations in Ulster led to discussion of a countermove among young men in Dublin. But there was no public proposal, until at the end of October Professor MacNeill, Vice-President of the Gaelic League, published an article in the League's official organ calling on Nationalist Ireland to drill and arm. The first meeting of a provisional committee followed a few days later. Support was asked from all sections of Nationalist opinion; but, as a whole, members of the United Irish League and of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who const.i.tuted the bulk of Redmond's following, refused to act. Still, about a third of the committee were supporters of the parliamentary party; they included Professor Kettle, who was from 1906 to 1910 among its most brilliant members. It was, however, significant that the Lord Mayor, a prominent official Nationalist, refused the use of the Mansion House for a meeting at which it was proposed to start the enrolment of Irish Volunteers. As a result, the venue was changed to the Rotunda, and so great enthusiasm was shown that the Rink was used for the a.s.sembly.

Even that did not suffice for half the gathering. Three overflow meetings were held, and four thousand men are said to have been enrolled that evening.

Yet the movement did not spread at once with rapidity. By the end of December recruits only amounted to ten thousand. For this two causes were answerable. The first was the honourable refusal of the committee to allow companies to be enrolled except according to locality. They would have no sectional companies of Sinn Fein volunteers, of United Irish League Volunteers, of Hibernian Volunteers. All must mix equally in the ranks. The second was the fear of most Nationalists that by joining an organization with which the national leader was not identified they might weaken his hand. This operated, although the declared intention of the organization was to strengthen Redmond's position. At Limerick in January Pea.r.s.e said: "In the Volunteer movement we are going to give Mr. Redmond a weapon which will enable him to enforce the demand for Home Rule."

Briefly, for several months the numbers of the new force did not show that the whole of Nationalist Ireland was in support of it. Ireland was waiting for a sign from Redmond, and it did not come. The events which literally drove Irish const.i.tutional Nationalists into following Ulster's example had still to occur.

There was, however, a wide extension of the cadres of the organization, and it was being spread by men some of whom--like Professor MacNeill--dissented from Redmond's att.i.tude of quiescence, while some were general opponents of the whole const.i.tutional policy. They covered the country with committees, recruited, it is true, from all sections of Nationalist Ireland. But it was inevitable that the element who distrusted Redmond, and whose distrust he reciprocated, should attain an influence out of all proportion to its following in the country.

Government's action--and this sentence will run like a refrain through the rest of this book--contributed largely to strengthen the extremists and to weaken Redmond's hold on the people. During eleven months the Ulster Volunteers had been drilling, had been importing arms, and no step was taken to interfere. Within ten days after the Irish Volunteer Force began to be enrolled, a proclamation (issued on December 4, 1913) prohibited the importation of military arms and ammunition into Ireland.

A system of search was inst.i.tuted. But the Ulstermen were already well supplied. Redmond was blamed for not forcing the withdrawal of the proclamation. He controlled the House of Commons, it was said. This was the line of argument constantly taken by dissentient Nationalists; and it was true that he could at any moment put the Government out. Critics did not stop to ask for whose advantage that would be. Government by issuing this proclamation had effected no good: they had embarra.s.sed their chief ally, and they had laid the foundation for an imposing structure of incidents which grew with pernicious rapidity into a monumental proof that law, even under a Liberal administration, has one aspect for Protestant Ulster and quite another for the rest of Ireland.

But in England at the beginning of the fateful year 1914 the Irish Volunteers had not yet become recognized as a factor in the main political situation. An att.i.tude of mind had been studiously fostered which found crude expression soon after the House met. One of the Liberal party was arguing that Ulster had made Home Rule an absolute necessity, because Nationalists would have "fourfold justification if they resisted in the way you have taught them to resist the Government of this country in maintaining the old system." "They have not the pluck," interjected Captain Craig, the most prominent of the Ulster members. The present Lord Chancellor, Mr. F.E. Smith, was voluble in declarations that Nationalists would "neither fight for Home Rule nor pay for Home Rule." These taunts did not ease Redmond's position, especially as it became plain that Ulster's threat of violence had succeeded.

Mr. Asquith, referring to the "conversations" between leaders which had taken place during the winter, said that since no definite agreement had been reached the Government had decided to reopen the matter in the House. This meant, as Redmond pointed out with some asperity, that the Prime Minister had accepted responsibility for taking the initiative in making proposals to meet objections whose reasonableness he did not admit. The Opposition, he thought, should have been left to put forward some plan.

Yet Redmond's att.i.tude, and the att.i.tude of the House, was considerably affected by an unusual speech which had been delivered by the Ulster leader.

Sir Edward Carson, as everyone knows, is not an Ulsterman, and the chief of many advantages which Ulster gained from his advocacy was that Ulster's case was never stated to Great Britain as Ulstermen themselves would have stated it. It is not true to say that Ulstermen by habit think of Ireland as consisting of two nations, for all Ulstermen traditionally regard themselves as Irish and so have always described themselves without qualification. But it is true to say that Ulster Protestants have regarded Irish Catholics as a separate and inferior caste of Irishmen. The belief has been ingrained into them that as Protestants they are morally and intellectually superior to those of the other religion. Their whole political att.i.tude is determined by this conviction. They refuse to come under a Dublin Parliament because in it they would be governed by a majority whom they regard as their inferiors. It is in their deliberate view natural that Roman Catholics should submit to be controlled by Protestants, unnatural that Protestants should submit to be controlled by Roman Catholics.

It does not express the truth to say that Sir Edward Carson was adroit enough to avoid putting this view of the case to the electors of Great Britain or to the House of Commons. Temperamentally and instinctively, he did not share it. He was a Southern Irishman who at the opening of his life held himself, as not one Ulsterman in a thousand does, perfectly free to make up his mind for or against the maintenance of the Union. He reached the conclusion not only that Home Rule would be disastrous for Ireland, for the United Kingdom, and for the British Empire, but that it would mean for Irishmen the acceptance of an inferior status in the Empire. As citizens of the United Kingdom, he held, they were more honourably situated than they could be as citizens of an Irish State within the Empire. This was an att.i.tude of mind which Ulster could endorse, although it did not fully represent Ulster's conviction: but this was the case which Sir Edward Carson always made on behalf of Ulster, and he made it as an Irishman whose personal interests and connections lay in the South of Ireland, not in the North. His argument was the more persuasive because it was based on a view of Ireland's true interest--not of Ulster's only; and it was the harder on that account for Redmond to repel peremptorily. More than this, between him and Redmond there was an old personal tie. The Irish Bar is a true centre of intercourse between men of varying political and religious beliefs, and as junior barristers Edward Carson and John Redmond went the Munster circuit together.

All this lay behind the appeal which on February 11, 1914, was implied rather than expressed in the novel phrase and still more unaccustomed tone of a consummate orator.

"Believe me," Sir Edward Carson said, "whatever way you settle the Irish question" (and that phrase threw over the cry of "No Home Rule"), "there are only two ways to deal with Ulster. It is for statesmen to say which is the best and right one. She is not a part of the community which can be bought. She will not allow herself to be sold. You must therefore either coerce her if you go on, or you must in the long run, by showing that good government can come under the Home Rule Bill, try and win her over to the case of the rest of Ireland. You probably can coerce her--though I doubt it. If you do, what will be the disastrous consequences not only to Ulster, but to this country and the Empire?

Will my fellow-countryman"--and at this emphatic word, which jettisoned absolutely the theory of two nations, the speaker turned to his left, where Redmond sat in his accustomed place below the gangway--"will my fellow-countryman, the leader of the Nationalist Party, have gained anything? I will agree with him--I do not believe he wants to triumph any more than I do. But will he have gained anything if he takes over these people and then applies for what he used to call--at all events his party used to call--the enemies of the people to come in and coerce them into obedience? No, sir; one false step taken in relation to Ulster will, in my opinion, render for ever impossible a solution of the Irish question. I say this to my Nationalist fellow-countrymen, and, indeed, also to the Government: you have never tried to win over Ulster. You have never tried to understand her position. You have never alleged, and can never allege, that this Bill gives her one atom of advantage."

Then, carried away by the course of his argument, an angry note came into his voice, and before a minute had pa.s.sed we were back in the old atmosphere. He accused us of wanting "not Ulster's affections but her taxes."

Well might Redmond say when he rose that Sir Edward Carson had been heard by all of us with very mixed feelings. "I care not about the a.s.sent of Englishmen," he said; "I am fighting this matter out between a fellow-countryman and myself, and I say that it was an unworthy thing for him to say that I am animated by these base motives, especially after he had lectured the House on the undesirability of imputing motives."

On the personal note Redmond was to the full as effective as his opponent, and his speech of that day was memorable. It was also very much more to the taste of the Liberal rank and file than what came from their own front bench. "We do not by any means take the tragic view of the probabilities or even the possibilities of what is called civil war in Ulster," he said; and added that the House of Commons ought, in his opinion, "to resent as an affront these threats of civil war." Yet in the end he promised, for the sake of peace, "consideration in the friendliest spirit" (not very different from acceptance) of any proposals that the Government might feel called upon to put forward.

It is noteworthy that in this prolonged debate there was no reference to the new fact of a second volunteer force. But on February 12th a question was asked about it. On the 17th there was allusion to another growing element of danger--the discussions among officers of the Army of a combined refusal to serve against Ulster. All these factors must have weighed with Redmond and with his chief colleagues in their discussions with the Government during the next three weeks. "Friendly consideration" pa.s.sed into acceptance on March 9th, when Mr. Asquith, introducing the Home Rule Bill for its pa.s.sage in the third consecutive session (as required by the Parliament Act), outlined the proposed modifications in it. They involved part.i.tion. But the exclusion was to be optional by areas and limited in time.

The proposal to take a vote by counties had, it will be remembered, been originally suggested by Mr. Bonar Law, and in following the Prime Minister he could not well repudiate it. The test, however, which he now put forward was whether or not the proposals satisfied Ulster: and he fixed upon the time-limit of six years as being wholly unacceptable.

Redmond, on the other hand, while declaring that the Government had gone to "the extremest limits of concession," said that the proposals had one merit: they would "elicit beyond doubt or question by a free ballot the real opinion of the people of Ulster." This indicated his conviction that if Home Rule really came the majority in Ulster would prefer to take their chances under it; the proposal of exclusion being merely a tactical manoeuvre to defeat Home Rule by splitting the Nationalists.

Its efficacy for that purpose was immediately demonstrated. Mr. O'Brien followed Redmond with a virulent denunciation of "the one concession of all others which must be hateful and unthinkable from the point of view of any Nationalist in Ireland." Opposition from Mr. O'Brien and from Mr.

Healy was no new thing. But by acceptance of these proposals the Nationalist leader made their opposition for the first time really formidable. Telegrams rained in that March afternoon--above all on Mr.

Devlin, from his supporters in Belfast, who felt themselves betrayed and shut out from a national triumph which they had been the most zealous to promote. From this time onward the position of Redmond personally and of his party as a whole was perceptibly weakened. Especially an alienation began between him and the Catholic hierarchy. It was impossible that the clergy should be well disposed towards proposals which, as Mr. Healy put it, would make Cardinal Logue a foreigner in his own cathedral at Armagh.

Yet upon the whole the shake to Redmond's power was less than might have been expected--largely, no doubt, because the offer was repelled. Sir Edward Carson described it as "sentence of death with stay of execution for six years." With a great advocate's instinct, he fastened on the point in the Government's proposal which was least defensible.

In my opinion these modifications of the Bill were never adequately discussed in the meetings of the Irish party. All was done between the Government and Redmond's inner cabinet, consisting of Redmond himself, Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and Mr. T.P. O'Connor. The negotiations were most delicate and difficult, and above all secrecy is hard to maintain when a body of over seventy men, each keenly concerned for the view of his const.i.tuents, comes to be consulted. Yet I think it a pity that the party never thrashed this question out. Once the principle of option was admitted, a great deal had to be considered. Voting must be a referendum either to the province as a whole, to the const.i.tuencies separately, or to local units of administration. A referendum by const.i.tuencies was as impossible as one by parishes: for instance, Mr. Devlin's West Belfast, out of the city's four divisions, would certainly have voted to remain under the Irish Parliament, and an absurd situation would have resulted.

The choice lay between a vote by counties or by the province as a whole.

In the province, three counties out of nine were as predominantly Nationalist as any part of Leinster. In two others, Tyrone and Fermanagh, Nationalists were about 55 per cent of the electorate. But the bulk of the population of Ulster resided in four counties of the north-east, so that Protestants over the whole province had a majority of some two hundred thousand. An appeal to the province, therefore, might involve the exclusion from Home Rule of a very large area which was thoroughly Nationalist. On the other hand, every scheme of exclusion had in view the possibility of the excluded area changing its mind on the question after a short trial. To separate the four overwhelmingly Protestant counties was to set up a body in which a change of vote would be much harder to bring about than in the province. As a matter of statesmanship there was much to be said for closing with the Ulstermen's original demand that the province should come in or stay out as a whole.

It satisfied Ulster's sentiment and lessened the chances of crystallizing a Protestant block of excluded territory, which would tend to become less and less Irish.

The answer to this was that Nationalists would never consent and did never consent to the possibility of permanent exclusion for any part.

Insistence on the time-limit was from this point of view a matter of absolute principle. Yet many believed then, and believe now, that if any part of Ulster were excluded by legislation it would certainly come in voluntarily after a short period. On the other hand, if any part were excluded even for a year, it was difficult to believe that it could ever be brought in except by its own consent. The view, however, to which we were committed (with the party's general approval), was expressed by Redmond at the customary St. Patrick's Day Nationalist banquet in London.

"To agree to the permanent part.i.tion of Ireland would be," he said, "an outrage upon nature and upon history." He quoted a phrase used by Mr.

Austen Chamberlain, who had described it as "the statutory negation of Ireland's national claim." But, he argued, no such sacrifice of principle had been made. The demand of Nationalists was for a Parliament for the whole of Ireland, having power to deal with "every purely Irish matter." Temporary limitations of this demand had already been accepted.

"We have agreed, as Parnell agreed in the Bill of 1886, and as we all agreed in the Bill of 1893, that the power of dealing with some of the most vital of Irish questions should not come within the purview of the new Parliament for a definite number of years." The control of police, for instance, was reserved to the Imperial Parliament in all those Bills for a term of years. But this did not mean that Parnell or we abandoned Ireland's right to manage her own police. Reservation of the police in perpetuity would have been impossible to accept. In the same way, said Redmond, "the automatic ending of any period of exclusion is for us a fixed and immutable principle."

To maintain this conformity with national sentiment great advantages were sacrificed. The whole debates of this period turned on the question of the time-limit. If it had never been raised, opposition would still have existed, but the fact would have been plain from the outset that Protestant Ulster claimed to dictate not only where it had the majority, but where the majority was against it. Redmond probably believed that the opinion of Nationalists in the North could not be brought to consent to abandonment of the time-limit. If so, he probably underrated, then as always, the influence he possessed. It is always easy to persuade Irishmen that if you are going to do a thing you should do it "decently." What is more, a real effect could have been produced on much moderate opinion in Ulster by saying to Ulster: "Stay out if you like, and come in when you like. When you come in, you will be more than welcome." But the decision for this course would have needed to be taken before the proposals were made, since any attempt to enlarge them was bound to renew and intensify the inevitable storm of Nationalist dissent. Whatever the proposal, it should have been absolutely the last word of concession.

If a clear proposal of local option by counties without time-limit had been put before Parliament and the electorate, I do not think our position in Ireland would have been worse than it was made by the proposal of temporary exclusion, and it would have been greatly strengthened in Parliament and in the United Kingdom. All moderate men, and many p.r.o.nounced Unionists, were becoming uneasy under the perpetual menace of trouble. Events which now followed rapidly turned the uneasiness into grave anxiety, but did not turn it to the profit of the Government.

The policy which was adopted in Mr. Asquith's proposal of March 9th was the policy which Mr. Churchill had pushed from the first introduction of the Home Rule Bill, even when it was formally disavowed by the Prime Minister. Contemptuous rejection of it by the Ulstermen when it was proposed was not calculated to strengthen Mr. Churchill's personal position, or to soothe his temper, and on March 14th he made a speech at Bradford which very greatly stirred public feeling. If Ulster really rejects the offer, said Mr. Churchill, "it can only be because they prefer shooting to voting and the bullet to the ballot." Should civil war break out in Ulster, the issue would not be confined to Ireland: the issue would be whether civil and parliamentary government in these realms was to be beaten down by the menace of armed force. Bloodshed was lamentable, but there were worse things. If the law could not prevail, if the veto of violence was to replace the veto of privilege, then, said the orator, "let us go forward and put these grave matters to a proof."

When Mr. Churchill next appeared in the House of Commons, a great outburst of cheering showed what a volume of feeling had found expression in his speech. Redmond came to the St. Patrick's Day banquet under the impression of that scene, and he spoke with a confidence which gives to his words a tragic irony to-day. He cited "the superb speech of Mr. Churchill" as evidence that "what is our last word is also the last word of the Government."

"If the Opposition have spoken their last word," he said, "the Bill will now proceed upon its natural course. It will proceed rapidly and irresistibly, and in a few short weeks become the law of the land."

The weeks have lengthened into years, and so much has happened in them that I keep no clear memory of that evening, though I was present. But it represented the temper of the time, among Home Rulers, and more particularly among Irish Nationalists, who generally held the opinion that the military preparations in Ulster were, as Mr. Devlin called them, "a hollow masquerade."

We saw the other side of the picture on Thursday, March 19th, when a Vote of Censure was moved. Mr. Bonar Law launched on the House of Commons a new and sinister suggestion.

"What about the Army? If it is only a question of disorder, the Army I am sure will obey you, and I am sure that it ought to obey you; but if it really is a question of civil war, soldiers are citizens like the rest of us."

Sir Edward rose immediately the Prime Minister had replied to Mr. Bonar Law, and his speech was furious. "In consequence of the trifling with this subject by the Prime Minister and the provocation, which he has endorsed, by the First Lord of the Admiralty last Sat.u.r.day, I feel I ought not to be here but in Belfast," he said; and he indicated his intention of proceeding there as soon as he had spoken. What he had to say chiefly concerned the Army, and the preparations which were being made at the War Office for the despatch of troops to Ulster. He suggested that there was the intention to provoke an attack so that there might be "pretext for putting them down."