Six days of the Irish Republic Part 14

"The Insurance Act, the killing of land purchase, and the founding of the A.O.H., sapped the foundations of belief, and it became known that 'a high official achieved his ambitions on the judicial bench only by becoming a professing Catholic and accepting initiation under the rites of Mr. Devlin's brotherhood. The staff of the _Freeman's Journal_, the official patriot organ, got endless jobs. At the same time Mr. Redmond excluded from his party, without trial or grounds, a dozen leading members opposed to this policy.'

"All that was sober, unselfish, self-respecting, and self-reliant quitted his ranks and joined the Sinn Fein movement without thought of rebellion or pro-Germanism.

"The courage of the Sinn Feiners atoned for much of their folly in the mind of those who realized that their spirit was not pro-German, but, in the main, a revolt against the conversion of Dublin Castle into a Redmondite Tammany Hall. Their uprising was the answer to the corruption, jobbery, and judge-mongering of the Molly Maguires masquerading in the vestments of religion. Hence the wholesale arrests of men not in rebellion have evoked no protest from Mr. Redmond, 'who watches calmly the dispersal of his critics,' hoping to find a new lease of life under a new jobbing nominee."

The Larkinists were, if anything, still more out of sympathy with the official party because, in the words of Connolly, they looked upon them as no better than the English conqueror, since they took the side of the social conqueror in the economic struggles of life in the city.

This seems certainly to have a touch of truth, for if ever any body of men resembled the unfortunate victims of rural landlords it was these wretched victims of the tenement slums, the denunciation of which seemed to have no part in the official Parliamentary programme, so much so as to compel Labour to create its own party and evolve its own leader, which it had accordingly done in the person of Jim Larkin.

Now, if anyone wishes to judge James Connolly they should not look at the soldier for a week; they must examine the life-long student of economics and read his "History of Labour in Irish History" and his "Reconquest of Ireland," for it is here we have the revolution in its cause, which was just as much economic as political.

It is the custom to speak of the Larkinites with scant respect, as if they were the mad, blind mult.i.tude of the "have nots" in perpetual prey upon the "haves"; but it is quite a false idea, for they have in their movement some of those who count socially and intellectually.

Thus, for example, the training of the Citizens' Army was almost entirely carried out by Captain J. R. White, D.S.O., son of the late Field-Marshal Sir George White, whose "Labour" ideas got him three months' imprisonment only a few weeks ago.

As to the att.i.tude of the average Dublin merchant towards the new labour party that is arising, I know of no finer apology for Larkin than the brilliant letter of "ae." to the _Irish Times_ in the days of the great strike, when he addressed the "masters of the city."

In it he warned them--the aristocracy of industry--because like all aristocracies they tended to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that they and their cla.s.s and their every action were being considered and judged day by day by those who had the power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty was making our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog. He reminded them that their a.s.sumption that they were answerable to themselves alone for their actions in the industries they controlled was becoming less and less tolerable, in a world so crowded with necessitous life; but what he chiefly held them responsible for was their incompetence as commercial men, because, with the cheapest market in the world at their command, they could never invite the confidence of investors.

What was even worse than their business incompetence, however, was, according to "ae.," their bad citizenship, for had they not allowed the poor to be herded together so that one could only think of certain places in Dublin as of a pestilence?

"There are twenty thousand rooms in Dublin," continued the terrible indictment, "in each of which live entire families and sometimes more, where no functions of the body can be concealed, and delicacy and modesty are creatures that are stifled ere they are born." In fact, "nothing that had ever been done against them cried so much to heaven for vengeance as their own actions, such as the terrible lock-out, which threw nearly a third of the whole city on to the verge of starvation"; and he concluded:--

"You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy in industry. There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of the aristocracy of industry will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land, if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you."

It was from such roots that the spirit of the Citizens' Army drew its inspiration (and possibly not a few of the looters as well), and it is impossible to understand the rage of these men without fully comprehending the condition in which they were compelled to live and move.

True, the revolt was not with any concrete economic end in view; but, none the less, it was coloured throughout with economic grievances.

It was the very torture of the ordinary conditions of peace that made them resent the fear of any additional burdens and sacrifices such as were demanded of their patriotism.

Yet what did patriotism and Empire mean to them, save only the doubling of their burdens and their masters' profits?

If the Scotch workman in London and the Scotch worker on the Clyde and the Welsh miner in the coalfields round Cardiff felt it, much more must the Irish docker; and it must never be forgotten that there is a triple link of blood, interest, and common sympathy between the workers of the two islands; and one has only to glance at the way the respective labour Presses of the two countries kept in touch with each other for the past year to realize how much an English labour problem the Irish political problem really was.

This brings me to some further factors which can be discerned in the rising--firstly, the fear of conscription; secondly, the hatred of militarism; and, thirdly, the chronic loathing of Castle government.

With regard to conscription, there has always been a dread of it. They had seen it come in England, and had watched anxiously the way it had been introduced and applied, and the farce of the Tribunals, whose action, in the words of the _Freeman's Journal_, would have been sufficient to cause a revolution had they behaved in Ireland as they behaved in England.

All during the summer months they had seen the cloud gathering, and Irishmen caught by a legal technicality and forced into the system; but all this came to a climax when the cry of cowardice was raised at Liverpool, as five hundred young emigrants, who would never have been helped to live for Ireland in their own country, were suddenly held up by order of the Cunard Company--which, as a matter of fact, owed nearly its whole prosperity to its coffin boats of the Famine days, and whose glaringly seductive posters had emptied Ireland, neither for America nor Ireland's sake, but purely to get the pa.s.sage-money of the emigrants who were now asked to go instead and "help England to give Constantinople to Russia, even if it cost them their lives."

For they had a way of blunt speaking, these men whose everyday life was an heroic fight for the home against "Hun" poverty.

When the cry of "cowardice" was raised, however, it was high time to protest, and none voiced that protest so well as Dr. O'Dwyer, the Bishop of Limerick, who wrote the following letter to the _Munster News_:--

"SIR,--The treatment which the poor Irish emigrant lads have received at Liverpool is enough to make any Irishman's blood boil with anger and indignation. What wrong have they done to deserve insults and outrage at the hands of a brutal English mob? They do not want to be forced into the English Army, and sent to fight English battles in some part of the world. Is not that within their right? They are supposed to be free men, but they are made to feel that they are prisoners, who may be compelled to lay down their lives for a cause that is not worth 'three rows of pins' to them.

"It is very probable that these poor Connaught peasants know little or nothing of the meaning of the war. Their blood is not stirred by the memories of Kossovo, and they have no burning desire to die for Serbia.

They would much prefer to be allowed to till their own potato gardens in peace in Connemara. Small nationalities, and the wrongs of Belgium and Rheims Cathedral, and all the other cosmopolitan considerations that rouse the enthusiasm of the Irish Party, but do not get enough of recruits in England, are far too high-flying for uneducated peasants, and it seems a cruel wrong to attack them because they cannot rise to the level of the disinterested Imperialism of Mr. T. P. O'Connor and the rest of the New Brigade.

"But in all the shame and humiliation of this disgraceful episode, what angers one most is that there is no one, not even one of their own countrymen, to stand up and defend them. Their crime is that they are not ready to die for England. Why should they? What have they or their forbears ever got from England that they should die for her? Mr. Redmond will say a Home Rule Act on the Statute Book. But any intelligent Irishman will say a simulacrum of Home Rule, with an express notice that it is never to come into operation.

"This war may be just or unjust, but any fair-minded man will admit that it is England's war, not Ireland's. When it is over, if England wins, she will hold a dominant power in this world, and her manufactures and her commerce will increase by leaps and bounds. Win or lose, Ireland will go on, in our old round of misgovernment, intensified by a grinding poverty which will make life intolerable. Yet the poor fellows who do not see the advantage of dying for such a Cause are to be insulted as 'shirkers' and 'cowards,' and the men whom they have raised to power and influence have not one word to say on their behalf.

"If there is to be conscription, let it be enforced all round, but it seems to be the very intensity of injustice to leave English shirkers by the million to go free, and coerce the small remnant of the Irish race into a war which they do not understand, and which, whether it is right or wrong, has but a secondary and indirect interest for them.

"I am, dear sir, "Your obedient servant, "-|- EDWARD THOMAS, "Bishop of Limerick.

"_November 10, 1915._"

The seditious Press took up the cry: "Conscription had not even been applied to her own sons, yet England was applying it to Irishmen," said Gilbert Galbraith in _Honesty_; adding: "for all she wants of Irishmen is their lives that she might live," and he warned Irishmen that "she (England) who took everything they had and stripped them naked and left them like Christ to the ribald jest and sneer of the rabble in the world's back-streets, would, like every bully, try to have revenge when she got them by themselves."

Had this been mere verbal sword-play, however, I should not quote it; it was more: it was the taking up of the challenge of cowardice.

"Will you in G.o.d's name get ready to answer her?" concluded the famous article in which he appealed to these would-be exiles repatriated by force; "because, if you want to, all you have to do is to get into touch with the nearest corps of Irish Volunteers." They would give them instructions, he added pointedly, how to act, and what they did they had better do quickly, for it might be too late on the morrow.

Could one be surprised, I ask, if some of these would-be emigrants answered the taunt gun in hand?--especially when men like Captain White, who was afterwards to try to rouse the South Wales miners to endeavour to save Connolly, was telling them plainly:--

"You are fast being led into industrial slavery. You know it, and I am apprehensive and angry, but too bewildered to move. To rob you of your right over your own poor bodies is the workers' tyrant. To rob you of your sovereign power over your own will is the workers' devil.

"Awake, brothers, before your liberty is dead. Arm yourselves against your real enemies. Say to the tyrants and their agents, 'The first man who lays hands on me against my will dies.'"

All this, I say, jumps to the eyes of anyone perusing the literature that produced the rising.

It is beside the point whether such argumentation be true or false, patriotic or seditious. The only point, as far as we are concerned in this quasi-medical diagnosis of diseased mentality, is whether or not these thoughts were present in the psychology of the combatants, and I maintain that the evidence is undeniable.

The att.i.tude of "conscientious objectors" to militarism in England is England's own affair. Yet I cannot, in my own mind, separate the personality of Sir John Simon from that of John Hampden. No doubt ship-money was necessary, and it was the patriotic thing to give it up, and no doubt the same applies to men for the Army: but when it came to the principle of the King taking money without the consent of Parliament, John Hampden thought it his duty to the traditions of his country to resist, just as Sir John Simon thought it his duty to the traditions of the British conscience to pa.s.sively protest--but that again, I say, is a matter for Englishmen.

The att.i.tude of the Irish conscientious objector, however, has always been of a more militant form, and this began to a.s.sert itself among the labour leaders in Ireland through the medium of the more outspoken of the English labour leaders. Whereas in England the ma.s.ses of workers are naturally loyal, in Ireland loyalty is a sustained effort against the grain of tradition. Hence, while in England the right to rebel fell on unsympathetic soil, in Ireland it merely relit the smouldering embers of past grievances into flame.

For there had been a growing epidemic of the phrase "Shoot them,"

applied almost indiscriminately, like a quack panacea, by political orators to every opponent on every conceivable subject since the war, and this was producing the most evil results.

Two quotations may suffice from the work by J. Bruce Glasier on "Militarism," which was freely circulated in Dublin by means of Liberty Hall, to ill.u.s.trate the strength of the feeling on this subject:--

"Although Great Britain is suffering neither from invasion from without nor insurrection from within, the military authorities are not only in command of the defences of our sh.o.r.es but of the civil authorities, and the whole population of the realm. The birthrights of British citizenship embodied in the Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus, and Bill of Rights are no longer inviolable. Martial Law--that is to say, military despotism--may be put in operation at will by the military commanders.

Civilians may be seized and tried by Army officers, and even sentenced to any penalty short of death without appeal to trial by jury. Our War Lord is made virtual dictator. A military censorship has been established over the Press and public meetings. Military officers may enter our houses, quarter troops upon us, take possession of our horses, motor-cars, cows, pigs, and pigeons. They may commandeer schools, factories, warehouses, farms, or any other kinds of public or private property. Strikes may be declared acts of treason, Trade Union officials arrested and tried by courts martial, and soldiers used as blacklegs--and no knowledge whatever of these happenings, not even of the existence of strikes or trade disputes, may reach the general public at all if the authorities so determine...."

A phrase that seems to have done great harm, and was specially singled out by the men of Liberty Hall, was "Shoot him!"--as a form of argument employed by every Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry orator, on every conceivable subject without the slightest const.i.tutional authority; but it must be said it was one used by all parties.

During the Home Rule controversy, for example, the Nationalists were just as fond of employing the phrase towards Carson as during the Welsh coal strikes Conservatives were of using it towards the miners.

The danger of such doctrines in Ireland is this, that whereas in England it is the upper cla.s.s princ.i.p.ally that is militarist, in Ireland it is princ.i.p.ally the lower cla.s.s, and whereas it is the Castle authorities who are always preaching the iniquity of physical force, it is the lower cla.s.ses who mainly admire it.

Realizing this, as any student of Irish history would, there should not have been the slightest doubt about the danger of employing force to men who not only had the principle of active resistance but the arms necessary to make it effective, and it has always appeared to me as the most marvellous thing the Liberals ever did that they were able to allow Ulster the full possession of arms without once provoking an occasion on which to actually put them to use.

The result of this fatal misuse of the words "Shoot him!" as a form of argument--which unauthoritative should be made a penal offence--was that the workers really feared that such irresponsible individuals if given the power would really carry out the threat, and determined to antic.i.p.ate the danger by a protest in arms.