Ulster's Stand For Union Part 9

CHAPTER XII

WAS RESISTANCE JUSTIFIABLE?

A story is told of Queen Victoria that in her youthful days, when studying const.i.tutional history, she once asked Lord Melbourne whether under any circ.u.mstances citizens were justified in resisting legal authority; to which the old courtier replied: "When asked that question by a Sovereign of the House of Hanover I feel bound to answer in the affirmative." If one can imagine a similar question being asked of an Ulsterman by Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, or Sir Edward Grey, in 1912, the reply would surely have been that such a question asked by a statesman claiming to be a guardian of Liberal principles and of the Whig tradition could only be answered in the affirmative. This, at all events, was the view of the late Duke of Devonshire, who more than any other statesman of our time could claim to be a representative in his own person of the Whig tradition handed down from 1688.[41] Pa.s.sive obedience has, indeed, been preached as a political dogma in the course of English history, but never by apostles of Liberalism. Forcible resistance to legally const.i.tuted authority, even when it involved repudiation of existing allegiance, has often, both in our own and in foreign countries, won the approval and sympathy of English Liberals. A long line of ill.u.s.trious names, from Cromwell and Lord Halifax in England to Kossuth and Mazzini on the Continent, might be quoted in support of such a proposition if anyone were likely to challenge it.

When, then, Liberals professed to be unutterably shocked by Ulster's declared intention to resist Home Rule both actively and pa.s.sively, they could not have based their att.i.tude on the principle that under no circ.u.mstances could such resistance be morally justified. Indeed, in the case in question, there were circ.u.mstances that would have made the condemnation of Ulster by the English Liberal Party not a little hypocritical if referred to any general ethical principle. For that party had itself been for a generation in the closest political alliance with Irishmen whose leader had boasted that they were as much rebels as their fathers were in 1798, and whose power in Ireland had been built up by long-sustained and systematic defiance of the law. Yet the same politicians who had excused, if they had not applauded, the "Plan of Campaign," and the organised boycotting and cattle-driving which had for years characterised the agitation for Home Rule, were unspeakably shocked when Ulster formed a disciplined Volunteer force which never committed an outrage, and prepared to set up a Provisional Government rather than be ruled by an a.s.sembly of cattle-drivers in Dublin.

Moreover, many of Mr. Asquith's supporters, and one at least of his most distinguished colleagues in the Cabinet of 1912, had themselves organised resistance to an Education Act which they disliked but had been unable to defeat in Parliament.

Nevertheless, it must, of course, be freely admitted that the question as to what conditions justify resistance to the legal authority in the State--or rebellion, if the more blunt expression be preferred--is an exceedingly difficult one to answer. It would sound cynical to say, though Carlyle hardly shrinks from maintaining, that success, and success alone, redeems rebellion from wickedness and folly. Yet it would be difficult to explain on any other principle why posterity has applauded the Parliamentarians of 1643 and the Whigs of 1688, while condemning Monmouth and Charles Edward; or why Mr. Gladstone sympathised with Jefferson Davis when he looked like winning and withdrew that sympathy when he had lost. But if success is not the test, what is? Is it the aim of the men who resist? The aim that appears honourable and heroic to one onlooker appears quite the opposite to another, and so the test resolves itself into a matter of personal partisanship.

That is probably as near as one can get to a solution of the question.

Those who happen to agree with the purpose for which a rebellion takes place think the rebels in the right; those who disagree think them in the wrong. As Mr. Winston Churchill succinctly puts it when commenting on the strictures pa.s.sed on his father for "inciting" Ulster to resist Home Rule, "Const.i.tutional authorities will measure their censures according to their political opinions." He reminds us, moreover, that when Lord Randolph was denounced as a "rebel in the skin of a Tory," the latter "was able to cite the authority of Lord Althorp, Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Morley, and the Prime Minister (Gladstone) himself, in support of the contention that circ.u.mstances might justify morally, if not technically, violent resistance and even civil war."[42]

To this distinguished catalogue of authorities an Ulster apologist might have added the name of the Chief Secretary for Ireland in Mr. Asquith's own Cabinet, who admitted in 1912 that "if the religion of the Protestants were oppressed or their property despoiled they would be right to fight[43];" which meant that Mr. Birrell did not condemn fighting in itself, provided he were allowed to decide when the occasion for it had arisen. Greater authorities than Mr. Birrell held that the Ulster case for resistance was a good and valid one as it stood. No English statesman of the last half-century has deservedly enjoyed a higher reputation for political probity, combined with sound common sense, than the eighth Duke of Devonshire. As long ago as 1893, when this same issue had already been raised in circ.u.mstances much less favourable to Ulster than after the pa.s.sing of the Parliament Act in 1911, the Duke of Devonshire said:

"The people of Ulster believe, rightly or wrongly, that under a Government responsible to an Imperial Parliament they possess at present the fullest security which they can possess of their personal freedom, their liberties, and their right to transact their own business in their own way. You have no right to offer them any inferior security to that; and if, after weighing the character of the Government which it is sought to impose upon them, they resolve that they are no longer bound to obey a law which does not give them equal and just protection with their fellow subjects, who can say--how at all events can the descendants of those who resisted King James II say, that they have not a right, if they think fit, to resist, if they think they have the power, the imposition of a Government put upon them by force?"[44]

All the same, there never was a community on the face of the earth to whom "rebellion" in any real sense of the word was more hateful than to the people of Ulster. They traditionally were the champions of "law and order" in Ireland; they prided themselves above all things on their "loyalty" to their King and to the British flag. And they never entertained the idea that the movement which they started at Craigavon in 1911, and to which they solemnly pledged themselves by their Covenant in the following year, was in the slightest degree a departure from their cherished "loyalty"--on the contrary, it was an emphatic a.s.sertion of it. They held firmly, as Mr. Bonar Law and the whole Unionist party in Great Britain held also, that Mr. Asquith and his Government were forcing Home Rule upon them by unconst.i.tutional methods. They did not believe that loyalty in the best sense--loyalty to the Sovereign, to the Empire, to the majesty of the law--required of them pa.s.sive obedience to an Act of Parliament placed by such means on the Statute-book, which they were convinced, moreover, was wholly repugnant to the great majority of the British people.

This aspect of the matter was admirably and soberly presented by _The Times_ in one of the many weighty articles in which that great journal gave undeviating support to the Ulster cause.

"A free community cannot justly, or even const.i.tutionally, be deprived of its privileges or its position in the realm by any measure that is not stamped with the considered and unquestionable approval of the great body of electors of the United Kingdom. Any attempt so to deprive them is a fraud upon their fundamental rights, which they are justified in resisting, as an act of violence, by any means in their power. This is elementary doctrine, borne out by the whole course of English history."[45]

That the position was paradoxical calls for no denial; but the pith of the paradox lay in the fact that a movement denounced as "rebellious" by its political opponents was warmly supported not only by large ma.s.ses, probably by the majority, of the people of this country, but by numbers of individuals of the highest character, occupying stations of great responsibility. Whatever may be thought of men engaged in actual political conflict, whom some people appear to think capable of any wickedness, no one can seriously suggest that men like Lord Macnaghten, like the late and present Primates of Ireland, like the late Provost of Trinity, like many other sober thinkers who supported Ulster, were men who would lightly lend themselves to "rebellion," or any other wild and irresponsible adventure. As _The Times_ very truly observed in a leading article in 1912:

"We remember no precedent in our domestic history since the Revolution of 1688 for a movement among citizens, law-abiding by temperament and habit, which resembles the present movement of the Ulster Protestants. It is no rabble who have undertaken it. It is the work of orderly, prosperous, and deeply religious men."[46]

Nor did the paradox end there. If the Ulster Movement was "rebellious,"

its purpose was as paradoxical as its circ.u.mstances. It had in it no subversive element. In this respect it stands (so far as the writer's knowledge goes) without precedent, a solitary instance in the history of mankind. The world has witnessed rebellions without number, designed to bring about many different results--to emanc.i.p.ate a people from oppression, to upset an obnoxious form of Government, to expel or to restore a rival dynasty, to transfer allegiance from one Sovereign or one State to another. But has there ever been a "rebellion" the object of which was to maintain the _status quo_? Yet that was the sole purpose of the Ulstermen in all they did from 1911 to 1914. That fact, which distinguished their movement from every rebellion or revolution in history, placed them on a far more solid ground of reasonable justification than the excuse offered by Mr. Churchill for their bellicose att.i.tude in his father's day. Although he is no doubt right in saying that "When men are sufficiently in earnest they will back their words with more than votes," it is a plea that would cover alike the conduct of Halifax and the other Whigs who resisted the legal authority of James II, of the Jacobites who fought for his grandson, and of the contrivers of many another b.l.o.o.d.y or bloodless Revolution. But there was nothing revolutionary in the Ulster Movement. It was resistance to the transfer of a people's allegiance without their consent; to their forcible expulsion from a Const.i.tution with which they were content and their forcible inclusion in a Const.i.tution which they detested. This was the very ant.i.thesis of Revolution. English Radical writers and politicians might argue that no "transfer of allegiance" was contemplated; but Ulstermen thought they knew better, and the later development of the Irish question proved how right they were. Even had they been proved wrong instead of right in their conviction that the true aim of Irish Nationalism (a term in which Sinn Fein is included) was essentially separatist, they knew better than Englishmen how little reality there was in the theory that under the proposed Home Rule their allegiance would be unaffected and their political _status_ suffer no degradation. They claimed to occupy a position similar to that of the North in the American Civil War--with this difference, which, so far as it went, told in their favour, that whereas Lincoln took up arms to resist secession, they were prepared to do so to resist expulsion, the purpose in both cases, however, being to preserve union. The practical view of the question, as it would appear in the eyes of ordinary men, was well expressed by Lord Curzon in the House of Lords, when he said:

"The people of this country will be very loth to condemn those whose only disloyalty it will be to have been excessive in their loyalty to the King. Do not suppose that the people of this country will call those 'rebels' whose only form of rebellion is to insist on remaining under the Imperial Parliament."[47]

Of course, men like Sir Edward Carson, Lord Londonderry, Mr. Thomas Sinclair, and other Ulster leaders were too far-seeing not to realise that the course they were taking would expose them to the accusation of having set a bad example which others without the same grounds of justification might follow in very different circ.u.mstances. But this was a risk they had to shoulder, as have all who are not prepared to subscribe to the dogma of Pa.s.sive Obedience without limit. They accepted it as the less of two evils. But there was something humorous in the pretence put forward in 1916 and afterwards that the violence to which the adherents of Sinn Fein had recourse was merely copying Ulster. As if Irish Nationalism in its extreme form required precedent for insurrection! Even the leader of "Const.i.tutional Nationalism" himself had traced his political pedigree to convicted rebels like Tone and Emmet, and since the date of those heroes there had been at least two armed risings in Ireland against the British Crown and Government. If the taunt flung at Ulstermen had been that they had at last thrown overboard law and order and had stolen the Nationalist policy of active resistance, there would at least have been superficial plausibility in it. But when it was suggested or implied that the Ulster example was actually responsible in any degree whatever for violent outbreaks in the other provinces, a supercilious smile was the only possible retort from the lips of representatives of Ulster.

But what caused them some perplexity was the disposition manifested in certain quarters in England to look upon the two parties in Ireland in regard to "rebellion" as "six of one and half a dozen of the other." It has always, unhappily, been characteristic of a certain type of Englishman to see no difference between the friends and the enemies of his country, and, if he has a preference at all, to give it to the latter. Apart from all other circ.u.mstances which in the eyes of Ulstermen justified them up to the hilt in the policy they pursued, apart from everything that distinguished them historically and morally from Irish "rebels," there was the patent and all-important fact that the motive of their opponents was hostility to England, whereas their own motive was friendliness and loyalty to England. In that respect they never wavered. If the course of events had ever led to the employment of British troops to crush the resistance of Ulster to Home Rule, the extraordinary spectacle would have been presented to the wondering world of the King's soldiers shooting down men marching under the British flag and singing "G.o.d save the King."

It was no doubt because this was very generally understood in England that the sympathies of large ma.s.ses of law-loving people were never for a moment alienated from the men of Ulster by all the striving of their enemies to brand them as rebels. Const.i.tutional authorities may, as Mr.

Churchill says, "measure their censures according to their political opinions," but the generality of men, who are not const.i.tutional authorities, whose political opinions, if they have any, are fluctuating, and who care little for "juridical niceties," will measure their censures according to their instinctive sympathies. And the sound instinct of Englishmen forbade them to blame men who, if rebels in law, were their firm friends in fact, for taking exceptional and even illegal measures, when all others failed, to preserve the full unity which they regarded as the fruit of that friendship.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] See _Life of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire,_ by Bernard Holland, ii, pp. 249-51.

[42] _Life of Lord Randolph Churchill_, vol. ii, p. 65.

[43] _Annual Register_, 1912, p. 82.

[44] Bernard Holland's _Life of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire_, ii, 250.

[45] _The Times_, July 14th, 1913.

[46] Ibid., August 22nd, 1912.

[47] _Parliamentary Debates_ (House of Lords), July 15th, 1913.

CHAPTER XIII

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT AND PROPAGANDA

By the death of the Duke of Abercorn on the 3rd of January, 1913, the Ulster Loyalists lost a leader who had for many years occupied a very special place in their affection and confidence. Owing to failing health he had been unable to take an active part in the exciting events of the past two years, but the messages of encouragement and support which were read from him at Craigavon, Balmoral, and other meetings for organising resistance, were always received with an enthusiasm which showed, and was intended to show, that the great part he had played in former years, and especially his inspiring leadership as Chairman of the Ulster Convention in 1893, had never been forgotten.

His death inflicted also, indirectly, another blow which at this particular moment was galling to loyalists out of all proportion to its intrinsic importance. The removal to the House of Lords of the Marquis of Hamilton, the member for Derry city, created a vacancy which was filled at the ensuing by-election by a Liberal Home Ruler. To lose a seat anywhere in the north-eastern counties at such a critical time in the movement was bad enough, but the unfading halo of the historic siege rested on Derry as on a sanctuary of Protestantism and loyalty, so that the capture of the "Maiden City" by the enemy wounded loyalist sentiment far more deeply than the loss of any other const.i.tuency. The two parties had been for some time very nearly evenly balanced there, and every electioneering art and device, including that of bringing to the poll voters who had long rested in the cemetery, was practised in Derry with unfailing zeal and zest by party managers. For some time past trade, especially ship-building, had been in a state of depression in Derry, with the result that a good many of the better cla.s.s of artisans, who were uniformly Unionist, had gone to Belfast and elsewhere to find work, leaving the political fortunes of the city at the mercy of the casual labourer who drifted in from the wilds of Donegal, and who at this election managed to place the Home Rule candidate in a majority of fifty-seven.

It was a matter of course that the late Duke's place as President of the Ulster Unionist Council should be taken by Lord Londonderry, and it happened that the annual meeting at which he was formally elected was held on the same day that witnessed the rejection of the Home Rule Bill by the House of Lords.

It was also at this annual meeting (31st January, 1913) that the special Commission who had been charged to prepare a scheme for the Provisional Government, presented their draft Report. The work had been done with great thoroughness and was adopted without substantial alteration by the Council, but was not made public for several months. The Council itself was, in the event of the Provisional Government being set up, to const.i.tute a "Central Authority," and provision was made, with complete elaboration of detail, for carrying on all the necessary departments of administration by different Committees and Boards, whose respective functions were clearly defined. Among those who consented to serve in these departmental Committees, in addition to the recognised local leaders in the Ulster Movement, were Dr. Crozier, Archbishop of Armagh, the Moderator of the General a.s.sembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Lord Charles Beresford, Major-General Montgomery, Colonel Thomas Hickman, M.P., Lord Claud Hamilton, M.P., Sir Robert Kennedy, K.C.M.G., and Sir Charles Macnaghten, K.C., son of Lord Macnaghten, the distinguished Lord of Appeal. Ulster at this time gave a lead on the question of admitting women to political power, at a time when their claim to enfranchis.e.m.e.nt was being strenuously resisted in England, by including several women in the Provisional Government.

A most carefully drawn scheme for a separate judiciary in Ulster had been prepared with the a.s.sistance of some of the ablest lawyers in Ireland. It was in three parts, dealing respectively with (a) the Supreme Court, (b) the Land Commission, and (c) County Courts; it was drawn up as an Ordinance, in the usual form of a Parliamentary Bill, and it is an indication of the spirit in which Ulster was preparing to resist an Act of Parliament that the Ordinance bore the introductory heading: "_It is Hereby Enacted by the Central Authority in the name of the King's Most Excellent Majesty that_------" Similarly, the form of "Oath or Declaration of Adherence" to be taken by Judges, Magistrates, Coroners, and other officers of the Courts, set out in a Schedule to the Ordinance, was: "I ... of ... being about to serve in the Courts of the Provisional Government as the Central Authority for His Majesty the King, etc."

It will be remembered that the original resolution by which the Council decided to set up a Provisional Government limited its duration until Ulster should "again resume unimpaired her citizenship in the United Kingdom,"[48] and at a later date it was explicitly stated that it was to act as trustee for the Imperial Parliament. All the forms prepared for use while it remained in being purported to be issued in the name of the King. And the Resolution adopted by the Unionist Council immediately after const.i.tuting itself the Central Authority of the Provisional Government, in which the reasons for that policy were recorded, concluded with the statement that "we, for our part, in the course we have determined to pursue, are inspired not alone by regard to the true welfare of our own country, but by devotion to the interests of our world-wide Empire and loyalty to our beloved King." If this was the language of rebels, it struck a note that can never before have been heard in a chorus of disaffection.

The demonstrations against the Government's policy which had been held during the last eighteen months, of which some account has been given, were so impressive that those which followed were inevitably less remarkable by comparison. They were, too, necessarily to a large extent, repet.i.tions of what had gone before. There might be, and there were, plenty of variations on the old theme, but there was no new theme to introduce. Propaganda to the extent possible with the resources at the disposal of the Ulster Unionist Council was carried on in the British const.i.tuencies in 1913, the cost being defrayed chiefly through generous subscriptions collected by the energy and influence of Mr.

Walter Long; but many were beginning to share the opinion of Mr. Charles Craig, M.P., who scandalised the Radicals by saying at Antrim in March that, while it was inc.u.mbent on Ulstermen to do their best to educate the electorate, "he believed that, as an argument, ten thousand pounds spent on rifles would be a thousand times stronger than the same amount spent on meetings, speeches, and pamphlets."

On the 27th of March a letter appeared in the London newspapers announcing the formation of a "British League for the support of Ulster and the Union," with an office in London. It was signed by a hundred Peers and 120 Unionist Members of the House of Commons. The manifesto emphasised the Imperial aspect of the great struggle that was going on, a.s.serting that it was "quite clear that the men of Ulster are not fighting only for their own liberties. Ulster will be the field on which the privileges of the whole nation will be lost or won." A small executive Committee was appointed, with the Duke of Bedford as Chairman, and within a few weeks large numbers of people in all parts of the country joined the new organisation. A conference attended by upwards of 150 honorary agents from all parts of the country was held at Londonderry House on the 4th of June, where the work of the League was discussed, and its future policy arranged. Its operations were not ostentatious, but they were far from being negligible, especially in connection with later developments of the movement in the following year. This proof of British support was most encouraging to the people of Ulster, and the Dublin correspondent of _The Times_ reported that it gave no less satisfaction to loyalists in other parts of Ireland, among whom, as the position became more desperate every day, there was "not the least sign of giving way, of accepting the inevitable."

Every month that pa.s.sed in uncertainty as to what fate was reserved for Ulster, and especially every visit of the leader to Belfast, endeared him more intensely to his followers, who had long since learnt to give him their unquestioning trust; and his bereavement by the death of his wife in April 1913 brought him the profound and affectionate sympathy of a warm-hearted people, which manifested itself in most moving fashion at a great meeting a month later on the 16th of May, when, at the opening of a new drill hall in the most industrial district of Belfast, Sir Edward exclaimed, in response to a tumultuous reception, "Heaven knows, my one affection left me is my love of Ireland."

He took occasion at the same meeting to impress upon his followers the spirit by which all their actions should be guided, and which always guided his own. With a significant reference to the purposes for which the new drill hall might be used, he added, "Always remember--this is essential--always remember you have no quarrel with individuals. We welcome and we love every individual Irishman, even though he may be opposed to us. Our quarrel is with the Government." When the feelings of ma.s.ses of men are deeply stirred in political conflict such exhortations are never superfluous; and there never was a leader who could give them with better grace than Sir Edward Carson, who himself combined to an extraordinary degree strength of conviction with entire freedom from bitterness towards individual opponents.[49]

In this same speech he showed that there was no slackening of determination to pursue to the end the policy of the Covenant. There had been rumours that the Government were making secret inquiries with a view to taking legal proceedings, and in allusion to them Carson moved his audience to one of the most wonderful demonstrations of personal devotion that even he ever evoked, by saying: "If they want to test the legality of anything we are doing, let them not attack humble men--I am responsible for everything, and they know where to find me."

The Bill was running its course for the second time through Parliament, a course that was now farcically perfunctory, and Carson returned to London to repeat in the House of Commons on the 10th of June his defiant acceptance of responsibility for the Ulster preparations. He was back in Belfast for the 12th of July celebrations, when 150,000 Orangemen a.s.sembled at Craigavon to hear another speech from their leader full of confident challenge, and to receive another message of encouragement from Mr. Bonar Law, who a.s.sured them that "whatever steps they might feel compelled to take, whether they were const.i.tutional, or whether in the long run they were unconst.i.tutional, they had the whole of the Unionist Party under his leadership behind them."

The leader of the Unionist Party had good reason to know that his message to Ulster was endorsed by his followers. That had been demonstrated beyond all possibility of doubt during the preceding month.

The Ulster Unionist Members of the House of Commons, with Carson at their head, had during June made a tour of some of the princ.i.p.al towns of Scotland and the North of England, receiving a resounding welcome wherever they went. The usual custom of political meetings, where one or two prominent speakers have the platform to themselves, was departed from; the whole parliamentary contingent kept together throughout the tour as a deputation from Ulster to the const.i.tuencies visited, taking in turn the duty of supporting Carson, who was everywhere the princ.i.p.al speaker.

There were wonderful demonstrations at Glasgow and Edinburgh, both in the streets and the princ.i.p.al halls, proving, as was aptly said by _The Yorkshire Post_, that "the cry of the new Covenanters is not unheeded by the descendants of the old"; and thence they went south, drawing great cheering crowds to welcome them and to present encouraging addresses at the railway stations at Berwick, Newcastle, Darlington, and York, to Leeds, where the two largest buildings in the city were packed to overflowing with Yorkshiremen eager to see and hear the Ulster leader, and to show their sympathy with the loyalist cause. Similar scenes were witnessed at Norwich and Bristol, and the tour left no doubt in the minds of those who followed it, and who studied the comments of the Press upon it, that not only was the whole Unionist Party in Great Britain solidly behind the Ulstermen in their resolve to resist being subjected to a Parliament in Dublin, but that the general drift of opinion detached from party was increasingly on the same side.

FOOTNOTES: