The Crime Against Europe Part 7

So wrote in 1600 to Philip II, the Archbishop of Dublin, already quoted, Mattheo de Oviedo.

This prelate had been specially sent to Ireland "to see and understand the state of the country misrepresented by English emissaries at foreign courts."

The wrath of Elizabeth against O'Neill was largely due to his keeping in touch with the continent, whereby the lies of her agents abroad were turned to her own ridicule. To Ess.e.x, her Viceroy, she wrote: "Tyrone hath blazed in foreign parts the defeat of regiments, the death of captains, and loss of men of quality in every quarter."

O'Neill not only for years beat her generals in the field, her beat herself and her councillors at their own game. To Ess.e.x, in an ecstacy of rage at the loss of the last great army sent, she wrote (September 17th, 1599): "To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust the devil upon his religion. Only this we are sure (for we see it in effect), that you have prospered so ill for us by your warfare, as we cannot but be very jealous lest we should be as well overtaken by the treaty."

(Ess.e.x wished to bring O'Neill in by a treaty which, while ostensibly conceding the terms of the Irish prince was to allow the Queen time to carry out her purpose.)

The Irish princes knew Elizabeth and her Ministers, as well as she read Ess.e.x. "Believe no news from Ireland of any agreement in this country," they had written to Philip II in 1597, "great offers have been made by the Queen of England, but we will not break our word and promise to your." In a letter written a year earlier (Oct. 18, 1596), replying to the special envoy sent by the king, they said: "Since the former envoys left us we have used every means in our power, as we promised we should do, to gain time and procrastination from one day to another. But how could we impose on so clever an enemy so skilled in every kind of cunning and cheating if we did not use much dissimulation, and especially if we did not pretend we were anxious for peace? We will keep firm and unshaken the promises which we made to Your Majesty with our last breath; if we do not we shall incur at once the wrath of G.o.d and the contempt of men."

How faithfully they kept those promises and how the Spanish King failed in his, their fate and the bitter ruin of their country shows.

That men fighting for Ireland had to meet Elizabeth and her statesmen with something of her own cunning is made very clear to anyone reading the State papers in Ireland.

Ess.e.x, in one of his "answers" wrote: "I advise Her Majesty to allow me, at my return to Dublin, to conclude this treaty, yielding some of their grants in the present; and when Her Majesty has made secret preparations to enable me to prosecute, I will find quarrels enough to break and give them a deadly blow."

The Irish, however, failed in this contest. They were not sufficiently good liars, and lacked the higher flights of villainy necessary to sustain the encounter. The essential English way in Tudor days, and much later, for administering a deadly blow to an Irish patriot was "a.s.sa.s.sination." Poison frequently took the place of the knife, and was often administered wrapped in a leaf of the British Bible. A certain Atkinson, knowing the religious nature of Cecil, the Queen's Prime Minister, the founder of a long line of statesmen, foremost as champions of Church and Book, suggested the getting rid of O'Neill by some "poisoned Hosts." This proposal to use the Blessed Sacrament as a veritable Last Supper for the last great Irish chief remains on record, was endorsed by Cecil.

Another Briton, named Annyas, was charged to poison "the most dangerous and open rebel in Munster," Florence MacCarthy More, the great MacCarthy. Elizabeth's Prime Minister piously endorsed the deed--"though his soul never had the thought to consent to the poisoning of a dog, much less a Christian ."

To Carew, the President of Munster, Cecil wrote enjoining the a.s.sa.s.sination of the young Earl of Desmond, then "in the keeping of Carew": "Whatever you do to abridge him out of Providence shall never be imputed to you for a fault, but exceedingly commended by the Queen." After this, we are not surprised to learn that in her instructions to Mountjoy, the successor of Ess.e.x, the Queen recommended "to his special care to preserve the true exercise of religion among her loving subjects." As O'Neill was still in the field with a large army, she prudently pointed out, however, that the time "did not permit that he should intermeddle by any severity or violence in matters of religion until her power was better established there to countenance his action." That the character of their adversary was faithfully appreciated by contemporary Irish opinion stands plain in a letter written by James Fitzthomas, nephew of the great Earl Gerald of Desmond, to Philip II. "The government of the English is such as Pharaoh himself never used the like; for they content not themselves with all temporal prosperity, but by cruelty desire our blood and perpetual destruction to blot out the whole remembrance of our posterity--for that Nero, in his time, was far inferior to that Queen in cruelty."

The Irish chiefs well sustained their part in meeting this combination of power and perfidy, and merited, on the highest grounds of policy the help so often promised by the King of Spain. They showed him not only by their valour on the field but by their sagacious council how great a part was reserved for Ireland in the affairs of Europe if he would but profit from it and do his part.

In this the Spanish King failed. Philip II had died in 1598, too immersed in religious trials to see that the centre of his griefs was pivoted on the possession of Ireland by the female Nero. With his son and successor communication was maintained and in a letter of Philip III to O'Neill, dated from Madrid, Dec. 24th, 1599, we read: "n.o.ble and well beloved I have already written a joint letter to you and your relative O'Donnell, in which I replied to a letter of both of you. By this, which I now write to you personally I wish to let you know my good will towards you, and I mean to prove it, not only by word, but by deed." That promise was not fulfilled, or so inadequately fulfilled that the help, when it came, was insufficient to meet the needs of the case.

History tells us what the sad consequences were to the cause of civilisation in Ireland, from the failure of the Spanish King to realize the greatness of his responsibilities. But the evil struck deeper than to Ireland alone. Europe lost more than her historians have yet realised from the weakness of purpose that let Ireland go down transfixed by the sword of Elizabeth.

Had the fate of Europe been then controlled by a Hohenzollern, instead of by a Spanish Hapsburg, how different might have been the future of the world!

Although Europe had forgotten Ireland, Ireland had never forgotten Europe. Natural outpost and sentinel of that continent in the West for three-hundred years now gagged and bound, since the flight to Rome of her last native Princes, she stands to-day as in the days of Philip III, if an outcast from European civilization non the less rejecting the insular tradition of England, as she has rejected her insular Church. And now once more in her career she turns to the greatest of European Sovereigns, to win his eyes to the oldest, and certainly the most faithful of European peoples. Ireland already has given and owes much to Germany.

In the dark ages intercourse between the Celtic people of the West and the Rhinelands and Bavaria was close and long sustained.

Irish monasteries flourished in the heart of Germany, and German architecture gave its note possibly to some of the fairest cathedral churches in Ireland.

Clonfert and Cashel are, perhaps amongst the most conspicuous examples of the influence of that old-time intercourse with Germany. To-day, when little of her past remains to venerate, her ancient language on what seemed its bed of death owes much of its present day revival to German scholarship and culture. Probably the foremost Gaelic scholar of the day is the occupant of the Chair of Celtic at Berlin University, and Ireland recognises with a grat.i.tude she is not easily able to express, all that her ancient literature owes to the genius and loving intellect of Dr. Kuno Meyer.

The name of Ireland may be known on the Bourses or in the Chancelleries of Europe; it is not without interest, even fame, in the centres of German academical culture. But that the German State may also be interested in the political fate of Ireland is believed by the present writer.

Maurice Fitzgerald, the outlawed claimant to the Earldom of Desmond, wrote to Philip II, from Lisbon on September 4th, 1593:

"We have thought it right to implore your Majesty to send the aid you will think fit and with it to send us (the Irish refugees in the Peninsula) to defend and uphold the same undertaking; for we hope, with G.o.d's help Your Majesty will be victorious and conquer and hold as your own the kingdom of Ireland.--We trust in G.o.d that Your Majesty and the Council will weigh well the advantages that will ensue to Christendom from this enterprise--since the opportunity is so good and the cause so just and weighty, and the undertaking so easily completed."

The history of human freedom is written in letters of blood. It is the law of G.o.d. No people who clutch to safety, who shun death are worthy of freedom.

The dead who die for Ireland are the only live men in a free Ireland.

The rest are cattle. Freedom is kept alive in man's blood only by shedding of that blood. It was not an act of a foreign Parliament they were seeking, those splendid "scorners of death," the lads and young men of Mayo, who awaited with a fearless joy the advance of the English army fresh from the defeat of Humbert in 1798. Then, if ever, Irishmen might have run from a victorious and pitiless enemy who, having captured the French General and murdered in cold blood the seven hundred Killala peasants who were with his colours, were now come to Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the last stronghold of Irish rebellion.

The ill-led and half armed peasants, the last Irishmen in Ireland to stand the pitched fight for their country's freedom, went to meet the army of England, as the Protestant Bishop, who saw them, says:--"running upon death with as little appearance of reflection or concern as if they were hastening to a show."

The late Queen Victoria, in one of her letters to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abortive rising of fifty years later in 1848:

"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland, and I think it is very likely to go off without any contest, which people (and I think rightly) rather regret. The Irish should receive _a good lesson or they will begin again_." (Page 223, Vol. II, Queen Victoria's letters.) Her Majesty was profoundly right. Ireland needed that lesson in 1848, as she needs it still more to-day. Had Irishmen died in 1848 as they did in 1798 Ireland would be to-day fifty years nearer to freedom. It is because a century has pa.s.sed since Europe saw Ireland willing to die that to-day Europe has forgotten that she lives.

As I began this essay with a remark of Charles Lever on Germany so shall end it here with a remark of Lever on his own country, Ireland.

In a letter to a friend in Dublin, he thus put the epitaph of Europe on the grave of a generation who believed that "no human cause was worth the shedding one drop of human blood."

"As to Ireland all foreign sympathy is over owing to the late cowardice and poltroonery of the patriots. _Even Italians can fight_"

(Letter of C. Lever from Florence, August 19th, 1848).

It is only the truth that wounds. It is that reproach that has cursed Ireland for a century.

Sedition, the natural garment for an Irishman to wear, has been for a hundred years a bloodless sedition. It is this fiery shirt of Nessus that has driven our strong men mad. How to shed our blood with honour, how to give our lives for Ireland--that has been, that is the problem of Irish nationality.

Chapter VII

THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

It would be idle to attempt to forecast the details of a struggle between Great Britain and Germany. That is a task that belongs to the War Department of the two States. I have a.s.signed myself merely to point out that such a struggle is inevitable, and to indicate what I believe to be the supreme factors in the conflict, and how one of these, Ireland, and that undoubtedly the most important factor, has been overlooked by practically every predecessor of Germany in the effort to make good at sea. The Spaniards in Elizabeth's reign, the French of Louis XIV and of the Directory took some steps, it is true, to challenge England's control of Ireland, but instead of concentrating their strength upon that line of attack they were content to dissipate it upon isolated expeditions and never once to push home the a.s.sault on the one point that was obviously the key to the enemy's whole position. At any period during that last three centuries, with Ireland gone, England was, if not actually at the mercy of her a.s.sailants, certainly reduced to impotency beyond her own sh.o.r.es. But while England knew the value to herself of Ireland, she appreciated to the full the fact that this profitable juxtaposition lay on her right side hidden from the eyes of Europe.

"Will anyone a.s.sert," said Gladstone, "that we would have dared to treat Ireland as we have done had she lain, not between us and the ocean, but between us and the continent?" And while the bulk of England, swollen to enormous dimensions by the gains she drew from Ireland interposed between her victim and Europe, her continental adversaries were themselves the victims of that strange mental disease psychologists term the collective illusion. All the world saw that which in fact did not exist. The greatness of England as they beheld it, imposing, powerful, and triumphant, existed not on the rocky base they believed they saw, but on the object, sacked, impoverished, and bled, they never saw. And so it is to-day. The British Empire is the great illusion. Resembling in much the Holy Roman Empire it is not British, it is not an Empire, and a.s.suredly it is not holy. It lives on the life-blood and sufferings of some, on the suffrance and mutual jealousy of others, and on the fixed illusion of all. Rather is it a great Mendicity Inst.i.tute. England now, instead of "robbing from Pole to Pole," as John Mitchel once defined her activities, goes begging from Pole to Pole that all and every one shall give her a helping hand to keep the plunder. Chins, Goorkhas, Sikhs, Malays, Irish, Chinese, South African Dutch, Australasians, Maoris, Canadians, j.a.panese, and finally "Uncle Sam"--these are the main components that when skilfully mixed from London, furnish the colouring material for the world-wide canvas. If we take away India, Egypt and the other coloured races the white population that remains is greatly inferior to the population of Germany, and instead of being a compact, indivisible whole, consists of a number of widely scattered and separated communities, each with separate and absorbing problems of its own, and more than one of them British neither in race, speech, nor affection. Moreover if we turn to the coloured races we find that the great ma.s.s of the subjects of this Empire have less rights within it than they possess outside its boundaries, and occupy there a lower status than that accorded to most foreigners.

The people of India far out number all other citizens of the British Empire put together, and yet we find the British Indians resident in Canada, to take but one instance, pet.i.tioning the Imperial Government in 1910 for as favourable terms of entry into that British possession as the j.a.panese enjoyed.

They pointed out that a j.a.panese could enter Canada on showing that he held from six pounds to ten pounds, but that no British Indian could land unless he had forty pounds and had come direct from India,--a physical impossibility, since no direct communication exists. But they went further, for they showed that their "citizenship" of the British Empire entailed penalties that no foreign state anywhere imposed upon them.

"We appeal," they said, "and most forcibly bring to your notice that no such discriminating laws are existing against us in foreign countries like the United States of America, Germany, j.a.pan, and Africa, to whom we do not owe any allegiance whatsoever."

So that outside its white or European races it is clear the Empire has no general or equal citizenship, and that, far from being one, it is more divided racially against itself than are even opposing Asiatic and European nations which have the good fortune not to be united in a common, imperial bond.

The total white population of this incongruous ma.s.s in 1911 consisted of some 59,000,000 human beings made up of various national and racial strains, as against 66,000,000 of white men in the German Empire the vast majority of them of German blood. And while the latter form a disciplined, self-contained, and self-supporting and self-defending whole, the former are swelled by Irish, French-Canadians, and Dutch South Africans who, according to Sir R. Edgc.u.mbe, must be reckoned as "coloured."

It is one thing to paint the map red, but you must be sure that your colours are fast and that the stock of paints wont run out. England, apart from her own perplexities is now faced with this prospect. Great Britain can no longer count on Ireland, that most prolific source of supply of her army, navy, and industrial efforts during the last century, while she is faced with a declining birth-rate, due largely, be it noted, to the diminished influx of the Irish, a more prolific and virile race. While her internal powers of reproduction are failing, her ability to keep those already born is diminishing still more rapidly. Emigration threatens to remove the surplus of births over deaths.

As long as it was only the population of Ireland that fell (8,500,000 in 1846 to 4,370,000 in 1911), Great Britain was not merely untroubled but actually rejoiced at a decrease in numbers that made the Irish more manageable, and yet just sufficiently starvable to supply her with a goodly surplus for army, navy, and industrial expansion in Great Britain. Now that the Irish are gone with a vengeance it is being perceived that they did not take their vengeance with them and that the very industrial expansion they built up from their starving bodies and naked limbs contains within itself the seeds of a great retribution.

"Since Free Trade has ruined our agriculture, our army has become composed of starving slum dwellers who, according to the German notion are better at shouting than at fighting. German generals have pointed out that in the South African war our regular and auxiliary troops often raised the white flag and surrendered, without necessity, sometimes to a few Boers, and they may do the same to a German invading force. Free Trade which "benefits the consumer" and the capitalist has, unfortunately, through the destruction of our agriculture and through forcing practically the whole population of Great Britain into the towns, destroyed the manhood of the nation."

(Modern Germany page 251, by J. Ellis Barker, 1907). An army of slum dwellers is a poor base on which to build the structure of a perpetual world dominion.

While the navy shows an imposing output of new battleships and cruisers for 1913, the record, we are told, of all warship construction in the world, it takes blood as well as iron to cement empires. Battleships may become so much floating sc.r.a.p iron (like the Russian fleet at Tsushima), if the men behind the guns lack the right stamina and education.

We learn, too, that it is not only the slum dwellers who are failing, but that to meet the shortage of officers a large number of transfers from the merchant marine to the Royal Navy are being sanctioned.

To this must be added the call of the Great Dominions for men and officers to man their local fleets. As the vital resources of England become more and more inadequate to meet the menace of German naval and moral strength, she turns her eyes to Ireland, and we learn from the London _Daily Telegraph_ that Mr. Churchill's scheme of recruiting at Queenstown may furnish "matter for congratulation, as Irish boys make excellent bluejackets happy of disposition, amenable to discipline, and extremely quick and handy."