Ireland in rebellion

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Presented to the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY

by the

ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY

1980

TORONTO

DEC 7 1922

IRELAND IN
REBELLION

PRINTED IN GRLAi BRITAIN.

IRELAND

IN

TRANSLATED FROM
THE FRENCH OF

SYLVAIN BRIOLLAY

'5463?

DUBLIN

THE TALBOT PRESS LIMITED

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN LIMITED

1922

PA

/3 75*73

TO THE MEMORY
OF MY MOTHER

PREFATORY NOTE

Ulrlande Jnsurgee, of which the present volume is
a translation, first appeared in the form of articles
for the " Revue de Paris " and " I,e Correspondant "
during the winter of 1920-1921. The French
edition was published by Messrs. Plon-Nourrit in
July, 1921, The author is a distinguished French-
man resident in Ireland since the beginning of 1919,
who saw and judged for himself, noted events as
they appeared in the Irish newspapers, and had
many opportunities of seeing prominent members of
all the Irish parties. The whole book was written
before the Truce of llth July, 1921.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGB
I. IRELAND IN REBELLION.

I.— The Present Rebellion ... ... ... 1

II. — Orange Rising against the Home Rule Act

(1911-1914) ... ... ... ... ... 3

III. — Ireland comes into the War ... ... ... 5

IV.— "Easter Week" 6

V. — The Resistance to Conscription ... ... 9

VI. — Irish Politics have a rhythm of their own ... 12

II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN,

I. — Its Extremist Idealism ... ... ... 18

II. — The Power of Illusion in Sinn Fein ... ... 26

III.— The Moral Forces ... ... ... ... 29

III. THE IRISH REPUBLIC.

I. — The Irish Republican Army ... ... ... 38

II. — The Triumphant Elections of 1920 ... ... 51

III. — Republican Justice ... ... ... ... 55

IV. — Intensification of Armed Action ... ... 62

IV. THE ENGLISH REACTION.

I. — English Temporisation ... ... ... 70

II. — Parliamentary Measures ... ... ... 73

III. — Economic Measures ... ... ... ... 78

IV.— Military Measures ... ... ... ... 81

V. — General Measures ... ... ... ... 86

VI.— Concentration of Efforts ... ... ... 93

V. CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES.

L— Lloyd George ... ... ... ... ... 106

II.— Sinn Fein prefers to Fight ... ... ... 110

III.— A Glimmer of Light ... ... ... ... 117

IV.— Chances of a Settlement ... ... ... 123

V. — Chances Against Settlement. ... ... ... 129

VI.— Conclusion ... ... ... ... „. 137

viii.

Ireland in Rebellion,

CHAPTER I,
I.

The present rebellion is a national revolt which is
explained by Ireland's* history — Reasons why it is
inopportune — A brief historical account*

IN 1607, after miracles of heroism and tenacity
displayed in vain against the invader, the last inde-
pendent princes of Ireland, those whom the English
court had made Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, and
whom Irish national pride still prefers to call by their
old native titles, Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh
O'Donnell, the last clan chieftains, were forced to
yield, and went to die in exile. The conquest was
finished ; the era of rebellions had begun.

Ten times in their subsequent history, in cir-
cumstances favourable or otherwise, with or without
hope of success, in 1641, 1649, 1689, 1782, 1798, 1803,
1848, and 1867, the unyielding spirit of the defeated
nation broke the prescriptive right of conquest and
registered its protest in blood that its soul had not
yielded. To-day again the age-long protest is raised
and the present generation has set the seal of its blood
on it.

But I hear you remark at once, this rising came
very late ; the Great War was ended, England came

' l

2 IRELAND IN REBELLION

out of it more independent and more powerful than
ever, Ireland stood alone. It was at the darkest hour
of the struggle, in the anxious years when the empire
was tottering to its foundation that such a rising
would have had a real chance of success. Granted.
To explain why things could not have happened
otherwise, a few historical remarks are necessary.

Before the war, if one felt the pulse of public opinion
in Ireland, one could feel the dull throb of an ti- British
feeling — slumbering, of course, and, as it were, tamed.
Since 1848 and the outbreak led by Smith O'Brien, the
state of chronic rebellion — with the exception of the
spasmodic explosions of the Fenian movement — had
relaxed and fizzled out into a constitutional opposition.
For fifty years, under Isaac Butt, Parnell and Redmond,
the Irish Nationalist Party appealed by constitutional
methods to the Parliament at Westminster for Self-
Government or Home Rule.

After many disappointments, in spite of the
opposition of the Tories, in spite of the veto of the
House of lyords which was at last abolished, the Home
Rule Bill was finally passed on the 25th May, 1914.
This, however, while satisfying the aspirations of the
real Irish population, was bitterly opposed by the
Orangemen of Ulster. The reader will remember that
in 1688 Prince William of Orange, Governor of the
Netherlands, and son-in-law of James II. of Kngland,
dethroned his father-in-law and drove him out of
Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne. Now, the
name Orangeman is applied to the Protestant immi-
grants from Kngland or Scotland that had " settled "
in the north-east corner of Ireland and around Belfast,
who take as their watchword the name of the Prince
of Orange, the conqueror of the Stuart and Papish

IRELAND IN REBELLION

King. Subsequent events proved that the Home Rule
Act, though passed into law, could not prevail against
the all-powerful will of that minority.

IT.

Orange rising against the Home Rule Act (1911-1914)
— Weakness of the Liberal Government.

As early as 1912 the Orangemen of Ulster had signed
a covenant or agreement, by which they undertook to
resist — by force of arms if necessary — any Act of
Parliament that aimed at breaking the Union which
was established between England and Ireland by the
fraud of 1800. Moreover, they felt they had at their
backs (otherwise their threats would have been a
piece of harmless bluff) the powerful Conservative
opposition in England, where a covenant similar to
that of Ulster was signed in 1914. Open preparations
were made for civil war. Sir Edward Carson, the
leader of the Orange Party, enrolled his Ulster
Volunteers, who were drilled by retired British officers.
Generous subscriptions were given by the wealthy
Tory magnates to arm and equip the men. Arms and
ammunition were imported from England and
Germany. In one day 50,000 rifles and 2,000,000
cartridges, consigned from the Waffenfabrik at Ham-
burg, were secretly landed at I^arne and taken away
before the police had time to intervene. The Belfast
people declared publicly that rather than fall under
the authority of the Parliament of Dublin, they pre-
ferred to appeal to the Kaiser, " Prince of Protestants."

In the face of this appeal to force Nationalist
Ireland got uneasy, and already in 1913 companies of

4 IEELAND IN REBELLION

Irish National Volunteers began to show themselves in
the streets of Dublin, as if by a law of equilibrium.
Redmond, still relying on Parliamentary means,
continued to negotiate instead of acting, and thus
arose quietly between him and his constituents a
breach which became in the course of time an unbridge-
able gulf.

Now, what of Asquith's liberal Government ?
Cowardly and unscrupulous beyond belief, it yielded
in face of the challenge hurled at it, at Parliament,
at the Constitution, and is thus responsible for the
present chaotic condition. Kven in the spring of 1914
Asquith, under pressure from the Orange extremists,
was considering county option on the question of Home
Rule ; that is to say, practically the division of
Ireland into two regions, Orange Ulster,* which could
remain under the Act of Union, and the rest of Ireland
which would come under the authority of a future
Dublin Parliament. This is a measure which Ireland
would never accept, as it exalts the wish of a small
minority — and that the foreign element in the
country — over the will of four-fifths of the popula-
tion.

The following summer witnessed a military incident
of a serious character. Almost all the officers, with the
General at their head, of the cavalry division which was
stationed at the Curragh Camp, fearing they might be
used to suppress the revolt of Ulster, sent in their
resignation in a body. Instead of putting down this
attempt at sedition, Colonel Seely, Minister for War,
summoned Gen. Sir Hubert Gough to Condon and,

* Orange " Ulster " consists of only four of the nine counties of
the province of Ulster. In the other five counties the Nationalists are
in the majority.

IRELAND IN REBELLION

before he succeeded in getting him to withdraw the
resignations sent in, had to capitulate.*

Meanwhile, when the Irish Volunteers were landing
arms at Howth the police arrived in time and fired
on the crowd, killing and wounding some civilians.

III.

Ireland comes into the war — She gets irritated at the
measures of distrust taken against her.

The Home Rule Act was passed into law a month
after the vote was taken on it, on the 25th June. But
it was perfectly clear from now on, that the resistance
of Ulster, fostered and supported as it was from out-
side, would never be put down by an English Cabinet,
and that the secession of the Orange counties, which
was at first put forward as a temporary measure, now
threatened to become a permanent scheme.

When the war broke out, John Redmond, in a
moment of enthusiasm and forgetful of these dis-
couraging symptoms, rushed his country in blind
confidence into the war for liberty by offering the
unreserved support of Ireland to the Parliament of
Westminster. And at first, indeed, the Irish enlisted
in large numbers.

This generosity met with a fitting reward ! The
Home Rule Act, signed by the King on the i8th
September and entered in the Statute Book, was
suspended by an Order in Council and its enforcement

* It may be remarked in parenthesis that there is no doubt that
the state cf political and military disorganisation caused in Great
Britain by the revolt of Ulster encouraged Germany, which was
convinced by Kulilmann of England's povverlessness, to undertake the
hazard of the war.

6 IRELAND IN REBELLION

postponed until six months after the cessation of
hostilities. The Nationalist Volunteers had offered to
transform themselves into an Irish territorial force.
Lord Kitchener, Minister for War, refused point
blank. The Irish who went to the Front were denied
the right granted to the Scotch and Welsh of serving
in national units under their own officers, and with
their own banners. The enormous Catholic majority,
systematically kept in the rank and file, was officered
almost exclusively by Protestants. To crown all,
Sir Edward Carson, the Orange leader, who was
detested by Nationalist Ireland, was appointed a
member of the War Cabinet, a step which was resented
by many as a personal insult and a provocation.

These reasons explain the growth of ill-feeling and
the steady falling-ofT of recruiting. From the very
beginning the extreme Nationalists had preached
abstention, on the plea that Ireland had nothing to
gain or to defend by the side of England, and conse-
quently had nothing to do with the conflict. Who will
deny that their words were borne out by subsequent
events ?

IV.

"Easter Week " — The Insurrection wrongly attributed
to Sinn Fein — What was Sinn Fein ? — Its sudden
development.

Then came the outbreak of Easter Week, the rising
of April, 1916. Wiser counsels were against it, but
the hotheads were too quick for them and faced them
with the accomplished fact. It is possible also that
there was a certain amount of German agitation, for
we must not forget that it was the wdfsFpenoTof the

IRELAND IN REBELLION 7

siege of Verdun. Be that as it may, the Republic was
proclaimed. From Monday to Saturday the rebels
held Dublin against the regular army, which was
receiving reinforcements daily. At last they gave
way before the heavy artillery which was laying waste
the centre of the city. After the surrender sixteen of
the leaders were executed and some 1,500 prisoners
interned or deported to England.

This unexpected and disconcerting rebellion came
like a thunderbolt. The innocent optimism of the
kindly Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland, was non-
plussed. What was the origin of it ? All of a sudden
it was attributed to Sinn Fein.

" Sinn Fein " — the word is Irish and means " our-
selves " — was a little group of uncompromising
Nationalists, whose programme might be summed up
in four words — Ireland without the English. A large
number of its members had been drawn from the
Gaelic league, which was founded in 1893, for the
study and revival of the Irish language, art and
traditions, and which had unconsciously, and perhaps
without desiring it, acted as a powerful incentive to
patriotism and awakened in the Irish a consciousness
and pride in themselves. When they started out to
fight against Anglicisation, it was difficult to stop
half way. The league, carried away by its own
impetus, left the academic plane and developed into
a political movement for independence.

The Sinn Feiners gathered round Arthur Griffith,
who expounded their policy. As early as 1905 Griffith
had published a series of articles, in which he showed
how Hungary had got rid of Austrian domination
without using any violent methods, but by merely
ignoring Austria. Inspired by this example, he

8 IRELAND IN REBELLION

proposed that Ireland should adopt a programme of
pacific non-co-operation similar to that recommended
to-day by Gandhi in India.

Naturally, these ideas had the support of very few
people in 1916. Serious people looked upon those
who advocated them as poor jesters, hotheads or
fanatics. Needless to say, the rebellion was not their
doing — Griffith, who was constantly preaching passive
resistance, took no part in it. It was the doing of a
small composite group, which consisted of a few
intellectuals with Sinn Fein tendencies of course,
such as Pearse and MacDonagh, but also of some
revolutionary socialists, such as Connolly, and a few
survivors of the Fenian movement, such as old Tom
Clarke.

However, the Redmondites thought it wise to
disclaim all connection with this movement, the
revolutionary tone of which frightened their modesty
as successful, respectable people, and to saddle those
scurvy Sinn Feiners with the responsibility for it.
And then an extraordinary thing happened.

When the rebellion broke out, it surprised, shocked
and horrified the bulk of the people even in Ireland. In
Dublin, at most a thousand men took part in the
fight, and public opinion was against them. But when
it was being suppressed, individual soldiers took the
liberty of carrying out some summary executions, or
rather murders, and the English, with incredible
stupidity, instead of ending the matter once and for
all, prolonged the shootings for a whole fortnight.
The condemned men suffered death with that wonder-
ful and touching heroism which characterises the
Celtic spirit, and which does more to convert such
a nation than ten years of propaganda. Public opinion

IRELAND IN REBELLION

in Ireland, always prone to enthusiasm and pity,
underwent a rapid change, with the result that the
rebellion which, from a military point of view, was
a piece of folly, turned out to be a political operation
of the most effective kind. Pearse and his men had not
conquered England to be sure, but they had conquered
Ireland. And tne responsibility of Sinn Fein in the
rising, to which the Redmondites tried to tie Sinn
Fein as to a stake- was proudly acknowledged and
became a pedestal.

V.

The resistance to conscription — The General Election
of 1918 — Dail Eireann.

The " hand-picked " Convention at which Lloyd
George pretended — without any sincere intention — to
seek a solution of the Irish problem, did nothing to
check the advance of Sinn Fein. On the contrary, by
its abortive issue, it gave it a further stimulus, as the
Sinn Fein Party, with intelligent caution, refused to
take part in it.

From that time almost every by-election was a
victory for Sinn Fein ; Count Plunkett, the father of
a young man who was shot in Easter week, De Valera,
who was condemned to death at the same time, and
whose sentence was commuted to penal servitude,
headed the polls by overwhelming majorities. It was
evident that the ill-feeling against England was
gaining ground every day.

It was on this sorely wounded people, this restive
and profoundly distrustful people, that the London
Parliament, without any consideration or any prepara-
tory measure of liberty, tried to impose conscription

10 IRELAND IN REBELLION

in April, 1918. The whole country revolted with one
accord : County Councils, Catholic Hierarchy, Labour
Leaders and Constitutional Leaders.

This last blow finished the Redmondite Party. In
the so-called war for the liberty of small nations,
Ireland, deprived of its national rights, deprived of
the Home Rule which had after all become law, English
law, was supposed to endure an indignity that no
other Dominion had endured — of seeing its children
snatched from it without the consent of its elected
representatives ! It was to shed its blood to save
from the abyss a master more hated now than ever !
Its leaders had either betrayed it or allowed themselves
to be hoodwinked. Whether they were dupes or
traitors, they must be swept aside. The new Lord
Lieutenant, a soldier, Field-Marshal French, whose
only means of government were threats and violence,
started his period of office by the wholesale arrest of
Sinn Feiners, on the pretext of a pro-German plot, of
which there never was the slightest proof. Lord
French got no recruits and only succeeded in stiffening
the Irish spirit.

The general election took place a short time after.
Dublin Castle, with the usual intelligence that charac-
terises it in its dealings with things and people in
Ireland, had prepared the way for the elections by
persecuting the Republicans, hunting down their
leaders, violently breaking up their meetings, putting
half their candidates or more into prison. Is it any
wonder that the rebels achieved a brilliant triumph
in these circumstances ? Out of the 105 seats they
won 73 ; and if the constitutional party retained six,
it was due to local agreements, which were made
between Sinn Fein and it for the purpose of defeating

IRELAND IN REBELLION ll

the Orange Party. The Redmondites' day was over.
Opportunely for himself, if not for his followers,
Redmond had died nine months earlier ; at least he
had not lived long enough to see the grave close over
his lifework.

Some time after, on the 2ist January, 1919, the
Sinn Fein members, who had — without result, of
course — issued summonses to attend even to their
Irish colleagues of opposite convictions, assembled as
Dail Eireann or Parliament of Ireland in the Mansion
House, Dublin, and sent forth to all the nations of the
world a declaration of independence. The nucleus of
a Government was formed ; De Valera, President of
the Republic and Prime Minister ; Griffith, Vice-
President ; O'Kelly, Chairman of the Dail. The
initial programme of these men was to get the cause
of Ireland as a distinct nation presented to the Peace
Conference. In spite of the support of the Irish-
Americans, they failed. As soon as the Treaty of
Versailles, which recognised by implication the subjec-
tion of Ireland was completed, De Valera set out for
America to combat its ratification by means of a vast
campaign of propaganda.

Meanwhile their claim to set up a Government of
their own came into conflict, as may be well imagined,
with the machinery of the English Government,
especially with the secret police. " It was not possible
to take and keep as prisoners those detectives whose
existence threatened the life of the Republicans."*
The first revolver shots rang out, and thus began the
tfagedy of the guerilla war which was to unfold with

* Report of Lieut.-General Sir Henry Lawson to Lord Henry
Cavendish Bentinck, President of the " Council for Peace with
Ireland."

12 IRELAND IN REBELLION

increasing intensity from month to month all the
potential horror it contained. This was in the autumn
of

VI.

have a rhythm of their own, and yet
on the World War — The three main

factors in their evolution : the Orange faction ; the

War itself ; the Easter Week rising.

From this brief survey it can be seen how Irish
politics since 1914 followed their own course, indepen-
dent of the world war, and at the same time inspired
by it. They followed it, of course, but at a distance,
limping, as it were, and always late. At the beginning
and during the struggle, when a general rebellion
would have been so dangerous to England, Ireland
was not ready nor even inclined for it. Bulled to
slumber by almost seventy years of peace, bound hand
and foot by the minute and hidebound organisation
of the constitutional party, pre-occupied with buying
back from the English landlords the lands formerly
confiscated from the Irish owners, it looked as if Ireland
— apart from a few small intellectual groups which had
no effective influence on others — had lost the hope,
nay, even the desire of liberty, and only wanted a
settlement. It is true that several factors were bringing
about a more and more rapid evolution in public
opinion, which could not, however, keep up to the
dizzy pace of external happenings. Ireland could
never make up for its handicap at the start. It
entered the war after the universal battle.

It remains for us to examine methodically the
principal factors in this evolution.

IRELAND IN REBELLION 13

The first incontestably, and probably the most
powerful, was the blindness, whether wanton or
forced upon them, of the successive English Cabinets,
in the face of the Irish situation. They were repeatedly
offered the opportunity of conciliating the sister-isle,
of cementing a lasting friendship with it. If Asquith
had had the courage in 1914, of putting the Home
Rule Act into force in the teeth of the Orange bullies,
he would have settled the question for a generation
or two. Perhaps even, by taking advantage of the
conciliatory influence of the time, he would have
achieved a final settlement. If even after the Easter
Week rebellion Lloyd George had been serious and
sincere in assembling his famous Convention, an
understanding might still have been effected. I
imagine that both Asquith and Lloyd George saw this
clearly, but neither of them dared or was able to act
against the opposition of Orange Ulster.

The power of Ulster is fairly difficult to explain.
But it is a fact that, while comprising only a fifth of
the Irish votes, it is by itself more powerful than the
four others. How can it be explained ? By the action
of the Ulster question on English domestic politics
and the reaction which made the Ulster Party a
preponderant power in the House of Commons. Orange
Ulster rejects on principle any loosening of the Union.
When the Liberals are in power, Ulster naturally
becomes the wrestling ground into which the Conserva-
tive opposition tries to lure the Government fox its
downfall, with the support of British patriotism. The
Liberals are betraying England ! The Liberals are
handing over Englishmen who wish to remain English
to their worst enemies, who are also offlr^Y^nd Sir
F. E. Smith crossed the Irish Sea to raisWi* agaSdard

ONTARIO

14 IRELAND IN REBELLION

of a holy war : " To your tents, Israel ! " (20th
September, 1913, at Ballyclare). That is the whole
history of the Orange movement of 1914. Carson, not
an Ulsterman, and hardly an Irishman, was a puppet
whose strings were pulled in London. The Tories
purposely added venom to the Ulster question as a
piece of strategy for reasons of domestic politics.

But anyone who wants devoted agents must pay
them. The London politicians are inclined to give
the Ulster politicians, as a reward for their services,
an influence out of all proportion to the real importance
of Orangeism. Take Carson as an example. Now the
Ulster Orangemen, noble Lords, great landowners, big
manufacturers, with a seasoning of haughtiness and
Protestant bigotry, have no interest in seeing a solution,
of whatever nature, of the Irish question. Nay, even
they have every interest in its remaining unsolved.
If they ask for a separation of the whole of Ulster, the
Nationalists will be almost as strong in it as themselves :
ten Sinn Fein members and five Home Rulers as
against twenty Unionists and two Labour-Unionists
(General Election, 1918). If they accept a referendum
to determine what counties desire separation, they
will have a majority in those counties, but they will
number only four out of nine ; Armagh, Derry, Antrim
and Down. Finally, whatever the arrangement, they
will automatically lose those big lucrative and in-
fluential administrative positions, of which they have
practically always had the monopoly. The Ulster
Orange Party is in reality a privileged trust, for which
any change in the existing order of things signifies
disaster. Therefore, their uncompromising attitude is
not a caprice on their part, but a condition of existence.
It follows that this inordinate influence, with which

IRELAND IN REBELLION 15

we have seen Ulster invested by the swing of English
politics, is now used deliberately in cold blood to pre-
vent a settlement. Give and take. I serve you against
your enemies, serve me against mine. It is, if I may
say so, the most amusing game of jobbery that could
be imagined.

That is what explains the rise of Sir Edward Carson,
who became a Minister in the War Cabinet and whom
some were recently thinking of making leader of the
Conservative Party instead of Austin Chamberlain.
This explains the line of conduct, at the same time
inert and uncompromising, of the present Government,
which is moreover full of Carsonites ; I/ord Birkenhead
(formerly Sir F. E. Smith), Mr. Shortt, Mr. Walter
I^ong, Mr. Denis Henry, Sir James Craig. But on the
other hand it explains the rapidly growing exasperation
of Irish feeling, which is tired of seeing the old machine
grind eternally for the profit of an anti-Irish minority,
disgusted at the refusal of justice and unfortunately
convinced that there is no peaceful legal method of
obtaining their rights.

Orangeism is like a foreign body, a source of in-
flammation and purulency for the organism in which
it is concealed.

Another thing that has contributed to increase
their resentment is, of course, the hopes that were
raised and stimulated in a small subject nation by
the spectacle of the Great War. Seeing the world rise
up in arms on the pretext of defending Belgium from
slavery, is it not natural that Ireland should think :
" I too am a slave " ? Seeing new nations rise up,
such as Jugo-Slavia, or ancient nations long buried,
such as Poland, revive again, is it not natural that, at
the moment of universal peace and justice, Ireland

16 IRELAND IN REBELLION

should think that she too would rise from the tomb to
the broad daylight of liberty ?

Right is a hundred times clearer in her case than in
many another that has got satisfaction ; her indivi-
duality as a nation is evident, for the race is distinctive
and relatively one of the purest in Europe ; the
language still survives in spite of centuries of persecu-
tion ; the protest against the rule of the stranger is
age-long, chronic and — leaving the settlers out of
count — unanimous. Her masters themselves have
recognised this and during the war were not afraid to
offer her liberty in exchange for her support, an
imprudence which poured oil on the fire ! How could
Ireland see herself treated as the victim of an exception
on the part of the Allies, and of a refusal of justice
on the part of England, without a sense of revolt ?

At last a small intelligent minority was found,
determined, idealistic and ready to die for its ideals,
with a deep sense of the continuity of Irish history,
that took advantage of the best moment — or the worst,
if you will — and put a match to the powder that
preceding events had piled up in the darkness.

The unexpected blow of Easter, 1916, at first un-
intelligible to and misunderstood by the masses,
succeeded in converting them completely. It awoke
in every Irishman the potential rebel which is always
dormant in him. " They knew well that they would
fail," said Mrs. Pearse later of her sons, " but they
knew also that by fighting they would save the soul
of Ireland."

If indeed these men and their friends, the
MacDermotts and MacDonaghs, if those who re-
presented the Sinn Fein idea in the movement, had
really a full and clear consciousness of their action,

IRELAND IN REBELLION 17

they certainly interpreted its meaning better than their
ally Connolly, who was no doubt more obsessed by
social revolution. For this reason they, rather than
he, were the responsible leaders and should remain the
eponymous heroes of the rising.

I,et us consider then who these men were and who
were their spiritual descendents.

CHAPTER II.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN.

I.

Its extremist idealism — Its causes : The composition of
the Party — The disinterestedness of its members —
Their sense of honour — The attraction exercised by
Sinn Fein.

WHAT strikes one most in Sinn Fein thought is its
extremist character, I mean the clear and deliberate
determination to ignore what is, and to take account,
nay to admit the very existence, only of what ought
to be. There is nothing more foreign to the ever-
lasting spirit of compromise and bargaining, so dear
to the English. " What do you want ? " say they.
" Economic advantages ? A better educational
system ? There is no reason why we should not
discuss them." — " Get out of Ireland first," replies
Griffith in his Manchester speech ; " that is the prelimi-
nary question. We shall talk afterwards." And yet
the epithet " extremist " annoys the Sinn Feiners.
De Valera recently protested against it in America,
quite pertinently and peremptorily. " We unreservedly
claim entire liberty for our country, an old nation of
independent formation ; and for that we are called
extremists. Were you Americans also extremists,
when you did the same for your country — although it
was only an English colony ? " But the ring of such

iS

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 19

an answer is unmistakable. Take from the word the
depreciatory shade of meaning that it has in current
parlance, give it back its literal sense, and the retort
of the leader to the accusation of extremism becomes
extremely extremist. In other words, if you try to get
to the bottom of these men, what do you find ? Whole-
hearted faith in the power of ideas, in the irresistible
superiority of right. That is what explains their
unflinching resolution when the victory of England
in the world-war brought to a climax the already
almost ridiculous disproportion in strength between
the huge Kmpire and its tiny adversary. To realists
the pass might seem desperate, but to them not at
all ! What is the good of temporising, of treating, of
compounding with the enemy, when it is certain that
a day of absolute justice, of reparation and triumph
will come ? And now, if we seek a deep-lying
cause for this radical idealism, it is to be found, I
think, in the composition of the party, and in the
fact that Sinn Fein is a specifically Irish form of
thought.

No doubt one could easily point out, in French
thought during the igth century, the same en-
thusiastic confidence in the power of ideas ; one might
quote Quinet, Hugo, Michelet . . . But, for one thing, a
certain number of French people look on them — in
this respect of course — as grandiloquent simpletons ;
and then, even amongst those who share this confidence,
it does not imply the abandonment of a positivism
tinged on occasion with irony : the thing really to be
hoped for is not some messianic apparition of justice,
but that the abuses of force will end by uniting higher
forces against force and placing them at length at the
service of right ; for what is right without might ?

20 • IRELAND IN REBELLION

That is, I think, the particular shade of average French
opinion, fairly tinged with criticism.

Here people are of a different cast. Their belief
is an intuitive and direct act of the will, of the imagina-
tion, of love ; it is one of those mental forms that they
produce quite naturally, more akin to feeling than to
ideas, to poetry than to logic ; in which the thought
is forcible in proportion to its lack of clearness and
easily stirs up the unconscious powers of the soul ;
at bottom it is a religious state.

Hence, for them, there is between justice and
might, not a harmony to be realised in the long run,
but immediate and substantial identity : " The
peoples that went into the Great War," said Mr.
Robert Brennan, one of the official propagandists of
the Party, one day, " fought against militarism and
for the liberation of small nations ; that secures the
liberation of Ireland." — " That reasoning is right in
the abstract," I objected, " but the very fact of the
war has revived the old tendency to come to decisions
by force ; besides the nations, either satisfied or weary,
have withdrawn naturally enough into their selfishness,
and will not readily come out again merely in the
interests of Ireland ; and the attitude of Ireland to
the Allies might easily injure her cause. ..." These
realist objections did not touch him even superficially ;
he shut himself up in his dream in the summary
notion that it was impossible for Ireland not to emerge
free from the war of right.

Another Sinn Feiner was explaining that Bail
Eireann, the only Government acknowledged by the
Irish people, and the only one, therefore, having a
right to its loyalty, was the de facto Government.
" Oh, no ! " said I, " de jure if you like, but not de

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 21

facto ; the de facto Government is the one that sends
its opponents to prison." No matter ; he stuck to
his point. " English rule," he repeated, " being
illegal, does not exist in fact." He also, strange to
say, overlooked the distinction between the ideal and
fact.

These men are millenarians looking for the dawn
with the certainty of faith, as sure of their triumph
as of the rise of to-morrow's sun. It is this that makes
them so uncompromising in their demands. It is this
that gives them a determination beyond the reach of
despair. But the mystic belief in justice is also, unless
I am much mistaken, what gives their thought such a
specifically Irish colour.

" The three social categories in which one finds the
greatest number of ' innocents '," a disreputable
banker used to say, "are officers, professors and
priests." What our sharper intended as an expression
of contempt might easily be made an encomium. If
these men lack the capacity to defend their private
interests, it is because their activity is too generally
turned to higher ends. Well, Sinn Fein is almost
entirely led by such men, and that is perhaps a second
explanation of the idealism of the party. Mr. De
Valera comes from the ranks of professors of mathe-
matics, even less rooted to the solid ground than other
professors .... Boin MacNeill, the leader of the Irish
Volunteers in 1916, now Member for the National
University of Ireland, is one of the best Celtic scholars
in Europe and Professor of Ancient Irish History at
University College, Dublin. MacDonagh, who was
shot after the rebellion, was an assistant in the same
college and a poet of distinction. Pearse, the President
of the Provisional Government, who was also shot;

22 IRELAND IN REBELLION

was trying an educational experiment in his school
at Rathfarnham, just outside Dublin, in a fine park
almost run wild and watered by murmuring streams,
where they say that the proscribed Robert Emmet
came more than once to wait under the tall trees for
his betrothed, the beautiful Sarah Curran. To-day
the staff of the party, about Griffith and De Valera,
is composed of some lawyers, of some doctors, pro-
fessors, and even students, all extremely young and
correspondingly full of spirit. There are few business
men amongst them, big manufacturers or bankers ; it
is true that such men are always rare in the revolution-
ary opposition, in which politics don't pay. The
National University, with its three colleges of Gal way,
Cork and Dublin, is going over more and more to
Sinn Fein as the young generations come up — at one
stroke it elected eight Sinn Feiners members to its
Senate — and will become a nursery of leaders. It is
not in these intellectual centres, which are both the
honour and the danger of the party, that there is much
inclination for bargaining and compromise; there is
no one so inflexible as the man of thought who does
not feel himself in the wrong.

A danger for the party, I have said, because politics,
which are a business, would perhaps sometimes need
men of business, and are not always compatible with
trenchant doctrines. But an honour, too, because of
the purity of these leaders. In acknowledging one-
self at present a member of the Republican Party
there is no profit to be had, nothing but hard knocks ;
those who face them are plainly urged by enthusiasm
only, and by devotion to an idea ; we in France have
known a like happy time under the Empire .... Such
disinterestedness compels the respect even of

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 23

opponents. Colonel Moore, to be sure, is sympathetic
to Sinn Fein when, in a tribute to the men shot in
1916, he proclaims that " they would have been the
flower of any nation." But then a purely English
paper deplores — is it merely a regret or an insinuating
invitation ? — that the young men elected to Parlia-
ment in 1918, instead of wasting their great talent in
pursuit of the chimera of independence, should not
use it for the economic revival of Ireland, which they
would bring about in a few years in collaboration with
England. Another* admires them — seventy of them—
for having come without faltering through " the
ordeal of money " ; they are almost all poor ; for most
of them the £400 assigned to English Members of
Parliament would mean comfort ; not one consented
to take the obligatory oath of allegiance to the King,
not one looked upon it as even a possible temptation.
Each of them went back quite simply to the life he
had led before the election ; one to his dissecting room,
another to his office, a third to his class-room. De
Valera, who is poor and does not live in Dublin,
suffered the loss of time involved in railway travelling
and long refused to accepc a motor car. L,ater on, if
liberty comes and power with its profits and
advantages, we shall see the sharks emerge, we shall
see politicians making successful deals and driving in
their Rolls-Royce cars ; but at present it is a very
common thing to recognise an Irish " Minister " in the
cheerfully juvenile figure which flits past on a muddy
bicycle, in a faded waterproof and a little cleft hat
dripping under the pelting rain. No doubt that is
a trifle, but it is odd and delightful.
There is a rivalry in honour between these men ;

*The Earl of Arran. Fortnightly Review.

24 IEELAND IN REBELLION

that is their real bond. Recently a Sinn Fein Member
of Parliament was court-martialled : a manuscript
letter had been found on him when he was arrested,
shortly after the murder of a D.I., proposing a boycott
of the police and an effort was being made to connect
the two facts, The prisoner was engaged to be married ;
did he fear too long a separation ? Or was he
expressing his real opinion ? Be that as it may, he did
not confine himself to proving that the letter was
not by him, he added that it by no means reflected
his ideas. And it was really odd to detect amongst
his friends an uncomfortable feeling, a regret, almost
an unexpressed censure of this " weakness." I^uckily
he got a year's imprisonment : that saved him.

The zest, on the contrary, with which everyone in
turn, almost as a matter of course, goes off to prison,
the obvious disinterestedness of the leaders, are in
themselves a permanent and most efficacious instru-
ment of propaganda. The repression which followed
Easter Week, the continual aggravation of rigorous
measures do the rest.

As a consequence conversions are frequent and some-
times reveal a singular force of attraction in the doc-
trine. For example, a young man of old Norman family,
whose father, a hereditary baronet, was a Redmondite
Member of Parliament, came in contact near Oxford,
where he was studying in 1916, with the Irishmen
deported after the rebellion ; he fell under their spell
and, breaking with all his connections, very nearly
stood as the Republican candidate in 1918 against his j
own father. He is now Secretary of the Republican]
Embassy in Washington.

But the most remarkable case of spontaneous
conversion through observing men and things is that

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 25

of Barton: a Protestant, a landlord by birth, the
proprietor of a large estate in Co. Wicklow. Before
the war he was one of the Irish Volunteers ; at the
time of the split between the Redmondite and Sinn
Fein sections, he went with the former and became an
officer in the English army. He happened to be in
Dublin at the time of the Rebellion ; he was struck
by the courage and loyalty of the insurgents, of whom
he disapproved ; he was sickened by the repression ;
he began to feel that his true place could never be in
the French trenches defending the Empire, but in
Ireland defending his real country ; he got demobilised
as an agriculturist. And down on his Wicklow estate,
under the influence of his surroundings, he took the
leap. He stood for the elections under the tricolour
flag, and was returned. Having been arrested soon
afterwards and interned at Mount joy, he effected one
of those cinema escapes which Ireland delights in ;
for two years he was on the run, hunted down, always
eluding his pursuers, appearing sometimes in a little
circle of sure friends. Rearrested in the beginning of
1920, he was tried by court-martial for a speech
threatening the life of the lyord lieutenant, and
sentenced to ten years' hard labour, commuted into
three years of the same penalty. He is now in
Portland Prison, wearing the regulation prison
clothes, :haved, reduced to the insufficient fare
of the establishment, with the right to one letter
and one visit every four months, living amongst
convicts. And one feels that the evolution of a
Barton is only a type that must be multiplied
by hundreds ; what appealed to him carries away all
the generous, slightly madcap, romantic youth of
Ireland ; in such a country they are the mass.

26 IRELAND IN REBELLION

II.

The power of illusion in Sinn Fein — It is, to a certain
extent, necessary for the people, and even for the
leaders.

There is, naturally, in the idealism of Sinn Fein,
and especially in its uncompromisingness, an enormous
element of illusion. Patriotic feeling cannot be aroused
to such a pitch of tension without a little chauvinistic
blindness ; so that in this party, in which a socialism
with humanitarian pretensions is very strong, one
commonly meets types of men who are both wild
internationalists and passionate jingoes. They see
nothing but their village. They would set fire to
Europe to cook their Irish egg. Their compatriot,
Bernard Shaw, ridiculed this trait in them with his
cruel wit : " When the peace conference of the universe
opens," he said, " you will see an Irishman get up
first and cry : Ireland, gentlemen. . . " A true criticism :
for men of this stamp Ireland is the centre of the
world, and up to a certain point that is natural ; what
is not so natural is to believe that the rest of humanity
take the same view. The most painful truth for them
is that the Irish question should be almost unknown
in Europe and — what is indeed disgraceful — a matter
of indifference to public opinion.

In Dublin one hears it currently said : " The Irish
in America will bring about, if not war, at least a state
of permanent animosity between the United States
and England ; the Irish in Canada and Australia will
one day be strong enough to threaten the Empire
with disruption ; if the Senate at Washington has just

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN

rejected the peace treaty, it was to get rid of Article X.,
which endangers the liberation of Ireland/' These
assertions are so often repeated, and in such a trenchant
tone, that ore is on the point of accepting them as
obvious. One must have lived in Ireland to understand
the spell cast, in the long run, by the endless repetition
of gratuitous statements. It is only when one reflects
quietly over them that one sees fully the huge
assumptions involved in these assertions, and that
one wonders, with some anxiety, whether the Sinn
Feiners themselves believe them, or are only
pretending.

I think they believe them. They are the victims
of their own spell, as well as its workers. The concert
of assertions engenders faith. And then they are of
a race more prompt than prudent, more ardent than
critical ; they have the spirit of illusion in their blood.
And this spirit of illusion, by a short side-path, joins
the unfailing optimism, the enthusiastic idealism just
mentioned, and, by another one, the inclination to
anticipate facts, to believe that act and idea coincide.
An Irishman whom one day I brought to book for this
answered : "You are quite right, but remember that if
we had not had that faculty of illusion, Ireland would
have died, because she would have despaired in the
three hundred years that she has been keeping up such
an unequal struggle/' A fine and melancholy answer,
and heavy with sad truth ! Yes, this readiness to
believe what they wish for is born within them, but
it is necessary for them ; they believe what they
say, but if they did not, they would still have to
pretend. Would the rebels of 1916 have fought as they
did, if their leaders had not announced the illusory
help of the Germans ? Would the country in 1918

28 IRELAND IN REBELLION

have voted as it did, if the leaders had not promised
to win liberty ?

Thus, the popular imagination had to be directed
towards two immediate poles : independent represen-
tation of Ireland at the Peace Conference, and when
that had failed, the campaign against the treaty in
the United States. Happily for the leaders, the second
object seems to have been pretty well achieved ; other-
wise, what outbursts of disappointment their return
would have caused, what unpopularity they would
have incurred ! Not that it is very clear what
substantial advantage Ireland gets from the rejection
of the treaty : if America stands aloof from the concert
of nations, one may equally well argue that the control
of the Empire is thereby strengthened, and with it,
the chances of subjection for Ireland. But the masses
of the people are less exacting ; what they see is that
England has got a set-back, and that is enough ; De
Valera can come back to Dublin. Only that now
another goal must be set in view, another fence to
clear, so as to keep the country going until the next
occasion. By the force of circumstances, in order to
induce Ireland in her exhausted and feverish state to
continue to stiffen in her rebellion, Sinn Fein is driven
indefinitely to repeat this whole-hog policy. And I
am sure that some of them feel what I say — I have
seen Mr. De Valera in American photographs looking
so care-laden, so sad, borne down as it were by the
sufferings and disappointments of a people — some feel
it, whose logic is surer or whose information is wider,
or again who, travelling hither and thither on propa-
ganda work, get outside the Irish closed chamber and
sees the true proportions of things. " That may be,"
said one of them to me on another occasion, " but

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 29

even if they feel it, they will never say it." For my
part I will add : least of all if they feel it. And you see
what a strange thing Sinn Fein is, a mixture of bluff,
self-suggestion, and faith almost unanalysable, and so
very Irish !

Besides, as I have also been told, would not analysis
and too clear a consciousness of things be dangerous,
even for the leaders ? Would not these things cut at
the root of their energy ? What do those who pride
themselves on this lucid disillusionment do for the
cause ? Nothing, because they say there is nothing
to do. A fine excuse for standing still, but an easy
attitude to take up ! Yes, easy and more meritorious
is that of the young leaders who, perhaps, without
hoping for any immediate or precise result, and having,
some of them, the courage to hold out no such hope,
give such answers as these to the questions of their
men : " Ask me no questions. I know nothing. Do
your duty ! When will freedom come ? I don't know.
Do your duty ! Obey orders ; don't pay fines ; go to
prison ; don't ask questions. Do your duty ! Perhaps
you will get the reward. Perhaps it will be your
children, or your children's children. No matter. Do
your duty ! " It is true, these words ring finer.

in.

The moral forces— The love of glory — The spirit of
sacrifice — The mystic belief in right — The sense of
historical tradition — The essential identity of Sinn
Fein and of constitutional nationalism.

And now, what are the mighty moral forces that
dictate such words to these young men ? Motives of
a personal order, and others that are wider. Amongst

30 IRELAND IN REBELLION

the first is certainly glory, every shade of it, from
juvenile vanity to the love of glory in its highest sense.
Just think of it ! the majority are not thirty, or only
just ; they have won, over grey beards, over the most
solidly constructed network of political organisations,
the completest, most intoxicating victory ; and it is
Sinn Fein, this doctrine of Roman sternness, which,
out of yesterday's obscurity made them the leaders
of to-day ; they must at least prove themselves worthy !
Saint- Just, also, remember, was terribly serious : he
was twenty-five years old.

Then there is the emulation in honour between
them, of which I have already spoken. Ireland is not
very big. The staff of Sinn Fein forms a circle which,
when all is said, is rather narrow, in which everyone
knows everyone else. One does not want to do less
than one's neighbour and, if possible, one would like
to do better. One does not want to lose caste in the eyes
of one's sisters, of one's fiancee, or more generally, in
the eyes of the women. For the women, as you can
imagine, play an important role in this little band.
One of them was explaining to me one day how useful
to the cause it was, and how good for the men's spirit,
that they in their corner should maintain, instead of
an enervating femininity, a serious and manly tone,
heroic at need. Whereupon, the conversation having
turned on Corneille, my interlocutor professed to enter
into the reasons that Pauline at length discovers for
loving Polyeucte. So spoke Madame Roland.

Besides, these young men have love of glory, pure
and simple. In little Irish shops, side by side with
popular ballads, one sees on postcards and in prints
the picture of Pearse or of Connolly, or De Valera
photographed in Volunteer uniform. On Irish chimney-

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 31

pieces MacDonagh firmly closes his protruding lips ;
young MacDermott has the grave and straightforward
air, the pure features that remind one — if I may
venture to compare a Saxon with him — of the fine
face of I,ord Grey. Irish girls carry in their prayer-
books, printed in a leaflet, the names of the sixteen
martyrs (Casement is not forgotten) who fell for
Ireland after Easter Week. I suspect these young
men of being ready to do a great deal to have their
portrait on the chimney-pieces and in the shops, and
consoled beforehand, in case risks should run high, by
the thought of their memory too living in the prayer-
books.

But, besides this love of glory, which after all is a
common human feeling, one perceives in them some-
thing less accessible because it is more Irish, something
like the spirit of sacrifice. No doubt, this partly comes
from the religion with which their education and
their whole race are impregnated, but there is in it
something else more peculiar to them. The fact of
being weak in numbers and resources, of being even
doomed to annihilation, would not be a reason for
giving up the game ; on the contrary,

'Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all.

Such was the inscription that MacBride — another of
those shot in 1916 — had put on his flag when twenty
years ago he led an Irish Brigade to the help of the
Boers. The Irish soul does not so much sing of might
or triumph in its poetry, even in its remote epics,
as it loves to celebrate, to pity, to mourn, the outcasts
or the defeated victims of a just cause ; its heroes
are Deirdre and Naoise, the Sean-Bhean Bhocht

IRELAND IN REBELLION

Lord Edward and Robert Emmet. Ireland has a sort
of despairing tenderness for misfortune. And even
though the sacrifice of these young men was to be
useless, it is but an added reason why they should
make it.

But it will not be useless. For — and this contradicts
what I have just said, but, with human beings, and
particularly Irish human beings, to contradict is not
to exclude — they have the clear consciousness that
there is not, in this respect, a single sacrifice that does
not bear fruit. The death of Pearse and his comrades
made Sinn Fein into a great party ; months of im-
prisonment makes more recruits than a hundred
speeches ; every act of repression increases their
strength ; the example of self-devotion is the strongest
means of propaganda in existence : these are truths
of experience on which they put their finger every day
and which every day mysteriously whisper to them :
Courage.

It is evident that we have already passed out of
the region of personal motives ; here a wider feeling,
to some extent a public feeling, comes into play. Yet
another, of the same order, buoys them up, the mystic
belief in justice which makes them assimilate, and even
confuse, right with fact, and whether it is reasonable
or not, gives them unimaginable energy. I^astly, and
above all, these men believe that they are acting in
the direction of their history, continuing a tradi-
tion.

" It may be truthfully asserted that the youth of
Ireland, in every generation, is instinctively separatist,
that its dream is to draw the sword, and that, con-
sequently, every generation produces the material for
a separatist movement. That being so, the question

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 33

of the acceptance by a given generation of a separatist
movement reduces itself in practice to that of the
formation, at the right moment, of an openly separa-
tist movement ; and in practice also it is possible to
attract any generation in Ireland from moderation to
a separatist movement, if the separatists succeed
in creating a public, attractive, and practicable
policy."

The thought is perfectly exact, even if the expression
is weak. What does the history of Ireland tell us ?
Up to the flight of the Earls, a war persistently kept
up, for centuries, against the English invader. After
the surrender, when a regular conflict had become
impossible, risings and plots, Phelim O'Neill in 1641,
Sarsfield in 1691, the Volunteers in 1782, the United
Irishmen in '98, Emmet in 1803, Young Ireland
in 1848, the Fenians in 1867. Every time that a
moderate constitutional effort is endorsed by the
people, in the time of O'Connell, of the Tenants'
Rights league, or of Parnell and Redmond, it is
only a second-best policy, to fill a gap, and because
a more radical movement has just been crushed. The
rebellion of 1916 verifies this law of alternation. Thus
the Sinn Fein leaders know themselves to be the
legitimate heirs of those great legendary names which
make every true Irish heart beat with pride : Sarsfield
and Wolfe Tone. Who can express the strength given
them by this sense of historical continuity ? And
yet, this sense in them is neither as deep nor as wide
as it should be ; they scoff pitilessly at Redmond,
his imperiousness in Ireland, and his timid credulity
at Westminster ; no doubt they force the note
consciously in the party interest and to contrast their
methods with his ; but anyhow, that is their feeling.

D

34 IRELAND IN REBELLION

They despise in O'Connell his respect for legal forms.
Judgments that are both hasty and unjust ! Would
not O'Connell's propaganda have been brought to a
full stop in early Victorian England but for his absolute
respect for legality ? And is not the Act of Emancipa-
tion, as its name indicates, the breaking of a link in
the chain ? As to the Parliamentary see-saw method
invented by Parnell, did it not produce certain
advantages, now insufficient but substantial in their
day, such as the redistribution of the land among
the farmers, thereby even preparing the ground for
bolder followers ? Redmondism and Sinn Fein, hostile
brothers, if you will, but less hostile than brothers,
different expressions of the same old national
spirit.

I admit all the grievances brought against Redmond j
I admit that, infected by thirty years spent in the
Parliamentary atmosphere, he had become a pro-
fessional politician, tyrannical here, backboneless
there, and that by dint of not daring frankly to
declare the ultimate objects he pursued, he ended by
being uncertain about them himself. But at bottom
these objects were the very objects of Sinn Fein. If
he was content with Home Rule, it was because it
seemed to him impossible in his time to aim at more ;
but for him too, whether he admitted it to himself
or not, the solution was merely provisional. I^et us
not forget the clear words engraved on Parnell's
monument : " No one has the right to put a limit to
the march of a nation ; no one has the right to say
to his country : Thus far and no farther. We have
never tried to fix an ultimate limit^to the progress
of Irish nationality, and we never shall." Where^the
constitutionalists want to proceed by stages, the Sinn

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 35

Feiners prefer to rush the denouement : that is the
whole difference.

When Redmond, in 1914, demanded special brigades
in which the Irish troops, commanded by Irish officers,
should go and fight under the green flag, did not
this particularism foreshadow the separatist move-
ment ? When he called on Parliament to withdraw
all British troops from Ireland and to entrust its
defence to purely Irish contingents, did he not tend,
consciously or not, to produce the nucleus of an army
of national defence, available against any enemy ?
The War Office perceived this when it persistently
refused — and, from its point of view, it was right.
Have I not read that Ireland was wrong in refusing
to fight side by side with the allies, but for this singular
reason that she would now have 400,000 trained men
ready ? The truth is that the supreme vision of
Redmond was the very dream of Sinn Fein ; scratch
any true son of Ireland and you will find the same
aspiration, perhaps latent, but living, in the bottom
of his heart.

An old lady, a large landowner in the West, dis-
quieted about her rents in the revolutionary atmo-
sphere created by Sinn Fein, had been hurling the
major excommunication against it for two hours by
the clock. The conversation changed and turned on
English rule : never did Griffith abuse it as vigorously
as she did upon the spot. A Redmondite, a former
Member of Parliament, very anti-German, who made
his son enlist in the British army at the very outbreak
of the war, admitted to me : " When I see a company
of English soldiers passing in the streets of Dublin,
I can't help myself, I clench my fists, I have to go
[ away. And I can't bear any longer to see my son

36 IRELAND IN REBELLION

in khaki." These people do not, perhaps, understand
themselves, but their feeling is, in its essence, as clear
as that of Sinn Fein.

And it is the growth and spread of this feeling
throughout Irish-Ireland that explains the continual
shifting of the old nationalism towards Sinn Fein.
Even about Redmond, and often beyond him, there
were men like Joe Devlin, whose vision was rathei
daring and whose speech was rather rough for the
occupants of seats at Westminster ; there were men
like Shane Leslie, who considered Home Rule only
as a stage, and hailed in advance the younger men
who should outstrip it ; there were men like Ginnell,
who were to pass boldly over to Sinn Fein. And
to-day, if it is true that Sir Horace Plunkett — formerly
an Irish Unionist M.P., think of it ! — still admits that
Ireland should remain within the Empire, what
difference in feeling do you find between one of his
bitter philippics and an address of Griffith or De
Valera ?

No, the only questions which separated Redmond
from Sinn Fein — putting aside, of course, personal
jealousies and ambitions, which in Ireland, as much
as elsewhere, and more, are the scourge of public life
— were questions of method and expediency. When
Sinn Fein sees things from a little farther off so that
its view will be less short-sighted, and fragmentary,
it will be juster and will recognise that Redmond and
his party also have their place in the line^ofj Irish
history, and that if it is in conflict with^them^it is
really because^it is complementary to them. It will
then feel, more completely than it now does, that it
gathers up the various threads of tradition, and it
will draw fresh strength from the consciousness that

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SINN FEIN 37

it brings together, reconciles, unifies, and incarnates
all Irish aspirations after liberty. For it is useless to
mince words, if at bottom Sinn Fein means indepen-
dence, under that name or some other, in act or in
dream, consciously or unconsciously, the whole of
National Ireland is Sinn Fein.

CHAPTER III.
THE IRISH REPUBLIC.

I.

The Irish Republican Army — Thwarting of British
power by force — by propaganda — Results obtained in
the middle of 1920.

IN May, 1918, Lord French was appointed Viceroy of
Ireland ; Mr. Shortt, later on replaced by Mr. Ian
MacPherson, became Chief Secretary ; and with them
began the system of military repression which still
continues. In December the Irish people, although
half the Sinn Fein leaders were in jail or hunted, voted
by a three-fourths majority for an independent
Republic. On the 2ist January, 1919, the Sinn Fein
deputies still at liberty, assembled in Dail Eireann,
or the Parliament of Ireland, proclaimed the indepen-
dence of the Irish Republic. Vain elections, empty
proclamation upon which the British Press exhausted
all its irony ! At the moment the situation was very
clear ; on the one side the realm of facts, all serious
folk, the force and majesty of the Empire ; on the other
feeble, wordy exaggerations, dreamers or practical
jokers, governments of phantasy and comic opera
cabinet ministers. Since then it would seem that the
work of Sinn Fein, whose results began to appear
especially in the first six months of 1920, has tended
to belie the beautiful parallelism of this specious

38

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 39

contrast and to align on its side, too, a certain number
of facts.

The attempt made in December against the life
of I,ord French was like a warning stroke of a bell.
But in spite of the revolver shots which were already
ringing out in the streets of Dublin it was still possible,
at this period, to believe that these were the
unconnected attempts of isolated terrorists. To-day
there is no longer room for mistake ; we have to re-
cognise in these incidents the opening of a campaign
long-thought-out and deliberately pursued to combat
and progressively paralyse English power in Ireland.

To this end Sinn Fein had at its disposal the Irish
Volunteers. It will be remembered that they had
been formed in the autumn of 1913 as a set-off to the
Ulster Volunteers of Sir Edward Carson. Their
effective strength must have varied greatly. When
Redmond had — vainly — proposed to I^ord Kitchener
to take them over en bloc as an Irish Territorial Army
he estimated their numbers at 100,000 ; those of them
who are to-day actually carrying out guerilla tactics
against English troops cannot exceed a few thousands,
but naturally, these thousands are picked fighters. In
any case the constitutional leader had never looked
kindly upon the creation of such troops, evidently by
no means parliamentarian in outlook, and liable to
easily slip away from his control. After some time,
however, he had formed so high an estimate of their
strength that he endeavoured to capture it for his
own profit by putting himself at their head. It can
be well imagined that his efforts to assist British
recruiting soon became intolerable in this young and
ardently anti-English milieu. He and his friends,
excluded from the direction of the Volunteers, were

40 IRELAND IN EEBELLION

replaced by others of more definitely radical views
like John McNeill, professor of Early Irish History in
the National University, who was appointed Chief of
Staff.

MacNeill's intervention prevented the Volunteers,
except in Dublin, from taking part in the rising of
Easter, 1916, of which he disapproved. The framework
remained therefore almost intact. But as the repressive
measures adopted by the Castle made themselves
more felt, anti-English sentiment increased in depth ;
and the parallel, but distinct organisations, like the
Citizen Army of revolutionary workers, or the Irish
Republican Brotherhood — the heirs of the old Fenians
— tended more and more to merge into the Irish
Volunteers. The latter, once forged and made perfect
in the fire of battle, exchanged their former title for
that of the Irish Republican Army, a name more fitting
for the state of war which, on the admission of the
English themselves, then existed in Ireland.

Where was this army to find recruits ? A few every-
where— from workers, students, peasants, clerks.
" The captains of volunteers," says Sir H. Lawson,
an English Lieutenant-general, " appear to have been
almost always quite young men, farmer's sons for the
most part, some of them schoolmasters, most with
what for their class must be considered a good deal
of education, ignorant, however, of the world and of
many things, but, as a class, transparently sincere
and single-minded, idealists, highly religious for the
most part, and often with an almost mystical sense
of their duty to their country. These men gave to the
task of organising their volunteers their best in mind
and spirit. They fought against drunkenness and self-
indulgence, and it is no exaggeration to say that, as

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 41

a class, they represented all that was best in the coun-
tryside.

" They and their volunteers were trained to dis-
cipline, they imbibed the military spirit, the sense of
military honour, etc., and then, as now, they looked
upon their army as one in a very real sense an organisa-
tion demanding implicit obedience and self-abnegation
from rank to rank.

" The Irish Republican** Army seems tojbe~"particu-
larly free from ruffians of the professional type, and
the killings of police and others, sometimes under
circumstances which evoke our horror, were almost
certainly done by members of the I.R.A., acting
under military orders — young men imbued with no
personal feeling against their victims, with no crimes
to their record, and probably then shedding blood
for the first time in their lives."

These men were evidently much less formidable
on account of their weapons or their numbers than by
reason of their moral exaltation, and the active
sympathy in which the population, almost without
exception, enveloped them. " Behind their organisa-
tion there was the spirit of a nation," says General
Lawson — " of a nation which was certainly not in
favour of murder, but which, on the whole, sympa-
thised with them and believed that the members of
the I.R.A. are fighting for the cause of the Irish
people." Thanks to this support from the masses
there are few traitors, and these few are promptly
unmasked and punished, while, on the other hand,
there is an incomparable secret service, since a whole
nation in sympathy gathers informatioriyfer " the
boys " and thwarts at every turn^ttne cni^iii
superiority of English power.

42 IRELAND IN REBELLION

This power, besides the regular army, consisted of
the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the Royal Irish
Constabulary, of about 2,000 and 10,000 men,
respectively. The D.M.P. is really a police force
comparable to our policemen, at least as regards the
majority of its members ; and, for these latter, life
has remained bearable. A suspension of hostilities,
tacit and perhaps official, exists between them and
Sinn Feiners. The political detectives of the G
Division, the " G-men " as they are called, alone in
every sense of the phrase, find it hard to live. . . .
As for the R.I.C. the French reader should not be
deceived by the peaceful word, Constabulary. The
force has nothing in common with our good gendarmes,
good-natured lads, loved and esteemed by the peasant
whom they protect from the marauder and the
vagabond. The R.I.C. is armed to the teeth : rifle,
bayonet, revolver and of late, grenades and machine
guns. Carefully recruited from men of exceptional
physique who undergo at the Central Depot, at
Phoenix Park, several months' physical and " moral "
training, and always at the orders of the military
authorities, the force is as much occupied in the
political surveillance of the country as in the repression
of crimes and misdemeanours.

Scattered in little groups of from six to ten men
under a sergeant, even in the smallest villages in
Ireland, the R.I.C. envelops the whole country in
an immense net with narrow meshes. For fear of weak-
ness or collusion with the population, no member of
the force is ever stationed in his own county. What
makes the R.I.C. more efficient and in troubled times
more effective is that the men (if not the officers) are
in the proportion of 95 to 100 Irish — genuine Irish

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 43

Catholics. Familiar by birth with the habits and
character of the people, speaking Irish in areas where
Irish is useful, possessing in addition the courage
and pugnacity of the race, they are the most dangerous
arm of the Empire in Ireland. But for them the
English army would be like a huge body deprived of
eyes and feelers, blinded and impotent. This is the
arm which had to be destroyed first. The attempt
was made by violence and persuasion together.

By violence : Shootings previously sporadic have
become more and more frequent, one should say
regular, and in spite of the silence of Sinn Fein on the
question of responsibility, these acts are obviously
regulated by a superior authority. The putting-away
of policemen is a daily item in the news columns of
the Irish papers ; at least a hundred have perished
since the beginning of the year, twice as many have
been wounded. Hoey, one of the cleverest and bravest
sleuths of the D.M.P., was killed at the door of the
police headquarters by a revolver shot fired from the
other side of the street by a marksman whose skill
bespoke training. Some weeks later (at 6 o'clock in
the evening), another detective, Barton, was killed
in the same manner fifty paces further up. Two or
three detectives who were following up an inquiry
into the latter's death were successively killed or
wounded — one, Wharton, was shot in the midst of
the throng turning out of Grafton Street. A high
official from Belfast, Assistant Commissioner Forbes
Redmond, was sent to encourage the police, who were
losing heart ; three weeks after his arrival in Dublin
the unfortunate man, going to dinner to his hotel, was
killed point blank. In every case the attacker escapes
— impossible to capture. One day I was speaking

44 IRELAND IN REBELLION

of these murders to a lady who would not harm a
fly. " Poor boys/' she said, with a sigh of pity. I
thought she was thinking of the victims. She
continued : " Such fine lads ! obliged to do such work.''
There you have Irish feeling on the subject.

In the country and in the towns of the South and
West — Cork, Tipperary, Thurles, Limerick — attacks
follow one another in more rapid succession, often
successful, almost always unpunished. It would be
a simple matter to give names and dates : to what
purpose ? The story is always the same, an R.I.C.
patrol is passing along a road, from behind a hedge
or a wall, from a bog hole, comes a volley of bullets ;
those who are not hit fly, the others are deprived of
their arms, the wounded generally well treated. Even
sleep, behind the doors and armoured windows of
the barracks, in spite of barbed wire and machine
guns — is not safe nowadays. Almost every night
small isolated barracks in the country are attacked.
The materials for the attack are slender, the success
variable, but the tactics are at least, clearly conceived.
Telephone and telegraph wires once cut and roads
blocked with tree trunks, a well-sustained fire keeps
the defenders under cover ; some bold spirits endeavour
to place sticks of gelignite against an angle of the
building so as to blow it in on the heads of the besieged.
For the past year each side has tried to introduce
some niceties into this rather severe and simple
scheme ; the barracks have been provided with wireless
apparatus or Verey lights, the Volunteers have dis-
covered a plan of throwing on to the roof cans of
burning petrol — on both sides grenades and heavy
bombs have come into play. Irishmen against Irish-
men— and here lies the saddest element in the situation

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 45

—have fought gallantly in both the French and the
English sense of the word. In a northern village whose
name I have forgotten, ten constables resisted all
night and surrendered only when six of their number
had been wounded and two others swallowed up in
the burning building. More than once, on the other
hand, after surrender, the victors have given full
honours and every attention to a valiant but defeated
foe.

Side by side with these exhibitions of chivalry
certain executions have been carried out with merciless
fury — in cases where the man belonged to the political
secret service. One of these, three days after his arrival
in a village in the West was fired at and missed. He
fled, taking refuge in a house. The assailants searched
from cellar to loft in vain. Hearing a lorry full of
police passing by the house, the searchers hid and
waited in silence. After a moment, as all became
quiet, they catch, towards the kitchen, a faint sound
of repressed breathing. They go to the cupboard,
find their man, drag him out and shoot him against
the wall.

Thus, not far from Tralee, the sergeant who in 1916
had arrested Sir Roger Casement was done to death ;
so too at I^sburn D.I. Swanzy, accused of connivance
at the assassination of MacCurtain, late Lord Mayor 1
of Cork ; so too perished Col. Smyth. Smyth was a ^
rough soldier who had lost an arm in the war, and]
who, since his entry into the R.I.C. had acquired al
reputation for being energetic — to excess.*"! Sent to1
Cork to raise the morale'of the police, he was" accused, 1
on the evidence of four'constables who had^resigned '
from the Force, of having, in the barracks at I4stowel, "
made a speech in which he urged his men to shoot1

46 IRELAND IN REBELLION

civilians at sight. " As for those who are on hunger
strike, let them die " — he is reported to have said,
" and the sooner the better." Some days later he
was surprised in the smoke room of his club and shot
dead on the spot. Judge Alan Bell — despite his title
of Judge, he was nothing more than a police officer
who had spent most of his career in the secret service
— was entrusted with an enquiry into Irish banks,
with a view to discovering traces of Sinn Fein deposits ;
one morning, on his way from Kingstown to Dublin,
his tram was stopped, Alan Bell forced to alight, and
then killed outright.

Thus we see that the trade has its risks — ever on
the increase. Henceforward, no policeman is sure of
his next hour. It is a hard trial for men gripped by
constant dread of a peril which is obscure, intangible,
withering. An intense propaganda, and it will be seen
one which was easy to carry out, was also brought
into play to increase the demoralisation of the Force.
The most rigorous boycott — and the Irish, who are
its inventors — know how to wield the weapon, ostra-
cised the " Peelers."* It was forbidden to sell them
anything whatever ; they had, therefore, to comman-
deer food. It was forbidden even to speak to them ;
girls who were weak enough to tolerate their company
had their hair cut off as a sign of infamy. One day,
even, it is said that some savage, remembering the

*Popular nickname for the R.I.C., who were raised in Ireland by
Sir Robert Peel. Sometimes this boycott led to tragic mistakes. A
Limerick Sinn Feiner, James Dalton, had been talking to policemen
— he had even spent a night in their barrack. Accused of spying, he
demanded a Dail Inquiry? He was killed one night by a revolver
shot. The following morning the Dail decision establishing his
innocence arrived. The poor fellow left thirteen children.

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 47

cruelties of former times, threatened to slit ears. And
then among these poor R.I.C. men there were many
who knew that their friends, their relations, their
brothers, were with the patriots whom they were
tracking. The contempt in which, as traitors, they
were enveloped stifled them. It was a far cry now to
the time when it was said that the ambition of every
Irish farmer was to have one son a District Inspector
of Constabulary and another a Bishop.

A year ago a sergeant and some constables, after
curfew, halted a pedestrian : " Who goes there ? "

" Hello, Sergeant ; you really ought to recognise
me — it was you who arrested me and brought me to
Mount joy last winter."

" Oh, to be sure ! Excuse me, Doctor ! But, look here
— allow us, to see you home — you might be worried
by the patrols."

And the doctor goes off escorted by his guard of
honour. On the way the conversation naturally turns
to politics. Before his men, and certain, therefore,
that he was expressing a common thought, the sergeant
explains with a touch of Irish drollery.

" Do you know, all the same, you Sinn Feiners
ought to be rather popular in the Force. After all,
only for you they would never have given us the new
scale of pay — 100 per cent, increase, Doctor. What 1
Resign ? Any time you like — get us jobs ! I have three
children. Bob, here, has eight, I/iam eleven. We must
live. I spent my last leave with my eldest brother,
who inherited my father's farm. He taunted me
with wearing the King's jacket, and urged me to
throw it off."

" Patrick," I asked, " suppose I do, will you give
me half the farm ? I heard no more about it, Doctor."

48 IRELAND IN REBELLION

Everyone laughed. It is easy to grasp the viewpoint
of men who speak in such a way.

In sum, demoralising influences operate upon the
Force from two converging directions ; the men have
had to bear the tortures of fear, they have been made
ashamed, and their consciences have been roused.
Thus, pestered and buffeted from all sides at once
it is long since they began to yield. From January,
1920, efforts were made to strengthen, by English
recruits, a corps already contaminated by Republican
sympathies. Resignations followed — at first isolated,
then more frequent, then almost in solid groups. The
Irish Bulletin for 2ist June, 1920, chronicles with
satisfaction more than 100 resignations for the month,
150, counting sergeants, officers and magistrates. On
the i6th July, Sir Hamar Greenwood, Chief Secretary
for Ireland, announces that since January ist 250
men have left the Force. Even inside the Force the
old spirit of blind discipline was being worn down ;
some men protested against the duties imposed upon
them ; a certain constable, Brennan, who, since he
refused to resign, was dismissed, carried on a campaign
to have the R.I.C. shorn of its warlike character and
restored to its only real function — the suppression of
criminal or civil offences. Quite lately, we had a
rumour, denied by the Castle, re-asserted by the
Dublin Freeman's Journal, that one morning in the
Phoenix Park Depot 140 men had thrown off the uni-
form and left the barracks, refusing to any longer
prosecute their fellow-countrymen for " political

! opinions."

j&{-.vWe must not underestimate such starts of|conscience.

I Remembering that a great number of these poor fellows
had 10 or 15 years, some 25 or 30 years' service, that

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 49

they are risking their dependants' daily bread and
abandoning the certainty of a pension for their old
age — we can measure the strength of sentiment which
impels them.

It is the same sentiment, dormant but ever ready
to be aroused, which at the call of Sinn Fein has almost
absolutely dried up in Ireland recruiting which was
once flourishing, and in distant India, at the receipt
of news from home, caused a mutiny in a battalion of
the Connaught Rangers.

Gradually the R.I.C. thus intimidated, decimated,
worked upon, began to lose its efficiency, patrols could
no longer go out at night — it was a useless risk. Soon
they began to evacuate the small lonely barracks
and to concentrate on the towns, to avoid the weakness
of dispersion. It was like the slow retraction of an
octopus which regretfully withdraws its hazardous
tentacles, and first by night, then even by day the
countryside (save for four or five counties in Ulster)
fell altogether under the sway of Dail Kireann. Hence-
forth there were two Governments in Ireland : the
Irish Government which controlled the Catholic coun-
trysides, and the English, master of the towns, and
even in the towns its supremacy was hotly contested.
Numbers of Sinn Feiners " wanted " — a pretty
phrase — by the police went calmly about their business,
certain that in the streets or even in daylight not a
policeman would dare lay hands on them. It was
only at night — in case their houses should be sur-
rounded and searched by a section of regular soldiers — •
that they ran some risk by sleeping at home. Hence
the number of men " on the run " — always moving
and never caught. Universal connivance protects
them. A G-man sent to make enquiries about the

50 IRELAND IN REBELLION

murder of Forbes Redmond, when challenged by the
witness, whom he was interrogating to prove his
identity, preferred to leave, discomfited. " I have a
wife and two children," quoth the poor man.

On the other hand the Viceroy and the higher officials
could not leave the Castle — itself fortified like a first
line blockhouse — except in the midst of armoured
motors and lorries full of soldiers. The attempt of
20th December had nearly cost Lord French his life.
The Lord lieutenant, returning from Roscommon,
had left the train at Ashtown Station — a safer place for
him than the Dublin terminus, Broadstone, intending
to proceed by motor to Phcenix Park. Warned by
their incomparable secret service, the Volunteers
attacked at an elbow in the road with gunfire and
grenades. But for a providential delay in the arrival
of the train, which upset their plans, it is beyond
doubt that Lord French would have been killed.
When it became clear that he was escaping a young
2nd Lieutenant, Martin Savage, jumped boldly out on
to the road a bomb in hand, straight in front of the
speeding car. He fell instantly under the bullets of
the escort. On another occasion in spring, a high police
official, Assistant Inspector General Roberts, R.I.C.,
\vhen leaving Amiens Street Station by motor was met
with a hail of bullets under the railway bridge, and by
good luck escaped with a wound in the neck. A little
later, Mr. Frank Brooke, hated for the memories
which he had left in his county as Deputy Lieutenant,
was killed in daylight in his office at Westland Row.
Bach time the assailants disappeared unmolested.
There remained a modicum of truth in the disgruntled
exaggerations to which in its ill-humour the Morning
Post gave vent : " The British Government has been

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 51

beaten — it only remains for it to be deposed by Sinn
Fein. Sinn Fein has become so powerful that the
higher civil officials and L,ord French himself have
been and are besieged in the Castle and in the Vice-
regal

II.

The Triumphant Elections of 1920 — Propaganda
Abroad — Financial Resources — Attempts at Econo-
mic Organisation.

The Irish did not rest content with these military
gains — indispensable as a first step towards supplanting
British power in Ireland. There now appeared a broad
and complete plan which they tried ably and methodi-
cally to put into operation. Bail Eireann having
become a de facto power gradually assumed the func-
tions of a regular Government. Its power was
increased by the Municipal Elections of January,
1920, followed by the County Council Elections in
June. In both of these, Sinn Fein, with its ally, the
National labour Party, literally swept the country.
With the idea of reducing the majority obtained by
the Republicans in the General Election of December,
1918, England had introduced a rigorous Proportional
Representation Act ; the triumph of Sinn Fein was
only the more crushing. In the towns and cities,
77 per cent., in the counties 80*9 per cent, of the votes
were cast for independence. Out of 699 seats on the
County Councils Unionism now held only 86. Dublin,
Cork, lyimerick, Galway and Sligo elected Republican
Corporations. Nay, even the sacred " North-east
corner " was entered. Tyrone and Fermanagh, two of

52 IRELAND IN REBELLION

the six so-called Unionist counties voted against
Partition. For the first time since the days of King
James the Mayoralty of Londonderry by 21 votes to
19 was captured from the Protestant settler. Carried
forward on a wave of universal enthusiasm, the
Republic was settling down.

Abroad it had kept its agents who, though left on
the door-step by the Peace Conference, had remained
to continue their propaganda. After various ups and
downs, Messrs. O'Kelly and Gavan Duffy, Irish Envoys
at Paris, who had been at first repulsed because of
the fervour of the Anglo-French Alliance, finally, by
taking advantage of a certain bitterness begotten of
English selfishness, succeeded in interesting French
public opinion in the fate of Ireland. Victory helped
France to forget that during the war Ireland had,
with all its strength, really played the enemy's game.
M. Marc Sangnier, a Paris Deputy, gave a lecture in
favour of Irish Independence which attracted much
attention. The Paris Press which had always refused
to accept the communiques of the Irish Bulletin,
ceased to pin its faith to the accuracy of Renter's
versions of events in Ireland. We know that when
first questioned in the House of Commons about the
Irish Delegation at Paris, the English Government
declared that it had nothing but contempt for the
ridiculous activities of Mr. Gavan Duffy. The expulsion
of the same Gavan Duffy from Paris, two months later,
showed that the Condon Ministry had changed its
mind. At the beatification of the Venerable Oliver
Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, beheaded in I/ondon
in 1681 for high treason, Mr. O' Kelly, who had been
sent to Rome to receive formally the Irish Bishops,
seized the opportunity for holding, in the Eternal City,

THE IBISH REPUBLIC 53

a purely Irish function, which must have been pro-
foundly distasteful to England.

In America, Mr. De Valera, after having used all his
energies to have the Peace Treaty rejected (on account
of Article 10, which sealed the fate of Ireland) failed
in his efforts to persuade the Republican and Demo-
cratic Conventions to make the Irish Question an
issue at the Presidential Election. On the other hand,
despite the unfortunate split between himself and
certain Irish-American leaders, like Judge Cohalan,
and the old Fenian, John Devoy, he made a wonderful
success of the floating of the " Irish Ivoan."

It was in this way that the new and still formative
State secured for itself resources, more necessary to it
than to any other, to strengthen it and to finance
the struggle. For the moment it was impossible to
levy regular taxes. They, therefore, asked for public
loans of £250,000 in Ireland, and £1,000,000 in America,
where at all times Irish revolt has found solid financial
backing. On the bonds it was stated that interest
at 5 per cent, would begin to run six months after the
evacuation of the island by the Army of Occupation.
Naturally, in Ireland, public appeals, applications,
or purchase of shares were held to be offences, punish-
able by imprisonment. In spite of everything the
loan was a success. Ireland gave £150,000 more than
the amount asked for ; America, instead of £1,000,000
furnished 10,000,000 dollars. These large sums, on
deposit for the most part in the United States beyond
the reach of seizure by the English, gave the Dail
certain means of action. The offensive began by an
effort to dry up Irish sources of revenue to the British
Treasury. To upset the making out of assessments,
on Easter Monday, anniversary of the Rebellion,

54 IRELAND IN REBELLION

Income Tax offices were burned, more or less over
the whole country. The County Councils, now manned
by Republicans, refused to furnish surveyors with any
indications which might be of assistance in the assess-
ment of income tax. As a final blow there was some
idea of issuing an order to refuse income tax to the
English and pay it to the Dail — but the difficulties
are such that, so far, no such action has been taken.
If ever the order comes, it will be issued simultaneously
all over Ireland, and first attempted in the country
areas where its execution is easiest. Legal action,
seizures of goods ? The seizures would run into tens
of thousands. And then who will buy the goods, houses,
lands, or cattle, seized by the British Treasury. No-
body. Some will be prevented by patriotism, others
by fear. Export the cattle to England ? Who will
drive them, move them on the railways, ship them ?
Nobody. We can see what embarrassing situations
may confront England in dealing with the solid
passive resistance of a whole population. Well wielded,
passive resistance is a dangerous weapon. $

The Republican Government, although in the hands
of pure intellectuals, barristers, professors, journalists,
students, was far from forgetting economic problems.
It recalled the tremendous wave of prosperity which,
under Grattan from 1782 to 1798, had marked the
short period during which Ireland had enjoyed a
half -freedom. It instituted a " Committee of Inquiry
into the Resources and Industries of Ireland/' which
did good work and might have done better if, despite
its purely economic character, it had not been inter-
fered with as seditious. In the Town Hall, Cork, one
day the meeting was broken up at the point of the
bayonet. Another day, Mr. Darrell Figgis was within

THE IEISH REPUBLIC 55

an ace of being hanged out of hand by an English
officer hopelessly drunk and irresponsible. A sergeant
was actually bringing up a rope when Colonel Moore, a
veteran of the Transvaal war, and now a member of
the Commission of Inquiry, fortified by his rank as
ex- Colonel of the Connaught Rangers, providentially
intervened just in the nick of time. Amid such incidents,
tragic or comic, the Committee continued its labours
on fisheries, mines, peat, coal, water power, railways,
harbours, and established to a certain degree the real
state of the natural resources of Ireland. Thus fore-
stalling the coming dawn of liberty, preparing with
all its might, the Bail was at least now better qualified
to forbid emigration, whose slow drain seemed to be
recommencing this summer.

III.

Republican Justice — Dangers of Anarchy — Police —
Arbitration Courts — Settlement of the Agrarian
question.

But the most interesting assumption of sovereignty
and to my mind the most effective against English
authority, was the creation of a purely Irish judicial
machine — police and judiciary. The matter was
urgent for, obviously, a country is not stirred to its
depths by a revolutionary crisis, as this one has been,
without the dregs tending towards the surface. Under
cover of general disorder brigandage pure and simple
had made its appearance, attacks by footpads in towns
hitherto the safest in Europe, armed highway robbery,
private revenge in the guise of political executions.
Under pain of going down in impotence and dishonour

56 IRELAND IN REBELLION

the Republican movement owed it to itself to put an
end to anarchy. The Volunteer organisation supplied
the force — in men and officers — nor must we ignore—
and here lies the real reason of such constant triumphs
— the support of unanimous assent. Robbers were
arrested ; the proceeds of their thefts, sometimes very
considerable, restored to the rightful owners ; other
delinquents were put in prison for a few wreeks, some-
times till they had promised on their honour to be of
better behaviour, others were treated to the " cat-o'-
nine-tails," others banished for a period from their
own county, and the guiltiest criminals were con-
demned, wittily enough, to be deported — to England^
Above the police, who were generally in charge of
the officer commanding the local Volunteers, were
established courts. The main difficulty, naturally, was
to ensure the execution of the verdicts. At first,
litigants who had recourse to these courts, agreed in
writing to abide by the decisions, and not to appeal
to the English. Then, in extreme cases, the Volunteers
were always available to enforce the judgments of
these "Arbitration Courts." Above all, over these bitter
quarrels of self-interest, there hovered an atmosphere
of Irish brotherliness, a feeling that it would have been
too degrading to appeal from the justice of one's own
countrymen to that of the foreigner. If you would
measure the depth of patriotic feeling in those simple
souls — farmers, day labourers, shepherds— imagine a
French peasant losing one of these lawsuits into
which he brings such fierce passion, and depriving
himself of his own free will of a chance to reverse the
decision. When one reflects on the decrees of these
Sinn Fein Courts, in reality illegal, precarious, and
dependent for their validity on the triumph of the

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 57

Republican cause, one cannot but be touched by the
confidence placed in them by these poor people. We
constantly return to the same point — Republican
justice derives its strength from the fact that it is
not submitted to unwillingly, but accepted and loved
as a proud token of freedom — and that here as else-
where every heart beats in unison.

After humble beginnings, having, so to speak,
insinuated itself into the remote western districts,
this judicial organisation promptly took root all over
Nationalist Ireland. In June in 24 out of 32 counties
Republican courts were functioning. Who were the
judges ? Volunteer officers, teachers, doctors, business
men who enjoyed general confidence for their special
qualifications or their patriotism and uprightness.
Almost always, and in a Catholic country one feels
what a moral guarantee this is for the parties — the
president is a priest. The procedure was simple but
imitated from English forms and regularly observed ;
soon, in certain districts, the Bar came over to the
Sinn Fein courts and pleaded officially therein.

A Protestant Unionist lady, a landowner in Co.
Meath was harassed by the peasants round about who
wished to compel her to sell her land. She complained
in succession to all the regular authorities. The
District Inspector of Constabulary confessed that he
was powerless. Elsewhere she was told that even in
her own interests she would do better not to persist
in her complaints. " I take the risk upon myself,"
said the obstinate lady. In the highest quarters she
found only silence, inertia, perhaps impotence. In
despair she applied to the Republican court, in a few
days the case was tried, the peasants nonsuited, and
the lady's peace of mind restored

58 IRELAND IN REBELLION

Besides the young Republic had need of all the con-
fidence enjoyed by these Arbitration Courts to settle
deftly but with no show of weakness the agrarian
question which, in a country like Ireland, is the most
dangerous fora new Government. The problem occurred
in certain parts of the country as acutely, as hotly, and
with as much display of violence as in the days of
Parnell and the " Land war." To give free rein to
the despoiling instincts of the peasantry meant going
down into anarchy ; to curb these instincts too roughly
entailed risking the loyalty of the masses.

j^In some cases it was an English landlord holding
huge tracts of land and living amid poor wretches who
did not own even an acre, who refused to divide his
estates. Against such an enemy — an enemy by class,
by religion and by race, any weapon was good. One
morning on his way to the hunting field in a motor
car, Captain Shawe-Taylor, a big horse breeder, was
held up by a tree thrown across the road and shot dead.
A steward who, after having been warned, persisted
in administering his master's estate, met the same
fate near Galway. Sometimes the executions took on
the character of primitive bestiality, which recalls
French peasant revolts — Chouans and Jacques. A
herd refusing to obey an order to abandon his master's
cattle was surprised, tied to a tree and savagely beaten
with stones and sticks. These, however, were out-
standing outrages ; nocturnal disturbances, threatening
letters, burnings of hay and corn, fences levelled,
cattle driving for fifteen or twenty miles — were
common features of the campaign. One instance will
show to what degree of tyranny the peasants were
gradually arriving. A group interviewed a landlord

at his own house to insist that he should put his land

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 59

up for auction. " And in the name of what law do
[you make these^ demands ?" the spokesman was
asked. Quick came the jeering reply, " In the name of
Shawe-Taylor's law."

Worse remains to be told. In districts where for

thirty or forty years the land had fallen into Irish

hands, the labourers turned against the farmers in

actual ownership of the land. They protested against

holdings of three, four, or six hundred, or a thousand

acres of agricultural or pasture land, whilst others

were restricted to the acre that went with the labourer's

cottage. The movement became so violent that even

the Church was not spared. One day the Bishop of

: Clonfert received a visit from a group of parishioners,

who, with all due deference, offered to purchase

portion of the episcopal estate ; without haggling,

with true Christian charity, the Bishop wisely gave

|way. Worst of all, in the poverty-stricken West,

where circumstances make these disputes still more

bitter, farmers and cottagers alike were jealous of a

[neighbour's acre more or less, conflicts became more

[ and more acrimonious, and the men of Clare do not

[hesitate to shoot. Failure to smooth over these

[dissensions — which the Castle must have regarded

[with no displeasure — meant that the Republic would

^see a pit dug between the possessing classes and the

^ proletariat, and thus the national movement would

;^be swallowed up in the bog of social revolution.

We find the echo of this very uneasiness in the pro-
clamation issued to their constituents in the name of
the Dail by certain Members : Austin Stack, Pierce
Beasley and Lynch in Kerry ; Father O' Kennedy in
the name of the absent De Valera in Bast Clare;
Brian O'Higgins in West Clare. " After the victory

60 IRELAND IN REBELLION

has been won," said O'Higgins, " the Bail will do
everything to give justice to all, so that no Irishman
will have to go to seek a livelihood far from his native
land. For the moment anyone who thinks that he has
just titles to land, now in the hands of another, is
invited to state his case in writing to the Registrar
of the District Court already established in West
Clare.

" But this must be clearly understood, any individual
who, after to-day, continues an endeavour to enforce
his claims, to give rise to disputes, to write threatening
letters in the name of the Republic to a fellow-country-
man, must be aware that in so acting he is defying the
wishes of the representatives elected by the people
and is injuring the national cause."

One feels that it is the voice of a big brother re-
monstrating with a rowdy youngster. The disorder
had to be checked, but only by persuasion and by an
appeal to the good- will of the people. Such was the
thorny problem which Sinn Fein appears to have
successfully solved. Not, of course, that the land
war disappeared in a single night as if by magic ;
unlucky landowners woke up now and again to find,
or rather not to find their cattle, driven twenty or
thirty miles away. Notwithstanding such acts,
many disputes have been settled by agreement. For
example, the London Morning Post for May I3th tells
us how the Land Committee of Carrick-on-Shannon,
having heard claimants and owners, arranged for the
breaking-up of four big grazing farms in the neighbour-
hood of the town.

I have sought in vain for the principles on which
the judges arrange the disputes. Doubtless they
simply set aside principles and trusted altogether to

THE IRISH REPUBLIC

common sense and equity, and to their personal
sense of justice. This method, which to French minds,
steeped in Roman classical traditions and enamoured
of order and rules, seems so unjudicial and so dangerous
was perhaps the only plan which could succeed in
circumstances so exceptional, and with a people more
swayed by generous impulses than impressed by legal
forms, men, if you will, still in a primitive conditior.
They did their best and the simple notion, quite new
in Ireland, that the judges were really " doing their
best/' tended among rough, impulsive men to soothe
angry passions. Again, success, as we have repeated
so often, was due to unanimous good-will.

Each case was decided on its merits, no limit,
maximum or minimum, was placed upon individual
holdings. In sparsely populated counties with big
ranches, the farmer was allowed 100, 200 or 300 acres.
In congested and poor areas in the West small morsels
of land were often subdivided. Full account was
taken of the size of families.* If a purely legal question
arose in the absence of an Irish code it was decided
in accordance with current usage, that is to say,
English law.

If the Court decided that a farm should change
hands, the value of the disputed holding was deter-
mined by experts, and the amount paid over to the
outgoing occupier. In most cases, as the result of this
bold but reasonable policy, settlements were reached.

Sometimes the unsophisticated Westerners conceived
plans for dividing up the land, so simple, so impracti-
cable, that they amounted to sheer robbery, and

* Perhaps also with the arritre penste that in the event of
a revision by the British those holding under Irish Law would
be practically undisturbed.

62 IRELAND IN REBELLION

claims made were impossible to satisfy short of civil
war. One day I was told a court delivered judgment
against the unanimous petition of a village in Co.
Mayo. The villagers went home, dug trenches and
waited. The situation was serious. I/aunch an attack ?
Irishmen shed Irish blood in the face of the enemy ?
Was it possible to pass over this defiance of Irish law
— still in its infant stages and so frail that any blow
delivered against it might well mean its collapse. A
delightful combination of wisdom and energy
conquered. For a week the rebels were let alone.
Then one evening, when they had been lulled into a
false security, the Volunteers entered the village by
surprise, arrested two leaders (who were deported for
three months) and extracted from the others a promise
to be good boys for the future. Thus a situation
which might have taken a grave turn ended (without
the firing of a shot) amid handshakes of reconciliation.
With such delicate empiricism did the Bail seek to
fulfil the first duty of every Government — the keeping
of peace between its citizens.

IV.

Intensification of Armed Action — The Irish Labour
Party to the Rescue— England at Bay.

We have seen that the Irish Government had
gradually extended its activities into every domain :
political, economic, financial and social. But it must
not be forgotten that none of these things would have
been possible but for military activity. A young
leader said to me one day with striking correctness,
" The Republic had crystallised around the army."

I

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 63

Conscious of the important part played by force, the
Irish endeavoured to have it, as much as possible, on
their side. We have already told how, on Easter
Monday, dozens of Income Tax offices had been
burned. On the same day (all over Ireland) the
barracks evacuated by the retreating R.I.C. were
given to the flames. To-day, more than 500 are in
ruins. Encounters between Volunteers and police or
soldiers became daily more frequent and on a larger
scale. There was no lack of effectives : 120,000, 150,000,
perhaps 200,000 men, practically the whole male
population capable of bearing arms in Nationalist
Ireland, the best men fighting, the others conspiring
to help them. The leaders congratulated themselves
that the resistance to conscription had preserved for
the service of the nation so many young men, who
otherwise would have been left to rot in the marshes of
Flanders. Soon, in face of the growing menace, the
numbers of regular troops increased steadily. The
English army from 36,000 men rose to 40,000, then
to 60,000. Artillery, tanks, armoured cars, aeroplanes
followed.

Naturally there was no idea of coming out into the
open against such forces : it was essential to deliver
sharp strokes, sudden, swift and successful, and
disappear — as the English officers contemptuously
called it, " Act the Sinn Feiner " — in a word let speed
make up for strength. Hence, according to counties,
the unevenness in efforts and in triumphs of the
Republican Army ; its value depends almost entirely
on the brains and energy of the local officers. Arms
were the main thing lacking, and above all, they were
very unequally distributed. There was a good supply
in Dublin in spite of daily searches. In certain parts

64 IRELAND IN REBELLION

of the country they were sadly wanting. Although
England had alleged German or Bolshevik aid, many
of the weapons were the old muskets landed six years
previously for the expected struggle against Carson's
Ulster Volunteers. No matter, the element of surprise
would have to replace armaments.

Besides, the English troops sent over to Ireland,
were not, in general, of the best quality. The old pre-
1914 professional soldier, calm, steady and well
drilled, had fallen on the plains of Mons or in the
trenches of Ypres. The recruits had neither their
endurance, coolness nor energy. Having joined up in
the hope of pleasant or at least peaceful gariison duty,
one may suspect that they were by no means delighted
to be sent to Ireland. On the other hand, numbers of
Irish ex-soldiers, trained by four years' warfare, had
passed into the ranks of the Sinn Feiners. These
circumstances explain many things.

One day a patrol of Scotch cyclists came upon
some young men playing bowls : the players stood
along each side of the road and as the soldiers passed
they were suddenly pounced upon and disarmed to
a man. On another occasion a squad of coastguards
near Queenstown was besieged and surrendered.
Again, in Dublin, twenty-five or thirty soldiers in
charge of an officer on duty at King's Inns beheld
their sentry surprised, and were themselves forced to
put up their hands : without a shot fired all the
rifles and two machine guns were captured. Some-
times, naturally, things did not go so smoothly ; the
orders are, as far as possible, to leave no prisoners
in enemy hands. I have heard it stated, possibly
without foundation, that Martin Savage was finished
off by Irish bullets. But when a coup is brought off

THE IKISH EEPUBLIC 65

successfully, need one describe how jubilantly the
news is received by the Irish crowd, so sportive, so
eager to be amused, so enamoured of prowess and
daring, so imbued with hatred and contempt for the
heavy, brutal Saxon, so Celtic, too, in its need to
jeer, to defy authority, and giving vent to all these
mingled feelings in wild outbursts of enthusiasm.
" Daring raids. Amazing attacks," say the placards
of the evening papers in O'Connell Street, and off
goes your Dubliner with a chum, victoriously waving
his " Final Buff/' *chatting, shouting, bursting into
laughter, with, all the time, a light shining in his eyes.
Towards the spring the Republican ranks received
a powerful support, that of the labour organisations,
which, with singular blindness, England had hoped
to see impede the National movement by standing
aloof. Had England forgotten that in 1916 James
Connolly and the Citizen Army had fought in the front
ranks of the insurgents. To begin with, the dockers at
North Wall, Dublin, refused to unload munitions of war;
others at Queenstown, declined to assist the landing
of one thousand Scotch soldiers ; then the railwaymen
all over Ireland refused to run any train which carried
armed police or soldiers. It was useless to replace
the recalcitrant drivers by Royal Engineers ; the rails
would have been blown up. A strike is a formidable
weapon when it has public opinion behind it. The
weaklings among the strikers were very few ; as a
body they felt strongly on the question, and then
men who had been dismissed received substantial
benefits, besides, the few " blacklegs " were severely
dealt with, as for example, the driver and firemen

* I<ast edition of the Dublin Evening Mail.

66 IRELAND IN REBELLION

surprised on their engine by Sinn Feiners and tarred
from head to foot as a public example.

The Irish Labour Party even permitted itself the
delicate luxury of putting the English workers on
toast. Five labour delegates, led by Henderson, had
visited Ireland towards the end of January, 1920,
made formal protests against British oppression, and
on their return to England passed votes of sympathy
with the Irish cause. Moreover, at this precise moment
Clynes and his followers were carrying on a vigorous
campaign against the despatch of munitions to
Poland. The Irish, therefore, asked for the support
of these disinterested moralists, the sworn enemies of
war and militarism, who from the lofty heights of
principle rebuked the imperialism of bourgeois govern-
ments. Could any request be more natural ? Following
the example of their English brethren, were not Irish
workers every whit as justified, nay, even more
justified in holding up bullets and bombs destined for
the consumption, if one may use the word, not of
strange and distant Bolsheviks, but of their own
neighbours and fellow-countrymen. The result was a
visit — brief — to Dublin, then an attempt to drag
things out ; finally, a meeting at Liverpool which
adopted a meaningless involved resolution, wavering
between two by no means reconcilable things —
Liberal principles and English interest. Anyhow, the
outcome was that the British Labour Party coldly
abandoned their Irish brothers to struggle as best
they might against the Army of Occupation.

Then it became a question of who would hold out
longest. Armed policemen board a train, the crew
refuse to proceed, whereupon the policemen make
themselves at home, drink, sleep and make merry in

THE IRISH REPUBLIC 67

the carriages for several days. At another place a
picket under special orders waits for a chance to get
into the first train that stops at the station. Thus,
by slow degrees, all communication is cut off, especially
with the West — a train only gets to Kerry or limerick
every three or four days. All other means of transit
are availed of, especially motor cars. Extraordinary
scenes occur in the stations — Dundrum, a small
country station — three R.I.C. with a sergeant, forty
infantrymen in full war equipment under an officer.
A train slips along the platform and stops. The four
policemen get into a compartment — the guard gets
out of the van — so all the actors are in position. A
gentleman comes up.

" You're not going on, Jack ? "

" Not a foot, sir."

" You will be dismissed, Jack."

" I know that, sir."

" Come and have a drink ? "

" Certainly, sir."

They proceed to the bar. Meanwhile, a young man
with nothing about him to indicate his importance,
save the instant obedience which he commands — he is
the commandant of the local volunteers — exerts him-
self to make order out of chaos, regulates the despatch
of the passengers, women first, to the nearby town of
Tipperary. Side cars and motors have been procured,
and each individual goes off .in his turn, as he is
told. Two commercial travellers, pressed for time,
and unchivalrous, ^try by heavy tipping to get
away first. They are taken off their car — the first
shall be last. The big guard reappears flushed
and happy. All the time, in the background, beside
the fixed bayonets, the British officer stands

68 IRELAND IN REBELLION

against the wall, inactive, ignored, inexistant and
seemingly bored : symbol of the British army,
powerful in men, more powerful still in arma-
ments, which vainly seeks for an obstacle to crush,
and finding nothing strikes in the empty air.
" Another general rising ! " said a volunteer officer ;
not at all ! Give them a chance of wiping us out with
their guns ? No, thanks ! But one, two or five years'
guerilla war — as long as they like — till they yield.

Thus, born of force and realised by force, like the
legendary fighter who regains his vigour by touching
the earth, his mother, the Republic came back to
force, there to gain renewed strength. All things
considered, in view of the slender materials at its
disposal, we cannot withhold our admiration from the
results achieved. Ireland, seemingly in a mad moment,
had undertaken to take up arms against the enormous
British Empire, now increased in prestige and weight
by the war, and alone, weak and diminutive as she
was, she had kept her word. She was like a briar in
which a third of the British Army got uselessly and
ingloriously entangled. And then, by simply ignoring
his sullen governess, like the philosopher who proved
the existence of motion by walking, the " ungovernable
Celt " had proved by practical demonstration that he
was able to govern, and able to govern himself. Thus
he had deprived British claims of their sole altruistic
pretext and reduced them to reasons of State.

But I cannot too often repeat that all this had been
gained by moral cohesion, by the soaring efforts of
a nation where all hearts beat as one. In this country,
where love for the motherland is all the more ardent
and tender as the motherland is smaller, stranger and
sadder, the masses, with their Celtic enthusiasm and

THE IBISH REPUBLIC

their idealism, which almost ignores realities, responded
magnificently to the call of race and nobly fought,
resisted and suffered. As to the marais — the timid
neutrals, good people wrapped up in their own small
affairs and unheeding the urgings of conscience — it
would be useless to deny that they were brought into
line by sheer force. A pleiade of leaders had given
the example by word and deed. And now, once again,
Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman who
wanders along the roads, driven by the stranger from
her cottage and her four green fields, had found
strong young men ready, as before, to give their lives
for her once more, the strength of the spirit had held
out against the powers of the flesh.

For England at bay now remained only two extreme
courses ; to yield to the manifest and general desire
of the Irish people, a desire which was now shown to
be realisable because in fact it had been realised, a
desire that England herself by her own war aims had
proclaimed in advance to be legitimate ; or ruthlessly
bereft of any pretext to flaunt before the eyes of the
world or with which to deceive her own conscience —
the sword.

It was the month of August.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ENGLISH REACTION.

I.

English Temporisation — The Counter-offensive let loose.

BRITISH patience — or carelessness — had been for long
prodigious. Up to the rising of Easter 1916, the Irish
Volunteers were indulging publicly in military drill,
without any thought on the part of Birrell, the Chief
Secretary for Ireland, of the necessity for intervention.
In 1919 uniformed Volunteers were often seen on the
streets of Dublin, and on St. Patrick's Day, 1920,
houses were decorated with Republican tricolour
flags. Is it not of its nature inconceivable that a
Government in France should tolerate analogous
manifestations ?

Towards the middle of 1920 the English, through
their happy-go-lucky imprudence, had reached the edge
of the precipice. The Sinn Feiners had invaded in turn
all the Government Departments of administration,
justice, etc. ; they had won the country districts from
the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the municipal
elections in June increased their boldness. Their very
triumphs, and the fear they inspired, were the cause of
the brutal counter-offensive, chiefly military, which
the English opened in August.

I open the note-book in which I enter with docility,
day by day, political events in Ireland. Suppression
70

THE ENGLISH REACTION 71

of newspapers, proclamations of meetings or fairs,
arrests, sentences, escapes, strikes, shootings. . . .
The thought of extracting a clear and simple
description of the whole, from all that mass of jottings,
fills one with discouragement. The measures taken,
in all their details, lie across and on top of one other,
entangled in one other. It is like a powerful and
awkward boxer getting punishment from a feather-
weight, scientific, quick and determined ; the big
fellow, without any preconceived tactics, receives
blows, blocks them, returns them as best he can with
his great maladroit fist. That is what has happened
here. It is very English. It is the eternal British
wait and see, the famous empiricism so much admired
by Taine ; in a word, it is the same lack of constructive
imagination which makes the English take things as
they happen, from day to day, without foresight or
prevention ; which makes them fight the symptoms
without investigating the causes, which makes them,
to put it frankly, disinclined to understand. This
lack of curiosity produces a certain mental slowness.
For years the English organism, under-developed in
its brain, and relying on its nervous system to give
it warning, has not grasped the imminence or the
greatness of the peril. It knew itself to be so incom-
parably superior to its diminutive adversary ! So for
a long time it acted negligently, without application
or sequence, as you chase away by a reflex action
the gnat which is tormenting you. Why bother more
about it ? Besides, there was the hope that the
trouble was ephemeral, that it was a crisis without a
morrow, this Irish malady which was attacking
Britain's health. Finally, with the obscure depth of
instinct, England felt that in refusing to use her

72 IRELAND IN REBELLION

strength to its uttermost, she was at a disadvantage
indeed, but a disadvantage which gave her morally
the incomparable advantage of not being, before the
world, in open and avowed warfare with a member
of what was called the United Kingdom.

She kept up this attitude as far as she could. But
she felt the abscess growing worse. From month to
month it absorbed new forces, without any sign of
healing, but only of the contrary. One fine morning
England wakes up with the sensation of not feeling
really well, a hitherto unknown sensation in which
scandalised amazement, terror and suppressed anger
are mixed together. And from the day when, for the
first time, she takes alarm, she reacts with an energy
and a fear that are all the greater for her long delay.
As the adversary does not wilt, she braces her muscles
to the measure of this unexpected resistance. A more
telling blow brings on a more violent return. And,
little by little, indignant of not getting the upper
hand more quickly, she reaches the stage of blind
fury of battle. The causes of quarrel, the possible
remedies, have left the field of consciousness. She
strikes.

Besides, even if the team that guides her have
cooler heads, and do not see red so easily as the others,
how could those men act otherwise, dominated as they
are by the General Election ? That election, brought
about by L,loyd George on the morrow of the Armistice,
in the flush of victory, revealed the nation's withdrawal
into itself, its egoism exasperated by war and danger.
It sent to Westminster a compact majority of 400
Tories, caring only about one thing in the world,
English interests, conceived in a most unyielding and
one-sided fashion. And at present, like Goethe's

THE ENGLISH REACTION 73

sorcerer, ensnared by spells of his own that he cannot
control, the Prime Minister, a victim of his excessive
astuteness, a slave for the moment of the Jingo
passions he himself lets loose, may see the dangers
of the path he has entered upon — it doesn't matter ;
he must continue in it, or bear the consequence of
immediate fall.

How shall we reproduce in words this angry
obstinacy of battle, this growing violence of blows,
above all, this action and reaction of the two comba-
tants on each other ? If that is missed, and not made
real to the imagination, the life of the struggle is
unfelt. If we hammer away at showing the chrono-
logical interdependence of facts, we shall get lost in
a chaos of little glimmering events, and the clearness
gets all blurred. We want a method somewhere
between the two.

II.

Parliamentary Measures — The new Home Rule Bill —
Emergency Legislation — The projected Education
Bill

The principal Parliamentary activity directed
against Ireland was the discussion of the new Home
Rule Bill. In 1914, it will be remembered, the Ulster
Orangemen, through the weapon of revolt, reinforced
by military sedition and Tory connivance, had forced
Asquith in his weakness to mutilate his scheme of
Home Rule. Even in that mutilated form, its applica-
tion had been deferred in September till the Greek
Calends, till six months after the end of the war. But
the hour was at length about to strike when it was
to become automatically effective. Just then it was

74 IRELAND IN REBELLION

decided to propose another scheme which included, in
the first place and definitely, the repeal of the Bill
already passed. In October, 1919, a Cabinet Committee
was formed to draw up the new scheme. It did not
include a single Irishman. On the other hand, along
with Mr. Bonar Law, who in 1914 had signed the
agreement between the Ulster Orangemen and the
English Tories, the Committee counted among its
members Mr. Walter Long, First Lord of the
Admiralty ; Mr. Short, Home Secretary and formerly
Chief Secretary for Ireland ; Colonel Sir James Craig,
Parliamentary Secretary of the Admiralty ; Lord
Chancellor Birkenhead, who, when he was called F.
E. Smith, had earned in Belfast the nickname of
" Galloper " Smith— in fine, the General Staff of
Carson at the time of the Ulster revolt, who had
since made their way to place and power.

We can imagine what sort of Home Rule would be
elaborated by a committee thus composed. Its
scheme, sent to the Cabinet on the nth November,
described by the Prime Minister to the House of
Commons on the 22nd of December, received the
finishing touches on the 28th February. Partition was
imposed on Ireland ; the six famous Ulster counties
(of which two, Tyrone and Fermanagh, had voted
Sinn Fein in January), got a Parliament of 52
members ; the other twenty-six counties got a Parlia-
ment of 128. Over both was a higher council of 40
members, 20 from Ulster and 20 from the rest of
Ireland ; the North-East, a quarter at most of the
population, and divided in opinion, had in it a re-
presentation equal to that of the other three-quarters.
Finally, Ireland was to have henceforth in the House
of Commons 42 members instead of 105. There

THE ENGLISH REACTION 75

followed an interminable and almost exhaustive
enumeration of matters which London excluded
formally from the scope of the Home Rule Bill.

Even in the Commons, the Bill received a rather
frigid welcome on December the 22nd ; the very
enormity of the farce was irksome. In many circles,
by no means Irish, there was a hue-and-cry against
it. The Times protested against the division of
Ireland, as being a natural perpetuation of hatred,
and also against the shabbiness of the financial pro-
posals. The Irish Times, a Dublin Unionist organ,
wrote on the i8th February : " The Bill has not been
conceived in the true interest of Irish settlement.
No section of the Irish people has been consulted in
regard to it. ... The unnatural policy of Partition
is necessarily fatal to the peace and prosperity of
Ireland. The Bill has no partisan in any sphere outside
Downing Street." In vain did Mr. Asquith, during
his electoral campaign at Paisley, Dr. Bernard,
Provost of the Protestant University of Dublin, the
Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland, the Anti-Partition
League of Southern Irish Unionists, all vie with each
other in condemning the bandy-legged and misshapen
project. What did it matter ? The Ulster Council,
assembled on the loth March, thought the measure
of 1920 better than that of 1914. " Ulster is safe,"
said they. On the ist of April, in the Commons, Sir
Edward Carson deigned to declare that, while he
preferred the status quo, he would not resist the Bill.
As for Sinn Fein, during the parturition of the monster,
let us do it this justice, it was content to smile. It
recalled simply that on the I3th February, 1917, the
English Prime Minister, according to the secret report
of Sir Horace Plunkett, had said to the Irish Conven-

76 IRELAND IN REBELLION

tion : "It is vain at present to propose Partition.
We must accept the unity of Ireland as a whole. Any
other idea would lead to failure. " That declaration
of yesterday was a measure of the sincerity of to-day.
For the whole year Parliamentary activity in regard
to Ireland was confined to staging this cadaverous
Act. Granted that the Bill was stillborn, that none
of those interested wanted it, not even those loyal to
England — all that was to be ignored. " It is for the
Irish," said the imperturbable L,loyd George on the
ist of April (symbolic date ?), "to give flesh and
bones to the Home Rule Bill." On the 3rd August
he repeated to Devlin, a Nationalist member for
Belfast, who questioned him ironically, that he would
put the Bill through. Devlin, as is known, at the end
of his patience, rose and left the House at the head
of the seven Irishmen who still sat at Westminster,
so that the Parliament that was to strangle the last
liberties of Ireland might at least be absolutely empty
of Irishmen. At the end of September five or six
hundred notables, chiefly of the constitutional party,
met in Dublin at a " Peace Conference," to consider
certain modifications of the Act to be submitted to
the Prime Minister. Notwithstanding their pacificism,
they ended by discovering that the Bill was unwork-
able, no matter how it might be amended. But that
is perhaps why it is so precious. It blocks the way
to every settlement, and Ulster requires nothing more
from it. " The Bill," wrote Truth, " is the true obstacle
to all agreement. But Carson has promptly informed
all whom it may concern that the Government has
given him undertakings, contained in the Bill, and
that he, Carson, will not allow himself to be fooled.
He is the master of the situation."

THE ENGLISH REACTION 77

It was, therefore, practically a case of voluntary
insolvency on the part of the Cabinet and the
Commons. Meanwhile Ireland remained under the
Castle, that is to say, the Viceroy, the Chief Secretary
for Ireland, and the Commander-in-Chief of the
British troops in the island. They were armed with
unlimited powers, first by the Defence of the Realm
Act, next in August, 1920, by the Restoration of
Order (Ireland) Act, and finally in December by the
proclamation of Martial I/aw in certain districts.

An Act, passed at a moment's notice by the two
Houses, one section of which among others suppressed
juries and substituted for them courts-martial, pro-
voked a scandal of a rare kind in the Upper House.
A Privy Councillor, Mr. A. M. Carlisle (not an ex-
tremist by his title !) rose under stress of his emotion
and declared to their lordships that the Bill might kill
England, but not Ireland. Then he left the Chamber.

The most diverse measures, direct or indirect,
brutal or insidious, were devised to put the strait
waistcoat on insurgent Ireland. One of the most
innocent in appearance was the Education Bill of
Chief Secretary MacPherson. According to his scheme,
the three divisions of education, till now half inde-
pendent and half Irish, were to give place to an all-
powerful triumvirate of British Civil Servants, of
whom the Chief Secretary was to be one. On the
occasion of this Bill considerable increases were to
be made in the salaries of the teachers, who just then
were being paid a starvation wage. Those teachers,
especially those engaged in secondary education, had
often headed the national movement. Pearse was
one of such, and MacDonagh ; MacSwiney, the I/ord
Mayor of Cork, was another. Thus it was of capital

78 IRELAND IN REBELLION

importance to devise a handle of power over them.
The malice consisted in connecting reform of education
with that of salaries ; and MacPherson made that
point clear to a delegation of the secondary teachers :
No Act, no money. He gave them a choice between
obedience and misery. Already discussions started
among them ; just as in every other affair, and with
greater reason in this one, there were Don Quixotes
and Sancho Panzas. But the resistance of opinion
was being organised against a measure which neces-
sarily tended to deprive the Church of its traditional
control of education. On the loth December the
Bishops gave it their veto, all-powerful in such a
matter. On the I3th the County Councils followed
suit. There came a rain of protests ; then, in April,
MacPherson fell from office and his Bill remained in
suspense.

III.

Economic Measures — State of Siege and stoppage of
business in the Counties — Progressive restriction of
Transport — Flax and Skins — Crown Grants.

Other more open measures were directed against the
country ; economic pressure, for example, which the
English themselves would feel more than anything
else, whose power, therefore, they understood, over-
rated perhaps, and had no inclination to forego. Since
the preceding autumn whole counties had been placed
in a state of siege as a punishment, implying the
complete stoppage of public business. The farmer
could not sell his stock or his potatoes, nor his wife
her milk and eggs. In October, 1919, proclamations
forbade the Cashel market, the Nenagh, Carrick-on-

THE ENGLISH REACTION 79

Suir and Clonmel fairs, the Thurles pig market. Things
went so far that in December some County Clare
landlords (far from being Sinn Feiners, need I add ?),
Colonel Tottenham, Sir Michael OXoughlin, lyord
Inchiquin, protested publicly as follows : — " Out of
fifty-one fairs only two have been permitted. Such
prohibitions do not diminish the number of murders
by one, but they ruin and exasperate the country."
A deputation of magistrates approached Captain
Williamson, the Commanding Officer at Tipperary,
with a similar purpose. He replied that " the Tipperary
fairs did not interest him in the least ; all he had to
do was to send the soldiers to help the police/' Some
hours before the time for its opening, the Aonach, or
Irish fair, held at Christmas in the Dublin Mansion
House, was suddenly proclaimed.

Meantime the Motor Permit Order had been issued.
Henceforth nobody could drive or possess an auto-
mobile without an authorisation, which the police
granted or refused without the possibility of appeal.
A strike in protest, not without violent incidents,
followed among the drivers, and lasted till February,
two months, without bringing about any amendment
of the position. Apparently justified by the necessity
of keeping motors from the Republican army, whose
supply of them has since never failed, the order was
a measure that could become Draconian in its applica-
tion. For instance a taxi owner, MacDonnell, of
Virginia, Co. Cavan, was refused any sort of permit
by the police, and further was told to sell his cars
within a month to a person approved by the inspector.
What could that mean but ruin for the poor man him-
self ? As for difficulties about transport for manufac-
turers, traders, even doctors, in a country of which

80 IRELAND IN REBELLION

80 per cent, of the electorate were suspect, I leave them
to the imagination.

Besides, all the means of transport were to be hit
one after another, and it is easily understood that
every blow had a heavy effect on business. In the
springtime the rail way men refused to carry soldiers,
police or munitions in the trains. Hundreds of them
were suspended, and there were times in July when
the West was without connection with the rest of the
island. Recently under pretext of trouble, the English
Government forbade the American transatlantic liners
to put in at Queenstown, thus cutting off all direct
sailing between the United States and Ireland.

Hostility to the prosperity of the country showed
itself still more crudely, and the Irish Times on the
loth February protested against it. The flax cultiva-
tors of Ulster, for instance, saw themselves compelled
to sell their crop at £290 a ton, while the English
planters sold inferior flax at £600 ; according to the
Morning Post, the Irish flax would have fetched £720
in the open market. Again, the export of skins was
permitted, but only to Great Britain, when the
Continental prices would have been almost double ;
the import of skins was forbidden.

Grants used to be given by the Crown to certain
bodies, such as the municipalities ; not through
generosity, no need to say, as Irish taxes far more than
compensated for the sums returned. After the January
elections the town councils, all practically Republican,
refused to submit their accounts to the Government
auditors. Condon replied by suspending the grants.
The blow was severe ; for Dublin alone it was a matter
of £200,000. It became necessary either to cut off
the midday meals of school children, to turn out of

THE ENGLISH REACTION 81

doors consumptives and incurables, etc., or to double
the city rates, which were already enormous. And
granted a people as patriotic as you please, that
would always be an unpopular pill. In other places
things were worse. At Ballinasloe, through lack of
funds, the lunatic asylum committee, presided over
by the Bishop of Clonfert, decided to set the harmless
lunatics at liberty, and threatened to release, on the
loth October, those affected by homicidal mania.
Whom did the threat concern in the end but the Irish
population ? This time the Castle had the right end
of the stick, and to the complaints addressed to them
by the Dublin hospitals, Sir Hamar Greenwood, who
had been Chief Secretary since April, replied with an
inflexible smile. W^^/*>

,-v «A

IV. • ^BJ 3

Military measures — Gradual suppression of all wml**
liberties — Wholesale arrests and deportations-
Increase of army of occupation — Courts-martial —
" Agents-provocateurs " — Murders by the police.

Limitation of receipts and increase of expenses were
the two means by which the economic pressure was
worked. The military pressure had never ceased since
the rebellion of 1916, not even at the armistice, which
had brought no peace to Ireland.

There was a new measure according to the caprice
of each day ; suspension of newspapers, the Cork
Examiner in September, 1919 (the forty-second paper
thus treated), the Freeman in December ; proclamation
of meetings ; gradual suppression, at first local, and
then absolute, of organisations expressive of anti-
English opinion, Dail Eireann and the Gaelic League

82 IRELAND IN REBELLION

in September ; the Dublin City and County branches
of Sinn Fein, the Irish Volunteers and Cumann na
mBan (Women's League), in October. At the end of
November the same organisations were suppressed
throughout the country. Later there was an inquiry
to discover the deposits the Sinn Fein party might
possess in the banks.

All the time the police, now protected by the military,
were investing houses at night and making raids and
searches in them. At Limerick, Galway, Cork, above
all at Dublin, the swoops followed each other ; on
the 1 2th December 40 men were arrested and deported
by order to Wormwood Scrubbs prison, near London,
9 others on the I3th, 30 on the 2nd February, 19 on
the 5th, 5 more on the 6th. By the 9th February 80
Sinn Feiners had been carried off, and 60 deported.
An enormous number were sought for, and were on
the run.* And on the 9th March, 1920, the Irish
Bulletin, drawing up a roll of honour, could write
that out of 73 Republican members elected in 1918,
all were or had been in prison or were sought for
except nine, six of whom had always been on foreign
diplomatic missions. The official headquarters of the
party was at various times raided, then emptied out,
closed and sealed ; the Sinn Fein Bank was suppressed ;
even the offices of a purely Irish insurance company,
the New Ireland, were closed on the 3rd January.

London naturally sought with all its power to

* Alderman Thomas Kelly, Lord Mayor-elect of Dublin, had been
one of the first deported. He was an elderly man, an expert- in
Local Government, but a Pacifist, of quiet disposition and poor
health. He lost his reason as a result of the distress he suffered in
prison, and in spring he was released ; but he has not since recovered
his reason. The other prisoners in Wormwood Scrubbs, whose
number mounted to more than a hundred, were released, like other
internees at Mountjoy, after sensational hunger strikes,

THE ENGLISH REACTION 83

reinforce its garrison in numbers and spirit. The
police force was raised to 14,000, its cost of mainten-
ance to almost a tenth of the total Irish revenue, nearly
three and a-half million pounds out of thirty-seven
millions. The army was visibly increasing. On the
23rd October in the Commons Mr. Winston Churchill
gave its numbers as 55,000, costing £210,000 a week ;
the profusion of engines, tanks, machine-guns, aero-
planes, doubles its strength to-day. Even the fleet
went on duty ; warships were anchored in Queenstown,
Galway, Derry , and Dublin Bay.

And as the advantage remained with the Republicans
in attack, initiative, and patriotism, as the army and
police confessed themselves powerless against the
guerilla warfare, new and worse blows were given.
Heavy sentences were inflicted on Sinn Feiners ; six
months on McCabe, a member of the Dail, for propa-
ganda in favour of the Irish loan ; three years' penal
servitude on Barton, another member, formerly a
British officer, for threats in a speech against the
Viceroy ; two years'penal servitude on Terence Smith,
for possession of a revolver ; six months in jail on
Patrick Devane, for having in his possession the
official Volunteer organ, and so on. There were
kidnappings of children, such as that of little Conors
of Greenane, who was put away for two months in
the Phoenix Park, and then released after six in-
terrogatories, somewhat deranged by terror. There
were ferocious executions, like that of Michael Darcy
of Cooraclare, who threw himself into the Shannon
when pursued. As he was drowning, four peasants,
running to his aid, were fired on by the police, and
the man sank when his strength was exhausted.

Prices, and enormous ones, werejput on certain

84 IRELAND IN REBELLION

heads, £10,000, for instance, for the murderers of
Forbes Redmond. Spies were at work, like Quinlisk
and Byrne, who were found duly shot. Last September
Arthur Griffith, the Vice-President of the Republic,
surrounded by Sinn Fein leaders, received a certain
Hardy, who declared himself ready to reveal a depot
of English arms that might be seized. He wanted to
see the Chiefs, and asked if those present were they.
Then came a sudden dramatic effect ; Griffith began
quietly to read out Hardy's record, a liberated convict
let out prematurely by some mysterious influence from
Belfast jail, an agent-provocateur who was seeking to
make the acquaintance of the heads of the Republican
army in order to tempt and betray them. As for the
pretended leaders of Sinn Fein present, they were
journalists, American, Spanish, French, even English,
specially summoned to see the betrayer unmasked
before them. An edifying scene about which the
English Press, with rare exceptions, did not breathe
a word.

And now rage overcame the British forces, and the
struggle degenerated into vendettas, the police replying
to Sinn Fein attacks by attacks on Sinn Feiners. At
Cork on the night of the igth March, 1920, a group
of men fired point blank on Professor Stockley, of
University College, an Irish Protestant who had
become a Catholic and a Sinn Feiner, an alderman of
the city. Seeing him fall they thought him dead and
went away. By a miracle not a shot was effective. But
the next day at two o'clock in the morning some men of
tall stature, probably the same ones, entered the
house of Lord Mayor MacCurtain, dragged from him
the baby^he^held in his arms, riddled him with bullets,
and broke his skull with butt-ends of rifles. The

THE ENGLISH REACTION 85 '

Coroner's inquest left no doubt that the criminals
were police, but not one of them was interfered with.
Some English organs, and the Prime Minister himself,
tried to insinuate that MacCurtain being too moderate,
had been a victim of Sinn Fein extremists * ; but to
a challenge of the Bishop of Cork, and another of
Griffith, demanding an impartial inquiry, there was
never a reply. At Thurles on the 2Qth of March,
MacCarthy was killed in similar circumstances ; again
there was no attempt at a serious investigation.

Let us join to these murders (not morally, for the
circumstances are different, but politically, which is
all that concerns us), the decision new in itself, to
permit the death in prison of Lord Mayor MacSwiney
and the eleven Cork internees who were on hunger-
strike. It is, I think, only a particular case of a more
general decision, which took a long time to be arrived
at because it needed some appetite to stomach it,
but which now seems really to have been taken,
namely, to get rid of the national leaders, no matter
how.

Another indication of it : at the end of September
a man named Lynch, well known in the West as a
judge in the Republican courts, fearing for his life,
fled to Dublin and put up at an hotel. That very night
police and military, revolver in hand, surprised the
porter and asked to see the register ; then they went
up to Lynch's room and shot him dead. The next
day an official report stated that Lynch fired first.

* Thus when the British authorities (cf. Le Temps of the 22nd
September) establish a difference between " moderate " and
" constructive " Sinn Feiners of the Griffith type, and the extremists
who would terrorise them, the Republican propaganda sees immedi-
ately a sinister arriere-pensee in this distinction, an unexpected one
in truth.

86 IRELAND IN REBELLION

A good many signs, too numerous to relate, pointed
to the contrary. The most remarkable was that
General Sir Nevil Macready, the Commander-in-Chief ,
who was given new powers on this very point by the
Restoration of Order Act, forbade specially in this
case the legal Coroner's inquest, and reserved the
inquiry for military judges. Suspicion deepened in
face of this obvious wish to smother all evidence.
It would always be easy to fire on people, and to say
afterwards, without having really to give any proof,
that they began it.

A recent interview of the General was not calculated
to dissipate that impression. " It would be necessary
to shoot about fifty individuals," said he, " and then
order would be restored." Many think the game is
now on, and some, who hitherto might have allowed
themselves to be arrested without resistence, are no
longer so disposed. If they must die — as well defend
themselves. That was what was done by two men
who were discovered in Dublin on the night of the
loth October ; they shot the two officers in charge
of the raid, and succeeded in making good their
escape.

V.

General Measures — "Carsonia" set up and armed
against Ireland — Reprisals.

In any case these proceedings, no matter how
energetic and desperate — they were, in a sense, of the
nature of expedients — were insufficient to bring about
a decision. The strength of Sinn Fein, militarily so
weak, lay in popular connivance. More ample and
general means had to be found, proportioned to the

THE ENGLISH REACTION 87

dimension of the peril. Hence the double idea of
applying penalties to the Irish population as a whole,
and for calling on the whole of another class of the
population for support.

The Unionists of the South and West, swamped by
the Irish and compelled to consider their feelings,
could not be counted on. But the Ulsterites were
there, a compact block of five or six hundred thousand
souls. They were alarmed to see the large Catholic
families supplant them little by little in the counties.
" These people breed like rabbits," remarked a
Protestant notable, frightened and disgusted, to a
French correspondent. They were maddened by the
disastrous January elections, and asked for nothing
better than to rush to arms. And arms they had,
for the penalties for keeping them, though crushing
in Republican districts, became merely a trifle of five
shillings fine for the loyalists. From the English point
of view that is intelligible.

And so the riots began in Derry, and lasted, with
periods of calm, during May and June. The casualties
were twenty dead and forty-five wounded. That is,
as far as can be known, for in such cases it may well
be imagined that each party hides its losses.

Questioned by Commander Kenworthy, M.P., Mr.
Denis Henry, Attorney-General for Ireland and Unionist
member for Ulster, replied that they were aiming at
the disarmament of " the disloyal portion of the
population." To disarm the Irish, to arm the Orange-
men, to restore, in fact, the whole immigrant minority
to its ancient role as a garrison, such was the plan.
It was thus Sir Bdward Carson understood it ; and
the tone at once imperious and contemptuous of the
Cabinet, pf the discourse he pronounced on the I2th

88 IRELAND IN REBELLION

of July, the commemoration day of the Battle of the
Boyne, showed to what point he felt himself master
of the people in London, supported as he was by
Conservative influence and English Jingo senti-
ment.

So, after the curtain-raiser in Derry, the great
spectacular drama was staged in Belfast. The
Catholics, outnumbered by three to one, were thrown
out of the shipyards by the other workers, and their
homes burned. Sometimes shots came from the ruins,
a powerless effort at vengeance on the part of some
desperate man. Every night the rifles were cracking
in the Irish quarter. The last week of August was
the most tragic. Carson's people, well armed and
organised, hunted down their badly-equipped enemies,
brandishing all the time immense Union Jacks on
which the military, called in to establish order,
obviously would not fire. At the beginning of Septem-
ber there were 58 dead, more than 600 wounded, and
damage done to the extent of a million and a-half
pounds. From time to time the man-hunt would
start again, like a badly extinguished fire. Seven
thousand workmen, of whom a thousand fought in
the war, were out of work.

Sir James Craig, who is an Ulster member, and
Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, has paid
in a public speech his compliments to his gallant
fighters ; and the beloved city saw itself immediately
released from the Curfew, which remains strictly
imposed on the others. That is because it has done
the service expected of it, affirmed its function as
an English outpost, given a lesson to the Irish, above
all, put a mask of civil and religious war on the
exercise of naked force. Soon Sir Ernest Clarke was

THE ENGLISH REACTION 89

appointed an Under Secretary in charge of Ulster
iffairs, with his residence in Belfast ; for the moment
that was all of the Home Rule Bill, not yet passed,
that was really translated into fact. Further, it was
projected to enrol in Ireland " without distinction of
creed or politics " (sic) such citizens as were disposed
to maintain order and serve under the command of
police officers. The pay was to be ten shillings a dajr.
Already, according to the Irish News, 37,000 have
enlisted, and 10,000 are to follow.* That amounts in
fact to the setting-up of " Carsonia " as a distinct
State, with an army and an administration, and the
office of jailor to the rest of Ireland.

There remained the second part of the programme,
the infliction ;[ of penalties all jround on the Irish
population, seeing that particular ones had such a
poor effect.

In truth, and instinctively, police and soldiers had
had recourse to such measures for a good while
already. On two separate occasions during the night
of the 20th January, 1920, they had sacked parts of
Thurles to avenge the death of Constable Finegan.
At limerick on the 4th of February the troops, being
hissed, according to one report, but according to
themselves, being attacked, opened fire without warn-
ing ; two people were killed. At Dublin on the 22nd
March soldiers returning from the theatre were boohed
by the crowd, and a few scuffles took place. Shortly
after the arrival of the men at Portobello Barracks
a picket suddenly sallied forth with a machine-gun

* At I/isburn 200 of these volunteer police, learning that five
Orangemen had been sentenced to three months for pillaging
Catholic houses during the August riots, resigned in protest.

90 IRELAND IN REBELLION

and fired on the crowd. There were two killed and
an unknown number wounded.

But these acts were half reflex, and only recently
became a system associated, rightly or wrongly, with
the name of Sir Nevil Macready. At first they became
excessively frequent, happening at Miltown-Malbay
on the I7th of April, at Limerick the 2ist of May,
at Fermoy (for the second time) and at Lismore the
2gth of June, in retaliation for the kidnapping of
General Lucas, at Limerick again the ist of July, at
Tipperary the 2nd, at Cork the 3rd, at Tuam the 2ist.
When Dr. Gilmartin, the Archbishop of Tuam, asked
the Castle for inquiry and protection, Sir Nevil wrote
in reply that as the sack of Tuam had been done by
the police, it did not concern him !

The police besides had changed a good deal in
composition and spirit, through internal influences as
well as external action of authority. Old R.I.C. men
to the number of nearly 300 had been killed or
wounded since the ist of January ; a good many
others were resigning every month through fear or
shame. Those that remained were the worse sort,
I mean the least Irish at heart. The efficiency of the
force diminished, its hardness increased. On the other
hand the London depot filled the gaps with English-
men, notably soldiers demobilised and without work.
Thus composed, the police changed in character, and
forfeited all Irish sympathy. Their pay was enormous,
seven pounds a week. Such men, regarding the " Irish
campaign " as a job that took them out of poverty,
were ready for anything, and enraged by any danger
of losing their position.

Other reinforcements were arriving, instalments of
assistance amounting provisionally to nine thousand

i

THE ^NGLISH REACTION 91

men. They were the Auxiliary Police Force, all ex-
officers, and the " Black- and-Tans," so named
familiarly because, through lack of uniforms, they
often wore, along with the R.I.C. cap and black
jacket, some khaki article of equipment. Whether it
be true, as rumour goes, that they were recruited
from a special milieu for a special task, I do not know.
But at any rate, in a few weeks they made a solid
reputation for terror ; and, as naturally happens,
people attributed to them all the cruelties exercised
in- a country where violence has been let loose, un-
controlled, and increased by fear.

There were men torn from their beds, dragged out
to the fields, flogged, beaten with the butt-ends of
guns, sometimes wounded by shots. In certain cases,
notably those of Tom Hales and Patrick Harte,
prisoners were put to the torture in the strict sense.
There were those four Republicans who, at Belfast,
on the 28th of September, after the murder of two
R.I.C. men, were made get up and, guilty or not, no
matter, were shot at their own door. There was
Constable Hugh Roddy of Tuam, who had resigned
in disgust after the sack of the town by his colleagues
on the 2 ist of July. He was at first taken from his
bed in the middle of the night, flogged and sent home ;
a second time he was treated in the same manner and
threatened with death if he did not leave Tuam within
four days, being, as his torturers remarked, " a shame
to the R.I.C."

But, above all, there were the reprisals all round,
extended and systematised. As a matter of fact,
strike where you will, you won't make a mistake ;
the whole country is Sinn Fein. So towns and villages
are set fire to, Fermoy devastated four times, Lismore,

92 IRELAND IN REBELLION

Bantry, Cobh, Ballylanders, Limerick, Tuam,
Ballaghadereen, Balbriggan, Tullow, Galway, Trim;
how many others !

The sack of Balbriggan may be taken as typical.
One afternoon District Inspector Burke was killed,
and his brother, a sergeant in the R.I.C., seriously
wounded. During the night came the lorries of
Black-and-Tans. The streets were swept by rifle fire
indiscriminately, doors and windows were smashed
with bombs, bombs were thrown into rooms. Thirty
houses were duly sprinkled with petrol, and set ablaze
in a moment ; it was impossible to make provision
to meet the fire, for everybody that appeared was the
signal for renewed firing. To the appeal of a woman
who was caretaker to a place about to be burnt they
replied characteristically enough : " We are not
barbarians. We bear no ill-will to women. But that
is a factory and must be burned/1 And it was.
Prisoners were brought to the police barracks ; some
of them were well treated, offered cigarettes and
released, they knew not why. Two of them, Gibbons
and Lawless, were kept, and were found on the
pavement next morning, their bodies riddled with
bullets and bayonet thrusts. One of them was found
with his head well bandaged, a proof that he was
wounded a first time, treated by a competent person,
and later, who knows, perhaps in the morning, taken
again and finished.

After Balbriggan the English newspapers, not merely
the Bolshevist Daily Herald or the extreme Liberal
Manchester Guardian, the Daily News or the West-
minster Gazette, but The Times, the Evening
Standard, the Observer were breathing fire and flame.
" Frightful story of Bashi Bazouks . . . Turkish Terror-

i

THE ENGLISH REACTION . 93

ism . . . puts a blot on the English name all over the
world ! We need not envy to-day the Huns in
Belgium ! " General Sir F. Maurice went one better
and commiserated the troops who were given such a
task. As for Macready, in an interview with an
American correspondent — the gallant General is
decidedly unhappy in his interviews — he declared
candidly : " There is actually no other means of
punishing or repressing crime, and it is only human
that the police should act on their own initiative."
That it is only human, so indulgent and almost en-
couraging, raises fresh storms, and Macready and
Greenwood are summoned to lyondon. Meanwhile
Miltown-Malbay, Ennistymon, I,ahinch, two days
after Balbriggan, are set on fire ; three civilians, of
whom one was only home on holidays, were killed ;
the child of one of them disappeared. Then Trim,
Ardrahan, Ballinagare, Mallow, Tubbercurry blazed in
their turn ; bombs were thrown into houses in Galway
and into the City Hall in Cork.

VI.

Concentration of Efforts — What was thought to be the
last Assault — The Descent into Hell — Chaos.

Just as a fit and healthy organism instinctively
eliminates, by the normal play of its nature, the toxins
that menace its health or the neighbours that trouble
its well-being, so England little by little, without
noticing it exactly, entered into more and more
violent reaction against the inflexibly rebellious
subject. I remember having seen at Roscoff, in a
glass case in the Delage laboratory, octopuses devour-

94 IRELAND IN REBELLION

ing live crabs that were thrown to them. The crabs
did not seem to relish the adventure ; but the octopuses
would, I imagine, have been very much astonished if
the question of decency were raised. Here, in like
manner, let us not look for moral values ; the pheno-
menon is of biological order.

The mighty monster felt, with stupor and indigna-
tion, its prey still stirring and trying to escape. It
clapped down its paw, that is all. The guerilla fighters
vanished, impalpable once their deed was done. Sixty
thousand soldiers and fifteen thousand police cannot
finish them. Well then, we'll attack the nation, press
down on it till it smothers and cries for mercy. The
Boers held out for three years against the English
army, but not for six months against the concentration
camps. What was there to fear ? Europe, devastated,
powerless, divided, occupied with the egoism of misery,
in rebuilding its ruins ? Or America ? Its coming
President, Harding, compared Ireland to a yellow
colony, and exclaimed : "I should no more permit
myself to give England advice concerning Ireland
than I should permit her to give us advice concerning
the Philippines." Decidedly, there was nothing to
fear. To it then ! And they set to.

So the moment has come. The machine is fitted
up, set in motion, and its pressure hourly increases
to crushing point. The forces driving it, stirred
from their depths, multiply their power by their very
simultaneity and convergence. And along with the
concentration of effort, we see everywhere the decision
to get finished with it.

Ulster is watching in arms.

Social order is intentionally destroyed. British
justice no longer exists owing to the abstention of

THE ENGLISH REACTION 95

those amenable. For some weeks past the Republican
tribunals have been regularly invaded and dispersed,
as at Navan, Wexford, Clare morris, the judges
arrested, the lawyers sent to prison. Some months
ago the Volunteer police had often, without hindrance,
taken the place of the others who had failed. Now
they are hunted, their members condemned for
usurpation of functions. Having to choose between
an order independent of them and disorder (for Ireland
will not have their order), the English choose disorder,
and according to the spirit of their system they are
right. Insecurity reacts on credit, on the volume of
business, and is a powerful though indirect means of
breaking down the economic strength of the country.
They know that so well that they exaggerate the in-
security, and give it all the publicity they can, for
instance in Great Britain and America.

At the same time, as though by chance, the railway
dispute, which Condon allowed to stagnate, suddenly
enters on a critical phase. Sir Eric Geddes, the Minister
of Transport, arrives in Dublin with an ultimatum.
Either the railwaymen must carry on the trains the
troops and munitions the Government sees fit to
send by them, or the companies will be deprived of
the Imperial subsidies, which means for them un-
conditional death. At once the scenes of last summer
are renewed, police in the carriages, trains held up,
personnel dismissed. Paralysis would ensue in a few
days, if the railwaymen had not the sense to yield.

And with the same object, namely, the progressive
extinction of all life, the destruction continues. The
very name of reprisals, decorated as it is with an idea
of summary justice, is a ruse that can deceive nobody.
There is no question of retaliation, but of a meditated

96 IRELAND IN REBELLION

and ripened plan to strangle finally the vanquished
who refuse to yield. There is something automatic
in the sequence ; attack on a constable, sack of a village.
They are playing on velvet. The King can do no
wrong, hence the Crown never pays except as an act
of grace, and even in those cases, whatever compensa-
tion the Courts grant to the sufferers will come in the
end from Ireland's pocket. Besides, the burnings
are not haphazard, but selective. It has been noticed
already ; a factory is not spared, because a factory
destroyed means numbers out of work and families
without bread. The police pay special attention to
creameries — more than fifty of them have been
destroyed — for a creamery in ashes implies that tens,
sometimes hundreds of families around are vitally
affected. So the armed forces, under pretext of
reprisals, with a meticulous regard for consequence,
with unerring aim, never cease from striking at the
sensitive, painful and vital point.

They have come now besides to dispense with
pretexts ; without any revenge to gratify, and merely
to inflict chastisement, they punish political opposition
by ruin. They burnt the apothecary Moloney's shop
because he was a member of Dail Eireann, and the
bakery belonging to the sisters-in-law of Tom Clarke,
who was executed in 1916. There have been cases
where a man's house has been burnt because his son
had escaped from the police. Sometimes the punish-
ment extends to a whole region. In Roscommon the
incendiaries, driving around with cans of petrol in
Crossley lorries, set dwellings, chiefly farmhouses,
ablaze according to their caprice. As for ricks of hay
and straw, and cornstacks not yet threshed, a
blackened heap marks where they stood by the way-

THE ENGLISH REACTION 97

side. One or other of two things must happen ; either
the people losing patience and growing desperate,
will reply by open rebellion, and then the army will
wipe them out in a few days, *or their wretchedness

* Thus we read without excessive astonishment this strange
message in the Daily Express as early as the 28 th of November,
1919 : " It is almost a hope of the authorities and the greater part
of the (English) population that an outburst of violence will soon
happen. A new campaign of assassination seems about to com-
mence. Lord French's life is in danger. An attack on Dublin
Castle is expected."

The manoeuvre is clear. It is so clear, it awakes such grave
suspicions even, that I prefer to leave their expression to an English
source. " There are strong proofs," says the Times of the 30th of
November, 1919, " that there exists a powerful conspiracy against
the prospect of peace in Ireland. . . . The progress which the Com-
mittee on Home Rule are said to have made towards a frank solution
of the Irish problem are doubtless far from welcome to those elements
which in Ireland regard any departure from the status quo as a
menace to their privileges and interests. It would suit the plans
of the obstructionists much better it Sinn Fein Ireland were itself
to wreck the project. It is difficult to believe that the repressive
measures so tardily taken are not the deliberate development of an
intrigue. . . . We fear that the Executive in Ireland has acted, with
or without the complicity of members of the Cabinet, to arouse in
Ireland such a state of feeling, if not of rebellion, that a settlement
may become impossible. That there could be a shadow of justification
for such a fear is in itself intolerable ; as for the execution of such
a plan, it would be a betrayal not only of the English people, but
of the credit and honour of the English nanu throughout the world."

Complicity within the Government, sanguinary undercurrents
of thought, those are questions morally grave, but politically
subsidiary, if our business is merely to study the essence of events,
and not their modes. So without insisting too much, let
us content ourselves with stating the existence of a manoeuvre
in three notions. The first was the suspension of the Home Rule
Bill in 1914 ; the second was during the respite of the Cabinet
lyong-Shortt Committee on Home Rule, and the voting and enforcing
of the so-called Home Rule Bill, when repression was increased
step by step, 1'n the hope of general or sporadic disorder ; the third
was the reaching of the conclusion that the Celt is ungovernable
except by force, and the starting again, without changing a pin,
of the old machine that has been grinding for centuries to the
profit of the Orange minority. Ana indeed it needs no great imagina-
tion to stage the farce. It was exactly the same as the one Pitt

98 IRELAND IN REBELLION

will increase day by day, till they finish by yielding.
In either event the game is won beforehand.

And then from week to week there is growing
evidence of a thing that must one day bring the
exasperation of the masses to exploding point, and
that thing is arbitrariness. No more justice, no more
rules to bind you, but also none to protect you. Bach
one feels himself abandoned to the discretion of
irresponsibles, police that are good-natured or
ferocious, soldiers drunk or sober, who may do to you
what they will, and be almost sure never to be called
to account. Bvery day brings its contingent of facts
which seem incapable of being surpassed, and which
the next day surpasses.

A court-martial sentences to three years' penal
servitude Father Dominic, a Capuchin, ex-chaplain
to Lord Mayor MacSwiney, and also ex-chaplain with
the English Expeditionary force at Salonica. His
crime was a private letter, seized in a raid, in which
he approved of the murder of fourteen secret service
officers who were killed in Dublin, on a Sunday in last
November (1920). (Lawson Report, p. 3).

Henceforth the courts-martial condemn to death as
a rebel every insurgent taken with arms in his hand.
The student, Kevin Barry, captured in an ambush,
is the first to be hanged in Mountjoy Prison, and
before putting on the execution cap, he declares on
oath that he has been tortured for the purpose of
extracting revelations. A little later Cornelius Murphy
of Cork is shot for being found carrying a revolver.

played for the United Irishmen — a series of provocations that
brought about the rebellion of 1798, then suppression of Irish
autonomy by the Act of Union. There is nothing new under the
Irish sky.

THE ENGLISH REACTION 99*

Then again at Cork six young fellows, who remained
in the hands of the soldiers after a fight, are shot in-
pairs, at intervals of a quarter of an hour. And finally,
six others, on the most shaky testimony in the case
of two of them, are hanged in Dublin, also in pairs,
at intervals of an hour — with the hope, I suppose,
that the last would flinch at the test. ... If not, why
this luxury of torture ?

Martial L,aw is in force in the South, and punishes
with death, not only the mere possession of arms, but
the giving of assistance, food or shelter, to the rebels.
So a mother who gives a meal or a bed to her outlawed
son may be made to face the firing squad. Civilian
guards are forcibly raised in disturbed districts,
compelled to go unarmed on night rounds about the
villages in order to surprise and report the preparation
of ambushes, for which they are held responsible ;
that means spying on their own for the foreigner,
under pain of death ! On lorries that are liable to
attack, the soldiers carry about as hostages persons
who have neither been tried nor sentenced, who are
simply known and taken for their political opinions.
Colonel Moore, an old man, was thus brought as a
living shield about the streets of Dublin. The
Volunteer chiefs reply by asking from their central
organisation permission to shoot the enemy at sight.

Encouraged or tolerated — the choice of words
requires some subtlety, " but a mass of public de-
clarations makes it evident that they have received
a little more than tacit approval " (L/awson Report,
p. 2)- — the irregular police put to their credit more
and more surprising exploits. And stranger still, the
cadets of the Auxiliary Force, though all officers,
seemingly go as far as the Black-and-Tans.

100 IRELAND IN REBELLION

One night the whole central and commercial part
of Cork goes ablaze. Three million pounds vanish in
smoke. The fire is started simultaneously in several
places during Curfew hours, when none can go about
but the Crown forces. The commission of inquiry sent
over by the I/abour Party collects overwhelming
testimonies by the dozen ; no matter, Sir Hamar
Greenwood, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, denies
obstinately in the Commons that the burning was the
act of his men. Nevertheless, General Strickland,
Chief Officer Commanding in Cork, being officially
charged to establish responsibility, sends in his report.
This report is hardly to be suspected of Anglophobia,
and yet the Cabinet refuses to publish it. Why ?
Some time after, the Commanding Officer of the
Auxiliaries in Cork is relieved of his post. Again
why ?

But in spite of all the efforts to drive it to the bottom
the mud inevitably rises to the surface. General
Crozier, the Commander of the Auxiliaries under the
higher authority of General Tudor, who is head of
the entire police force, sends in his resignation one
fine morning. The wherefore is a mystery. Soon,
however, the cat is out of the bag. Twenty-six cadets
charged with looting at the time of the sack of Trim,
had been dismissed by him. Having gone for de-
mobilisation to the depot in London, they appealed
and intrigued, and Tudor, acting perhaps on higher
orders, but in any case over Crozier's head, restored
them to their units. A resounding scandal.

Besides that, repeated incidents show what sort of
men have got into the corps. One evening two young
men whose innocence is acknowledged, and who are
released from the Castle after Curfew hours, ask for

THE ENGLISH KEACTION 101

safety to be brought home under escort in a military
lorry. Both are brought to the suburb of Drumcondra
and shot at the corner of a wall. After weeks of
denial, two officers of the Auxiliary corps stationed at
the Castle have to be arrested on a charge of murder.

A cadet named Harte, at the head of a patrol,
meets on the road in broad daylight Canon Magner,
a Cork parish priest, 73 years old, accompanied by a
young farmer. Revolver in hand, he throws the old
man on his knees, makes him undergo an examination
in that posture for a quarter of an hour, and then
blows out his brains ; after that he mortally wounds
the other. Impossible to suppress the story owing to
the number of witnesses. Harte, on being court-
martialled is declared insane, put out of the reach of
justice, and disappears as through a trap-door. It
cannot be said with certainty of him that he incurred
the least punishment, no more than it could of Captain
Bowen Colthurst, who committed the same crime in
the Sheehy-Skeffington case during the rebellion. He
is merely an indiscreet fellow noiselessly withdrawn
from circulation.

One night at L,imerick, Mayor Clancy and his
predecessor O'Callaghan, called to open their doors,
are shot dead. Clancy's wife is wounded in trying to
defend him. The expedition was a safe one, since the
inhabitants may not have arms in their houses under
pain of death.* But who carried it out ? The trade

* The stories recorded above may appear to the reader extrava-
gant and improbable. I am glad to be able to quote this testimony
of M. Ludovic Naudeau, sent to Ireland by the Temps and the
Illustration, which have never passed for Anglophobe or revolution-
ary organs : " Let us put it briefly ; there are happening to-day
in Ireland a whole series of facts such as my pen described eighteen
years ago, when I was relating the ferocities endured by the Mace-

102 IRELAND IN REBELLION

mark seems to be the same as that of the murderers
of MacCurtain, the L,ord Mayor of Cork, or of those
who more recently murdered Father Griffin, a young
priest who was summoned one evening on a sick call,
and found some weeks afterwards in the mud of a
bog. The Castle sees none the less in O'Callaghan and
Clancy merely Sinn Feiners who were victims of their
own moderation, assassinated by the terrorists of the
party. But Mrs. O'Callaghan, questioned by the
District Inspector about the identity of the criminals,
replies that he ought to know them better than her-
self. As for a deposition, as she wrote in a letter to the
Press, she would make it willingly before a jury of
her fellow-citizens, but not before that travesty of
justice, a military court of inquiry. Nevertheless,
Sir Hamar Greenwood, with a serenity and ease that
no longer bother even about saving faces, but merely
speculate on the complacency of the House, confines
himself to coolly repeating that there is not the least
evidence of guilt on the part of the Crown forces.

Monseigneur Baudrillart, in a recent address, has
called Ireland, " the crucified nation." It is indeed
all that can be said. The average of killed on both
sides varies between fifteen and twenty a day. When
things have come to that pass, it may be said that
all appearance of government has vanished ; it can
only be called a butchery. And acts of violence,

donian population, then groaning under the yoke of the cruel Turk.
When the Ottomans set fire to the villages where Bulgarian comitadji
had been, was there any limit to our conscientious indignation ?
Is it possible that in a country governed by our illustrious ally,
by that noble England that has set all peoples the example or
democracy, the traveller should witness such scenes ? Methods of
frightfulness, like those employed by the Teutons in Belgium,
cannot for long be approved of by British citizens " ( Illustration,
5th March, 1921).

THE ENGLISH REACTION 103

murders and bloodshed, though more trying to the
reader's nerves, are not the worst thing for the patient.
The worst, I repeat, are the burnt houses, the ruined
harvests, the blazing factories, the people in the
street that can no longer earn their bread. That
punishment is the equivalent of the ancient torture
of cutting off the hand of a robber at the wrist, the
hand that would work no more. . . . And Ireland,
dumb, impassible, stupefied by blows, one might say,
into insensibility, descends towards chaos.

National resistances, especially of peasant peoples,
can be conquered by no other means. The country
has to be destroyed and the people deprived of food.
Ireland is treated like the Moroccan douars whose
flocks are raided, like L,a Vendee trampled on by the
" infernal columns," most of all like Ireland in 1798
by those regiments whose own head, the honest
Cornwallis, was ashamed of them. And fundamentally
there is either folly or some measure of disloyalty in
feeling astonishment or scandal in regard to such
things. Conquest is conquest, force is force, and the
idea of assigning a limit to them, once they are em-
ployed, has not a shadow of common sense. The least
measure of coercion against hearts in revolt bears the
seed of the worst atrocity that will ripen if they
persist. At Amritsar General Dyer opened fire with
his machine guns ; 400 Hindoos were killed, 1,000 or
1,200 wounded, but all movement was strangled in
the embryo. Thereupon the Government, while
profiting by his act, struck him out of the list of
officers, and the Commons denounced him. Now that
is either silly or pharisaical. But the I/ords glorified
him, and that is something lucid and honest. So when
the Spectator cries, in connection with Ireland, " Shoot,

104 IRELAND IN REBELLION

but don't argue," when the Morning Post clamours
for reconquest, no matter how " disagreeable " the
means to be contemplated, one feels a sort of relief
mingled with an austere joy. One gets away at least
through the blunt openness of those proposals, from
the pathos and contradictions in which the moderate
English Press is wallowing, and the intelligence gets
a savour at last of the pleasure of understanding.

Ireland has the garrotte on its neck, and the stick
is twisting the cord with the inexorable power of
soulless things. And this is why the moment is so
unique and so engrossing ; if lyondon has the stomach
— no other word will do — to go on with the present
dragonnades, it seems to its mind impossible that
Ireland, starved, beaten and strangled, will not be
reduced after some time.* And then there will be,
once more, for a generation or two, the great silence
of despair, perhaps the beginning of the end. If
IvOndon cannot, or dare not, continue the dragonnades,
it must yield. These dragonnades were the only really
efficacious mode by which force could reduce the
country ;* and the Irish, on their side, will not let go

* " It is unquestionably in this belief that the Government
ordered the reprisals all round, or shut its eyes to them. The most
presumptuous among its members thought that about a month of
this policy would have the desired effect " (Lawson Report, p. 4).
Unfortunately, it is now nine months and more since the English
counter-offensive was started, and its only appreciable effect has
been to make things inexpiable, without getting in any way near
a military decision.

* " What can we do ? " said a captain to me at Ljmerick. " It
is certainly a melancholy task, and we do it without joy. But reflect
that every day English officers and soldiers are immolated. Now
if there is an incontestable truth, it is that the vast majority of the
Irish population are tacitly the accomplices of those who assassinate
us. They facilitate their movements, they conceal them, they give
them information, they wish for their success. That granted, since
it is extremely difficult for us to capture the francs- tireurs who

THE ENGLISH REACTION 105

the bone. Within the Empire or not, that is not the
real question. Ireland should be given back to the
Irish ; and the Unconquerable, on whom Elizabeth,
Cromwell, and Pitt have each cast their shovelfuls
of clay, would issue once more from the grave with
a light in her eyes.

What of to-morrow ? The gods alone know. But
the omens are dark. Sir West Ridgeway, a former
Under Secretary for Ireland, takes the trouble of
writing to the Times to recommend reprisals. " There
must be reprisals," but let them be regulated by the
command and not by the men. And towards December
the system comes officially into force. At Carnarvon
on the loth of October, Lloyd George excuses or
justifies the excesses that have been committed, and
makes us suspect that worse is coming. Asquith
insists on conciliation, and Carson speaks of him as
though he were a traitor. And if the past may en-
lighten us, I recall the words of an English Liberal
that Paul Dubois quoted fifteen years ago : " The
Irish are only trying to worry us, just as the Poles
try to worry the Germans."* And he was a Liberal.

attack us unexpectedly, the only method at our command is to
inflict suffering on the masses, slyly hostile to us, from which they
are recruited, from which they obtain their resources and means of
action, and whose champions they are. We must tesolve on that,
or clear out " (Inquiry of M. L. Naudeau, published in the Illustra-
tion, 25th February, 1921). I like to quote this testimony because
of its almost naive honesty. It reveals in an expressive and striking
manner the codified and general character of the reprisals, the
national character of the rising, the fundamentally desperate
character of the measures the English have tied themselves to.
Like a good soldier, who is merely an irresponsible agent for carrying
things out, the witness leaves aside the moral and the political
question.

* Paul Louis Dubois : I' Irlande contemporaine, Introduction, p. 6.

CHAPTER V.
CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES.

I.

Lloyd George — He understands the situation — But, a
prisoner in the hands of Conservatives and Orange-
men, he parades his intransigeance — Forced
duplicity of his attitude — His desire to negotiate
nevertheless.

THUS for four years Ireland answers oppression by
armed revolt, England answers revolt by terror ; a
somewhat desperate decision. Is an agreement, then,
impossible ?

On the English side, certainly, the Prime Minister
seems rigid and more and more uncompromising. But
he is never simple, especially when he most seems so.
This man^who in the last twenty years has made the
complete round of the political clock, is too intelligent
not to understand the Irish Question, even if he
pretends not to. Irately when his Parliamentary
interests of the moment did not forbid such compre-
hension, he expressed that problem in striking terms :

" Centuries of pitiless repression and of brutal
injustice, centuries of insolence and outrage have
driven hatred of British rule into the very marrow
of the Irish race. The one unsurmountable fact
to-day is that Ireland is no more reconciled to
British rule than she was in the days of Cromwell "
(7th April. 1917).

106

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 107

And even yet to-day, heated as he is by the struggle,
he sometimes, with imprudent petulance, allows the
truth to escape. When on 26th July last Sir Edward
Carson and the Duke of Northumberland, at the head
of a delegation came to him and represented the
trouble in Ireland as a symptom of an international
conspiracy against the Empire, he answers gravely —
for his manners are above reproach — that they are
perhaps right, but at the same time he recalls, as if
in spite of himself, that Ireland has ancient grievances
which must be remedied by granting her a reasonable
degree of freedom within the Empire. Only — he wants
to remain Premier.

Assuredly this Welshman, who does not even belong
to the English Church, is, on many points, far removed
from the Tories whom he caused to be elected in
December, 1918 ; but even more than their leader he
is their instrument and their prisoner ; let him cease
to obey and they crush him. These hidden sentiments
sometimes appear on the surface ; sometimes the
rumour runs that L,loyd George, impatient at his
present subjection, would not be sorry to hold other
elections, on the Irish question, or on labour troubles ;
sometimes various surly people inquire sullenly if
England will one day cease to be the prey of Scotch
and Welsh, and the English get a chance. On both
sides the marriage is solely one of reason but neverthe-
less a marriage.

Now, these Tories are the same who in 1912-1914
signed a convention with the Orangemen in revolt
against Home Rule, and openly accepted funds to
finance civil war in Ireland ; for these people, Ulster,
an advanced post in a conquered country, is, so to
speak, the locus, the touchstone also, of English

108 IRELAND IN REBELLION

patriotism ; from a less lyric point of view the Ulster
Question is that which they use periodically, to inflame
Bnglish pride and overthrow their Liberal adversaries ;
between them and the Ulstermen there is a reciprocity
of services, expected or rendered, which makes the
alliance indissoluble. This is what justifies the Times
assertion : —

" We now say, without fear of truthful contra-
diction, that Mr. Lloyd George is the self -consti-
tuted prisoner of the forces associated with the
name of Sir Edward Carson, not because he admires
or believes in the ideas they represent, but because
he is persuaded that, were he to flout them, they
could expel him from office " (nth October, 1920).

And one can believe that Sir Edward Carson,
conscious of this force, makes it felt. The tone in which
he speaks to the Government, a government, note,
which he supports and claims to respect, is quite
simply astounding : —

" If you are unable to protect Ulster against
Sinn Fein machinations I shall take the matter into
my own hands. I will reorganise at all costs, and
notwithstanding the consequences, my Ulster
Volunteers. I hope you have got that pretty clear,
I hate words without action" (i2th July, 1920).

The tone is that of a non-commissioned officer to
recruits, of a master to lackeys, and, not without
indelicacy, throws into prominent relief the subordina-
tion of the Ministry to the Orangemen.

And it is this subordination which throws light on
the Carnarvon speech (9th October) of set purpose so
narrow, full of the obstinacy of unintelligent rancour,
so unworthy of a statesman, so badly received besides,

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 109

by all of the Press which counts, that speech where
Lloyd George now justifies, always excuses, and for
anybody who can read between the lines, encourages
the so-called " reprisals," or more properly speaking,
the deliberately planned cruelties exercised by the
troops in Ireland. His harangue is not the frank
expression of his own thought ; it is a pledge, given
by the unfortunate speaker, and at the same time a
policy taken out against future dangers.

Thus ambiguously divided between his own
comprehension of things as they are, and his state of
dependence, he takes a series of equivocal steps,
contradictory and, therefore, perhaps without
deliberate malice, insincere. He would like to enter
into negotiations, and at the same time, lays down
preliminary conditions which make, as he well knows,
all conference useless. As early as 1917, at the time
of the Irish Convention, he understood — and said then
openly — that any project admitting of the secession
of Ulster from the rest of Ireland was still-born. To-
day (i7th August, 1920), in the House of Commons,
he declares himself ready to hear any representative
of Irish opinion, but on three conditions of which the
first is the secession of the famous six counties. And
yet he knows well that of the six counties two have
since gone over to the Republic. He knows well that
to-day less than ever does Irish opinion, not even
that of the Southern Unionists, accept partition. But
he knows still better that Carson holds the leash, and
he fears the check of the curb.

And yet, nevertheless, scenting the danger to the
Empire that this Irish abscess continues to be, and
secretly convinced that once round a green table his
superior dexterity would once again fool the simple

110 IRELAND IN REBELLION

Gael, as it has fooled so many others, with all the
natural bent of his character, the crafty Welshman,
sincere in his desire to deceive, really itches to
negotiate. I,et him only catch them round a table,
these adversaries now safe in their silence, and he will
twist them round his finger.

II.

Sinn Fein prefers to fight — Necessity and, according to
it, possibility of armed action — Its intransigeance
has several sources : The Irish character ; Sinn Fein
rigidity ; fear of the Nationalist Parliamentary
Party ; the distrust inspired by England and English
politicians.

But for these same reasons, acting in an opposite
direction, and for other reasons also, these adversaries
have little eagerness to take their places round the
table. They prefer to fight.

In the first place they know too well that violence
alone has turned attention to them. The strange and
rather tardy discrimination which the Castle seeks to
establish to-day between Sinn Fein theorists such as
Griffith, who are to be encouraged, and advocates of
physical force, leaders in attacks who are to be
subdued, is entirely baseless if it be not a preparation
to impute to the ' extremists ' the eventual suppres-
sion of the " moderates." In fact politicians and
soldiers are in complete accord. Griffith knows very
well that were it not for the Volunteers and their
young chiefs, and the effort which they oblige England
to make to maintain, as well as she can, her rule here,
he himself might have spoken, written, thundered for
twenty years and not even a single I^ondon Cockney

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 111

would have quivered an eyelash ; in a word, without
the men who strike the man who thinks is of no avail.

What might have dissuaded the Sinn Feiners from
continuing the struggle by armed force was the fear
that the civil population, shockingly dragooned, would
finally yield. This was the hope of the Castle. " There
are," wrote Brigadier- General Blind,* " indications
that the measures recently taken by the Government
have had the desired effect, at least in the moderate
sections of Sinn Fein, which are beginning to use their
influence to stop the campaign of outrage."

" Vain expectation," say the Republicans. " After
some weakening under excess of distress, the country
has regained self-control, remembered that the Volun-
teers for whom she endures such ferocious vengeance
are hei sons, and henceforth each new excess of the
police can only inflame hatred, without impairing
endurance. As for our Volunteers themselves they are
ready for far greater sacrifices. "It is not he who
can inflict most that triumphs," said McSwiney, " but
he who can endure most." lyet us see who shall tire
first. Besides are not our chances fair ? We know
what a weakness we are for England, embarrassed as
she is in all parts of the world, and with her right
hand caught in the wasp nest of Ireland. Weariness
and opposition increase as the struggle lengthens.
Our guerilla war cannot be crushed by force. As
for general dragonnades, either they continue and blot
out the name of England from the civilised world, or
they cease, and then British impotence confesses
itself, and for the first time Ireland is on a footing of

* In a secret order issued to the troops three days after the sack
of Balbriggan.

112 IRELAND IN KEBELLION

equality to treat with her old enemy. We prefer to

fight.-

Thus say the Republicans. And what they say is
what they think. There is this disconcerting Irish
character, which often, under pressure, reacts in the
most unexpected direction, and which throughout its
history shows a deliberate tendency to choose disaster
rather than compromise. Certain horses, under the
whip, are maddened and kill themselves.

There is the uncompromising enthusiasm of the
Republican movement, where there are still many
men, who without boasting, but also without com-
promise, refuse to consider the possibility of yielding,
because they feel bound by their oath, literally unto
death. The cold exaltation of courage shown by
MacSwiney is not so rare in their ranks. " The English
burn houses and factories ? So much the better ! that
sends more young men to the army. They track us
down more and more closely ; we have our backs to the
wall ; what else can we do ? " And if sometimes, in
an evil dream, they have the vision of the possible
destruction, doubtless rather than retreat they still
prefer to fall bearing arms, that at least the example
may remain to " save the soul of Ireland ! " That is
why Sinn Fein prefers to fight.

Moreover many reasons deter it from negotiating.
First of all its spirit. The men who have worked out
its doctrine and who still lead it, pure thinkers, as has
already been remarked, writers like Griffith, pro-
fessors like MacNeill, have in their convictions the
sincerity, but also the inflexible rigidity of theorists :
this is what makes them so baffling to the practical,
businesslike English, whose bent is always towards
opportunism and compromise ; this is what makes

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 113

them so akin to the Irish temperament, whose idealism
borders on the chimerical. Before the Rising and the
days of greatness which followed, De Valera, then a
humble professor at Blackrock, was cycling about
Connemara during the holidays with a friend. They
happened to speak of Home Rule, of half-liberty. De
Valera cut short the discussion. " If liberty is not
entire," said he, " it is not liberty." That is the Sinn
Fein spirit. There is no Irish Question. Ireland
happens to be occupied by a foreign army. She is,
in fact, a nation like other nations, and like them has
the right to independence. The foreign army has only
to evacuate the country and that is all. Where is the
' Question ' there ? Debate with Lloyd George ?
Debate what ? What is there debatable in the
matter ?

Besides, if Sinn Fein were tempted to forget its
radical turn of mind political interest would deter it.
Let it abandon principle, on which it stubbornly takes
its stand, and enter the road of compromise with
London politicians, and since there ceases to be any
great difference between it and the old parliamentary
opposition, one can no longer see why it should have
swept away the latter two years ago. There remain
in the country a sufficient number of demobilised
politicians, very sorry to be demobilised, full of bitter
resentment because they have lost on the threshold
of old age, the paradise of power — there are still
enough placemen, remnant of the old Redmondite
organisation throughout the country, to make Sinn
Fein pay dearly for the slightest weakening.

Finally and above all, Sinn Fein is deterred from
negotiating by elementary prudence. There is a
cruel truth which must be uttered, first of all, because

114 IRELAND IN REBELLION

it is the truth, and then because it explains so much.
In Ireland English pledges are no longer good currency.
The Irish have been too often duped, tricked, deceived,
fooled, so many Home Rule Bills have succeeded other
Home Rule Bills and not one has been put into execu-
tion. So many solemn promises which have not been
kept ! Even a law passed and promulgated and
annulled, defective as it was, when a danger arose
that Ireland might benefit by it ! That is all over.
Condon may now bestow on them her sweetest smiles,
make them her most tempting offers, in each word
they scent the snare, and the sincerest Englishmen,
such as lyord Grey, are to them only more profound
liars. The Irish Bulletin, of the gth September,
peifectly voices this invincible distrust ; it quotes
appeals made by England to Ireland during the war,
in which she promises, sometimes explicitly, freedom.
" America, by the voice of her President, declares the
liberty of every nation is as much to be respected as
her own, as worthy of being assured. Will Ireland
fight for her freedom ? America will see to it that her
rights are assured." Thus spoke England in the dis-
order of danger ; and now. . . . No ! decidedly, we play
no more with cheats.

This instinctive suspicion of a whole nation is keener
still when directed against individuals. Whom is one
to trust in this array of politicians, so stale, that one
knows by heart, in advance, all their artifices, all
their knavery ? From General Sir Hubert Gough in
the Star to-day flow forth emollient homilies : —

" The Empire cannot last indefinitely if it rests
on force, and not on the consent of the governed.
It must make itself loved, not hated. ... To be
disloyal is not a crime on certain occasions. If

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 115

England be unjust or faithless towards others, or
merely suspected ot being so, she need not expect
loyalty. That is Ireland's case to-day. "

Quite so. But can this, by any chance be the same
angelic general who, supporting the sedition of his
officers of the Curragh Camp, and thus putting force
at the service of the Orange rebels, destroyed Home
Rule in 1914 ?

Lloyd George ? He is still more double-dealing : —

" The sincerity of the Prime Minister is more
and more clouded with suspicion. Ireland in its
chaos cries loudly against faith in his declarations
and promises. The miners put in the van of their
cause the assertion that he is not to be trusted.
His dealings with the German reparation question,
and then with Poland, are remembered against
him,"

writes the Times, still implacable (i8th October).

His manner of conducting a controversy makes him
still more suspected. Is it sincere, is it even really
clever to declare (answer to Bottomley, i8th August),
that " the Sinn Feiners imagine they represent the
majority of the Irish people ? " Could it possibly be
that the Coalition, to which the Cabinet owes its
existence, does not represent, but merely imagines
that it represents, the majority of the English people ?
Is it frank, or even clever, to persist in charging the
Republicans with the murder of MacCurtain, former
Lord Mayor of Cork, when everybody knows, and
none better than Lloyd George, that he fell by police
bullets ? Beyond a certain limit, honesty would be
supreme craft. And so one laughs heartily at the sar-
casms of Asquith's daughter, Lady Bonham Carter : —

116 IRELAND IN REBELLION

" The Prime Minister is an excellent quick-
change artist. He has had a fine political career,
but nothing to what he would have done on the
films."

But having laughed, one wonders if Asquith or his
partisans can afford to mock at L,loyd George's
versatility, or to give him lessons about Ireland.
Asquith to-day stigmatises the policy of repression,
proposes to offer Ireland practically unlimited liberty
and even claims not to fear eventual Irish armaments.
Six years ago the self-same Asquith was Prime Minister
of England, with power in his hands. A law of Home
Rule had been passed which he had only to apply ;
what did he do with it ? To-day when he pleads for
Ireland, is he playing an open game ? Is it simply an
opposition manoeuvre, a Parliamentary trick ? It is
permissible to doubt.

" The Irish," the same Asquith once wisely said,
" should be in a position to believe that they are faced
by responsible and honest men." Obviously. Un-
fortunately, they can no longer biing themselves to
believe it. When they look at their possible partners
they see first the impassive faces of Balfour and Bonar
L,aw ; serious people, who, in a certain sense, deserve
respect ; they are, of course, enemies from whom
Ireland has nothing to expect, but at least one knows
who they are, at least they are true to themselves.
After them one looks, reviews each face, and among
the satellites of I^loyd George, among the Ulstermen
rewarded for their services by a dizzy favour which
hurries them on to honours, even among Prime
Ministers, present or past — one can find only weather-
cocks. This is the final reason why the Irish have no
desire to negotiate.

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 117

III.

A glimmer of light — How much of Irish intransigeance
is bluff ? — Offers of strategical guarantees — That
necessarily Sinn Fein would accept a Home Rule
which was not fictitious — That Lloyd George, in
order to refuse it, affects to believe Sinn Fein
irreconcilable.

Is the circle then closed, an arrangement impossible,
the blind alley hopelessly blind ? Not yet. For this is
what Irishmen may still say and do say : " You English
wish to give Home Rule to Ireland. That is not what
her people want ; her people desire, purely and simply,
that you should get out ; and we, her representatives,
have therefore nothing to discuss with you. But this
Home Rule, an idea which is yours, and yours alone,
impose it : you will see. An impregnable, logical
position. Naturally Condon does not like this theorem ;
its nakedness offends her. As counterpart to her
" concession " she would like to obtain pledges. But
the Irish do not budge from this : " Home Rule is a
purely English solution ; apply it if you think fit ; it
is no concern of ours."

But already one sees what seems to be a glimmer of
light piercing the darkness. Besides this expectancy,
this almost exaggerated caution, this proclaimed
indifference, is it, in its turn, very sincere ? Is it not
rather a feint in the closely-played poker that is going
on before our eyes ? For my part I do not doubt it.

Whatever, besides, may be one's judgment of them,
the Republicans love their country too well not to be,
more than all others, moved by her sufferings, and
not to wish for them any remedy, however imperfect,

118 IRELAND IN EEBELLION

however far it fall short of their principles or dreams ;
in spite of their slightly chimerical idealism, they have
too great a sense of proportion not to appreciate the
impossibility of subduing by mere force the enormous
Empire which they may indeed harrass, but not bend
nor vanquish ; in my opinion they desire then, pas-
sionately, any measure, even incomplete, of freedom.

But they will not accept a sham and a mockery as
were so many previous Bills ; they will not allow
themselves to be led a dance, like Butt's or Parnell's
or Redmond's party, by letting themselves be trotted
from Commons to Lords, and from Lords to Commons,
to be presented at last with a hollow sham ; they believe
that the only way of obtaining from England some-
thing which is really something, is the closed fist —
and on my word, to judge by Ireland's past, they are
not perhaps altogether wrong.

That is why they play this game of bluff. But as the
game goes on, they gradually, and as if in spite of
themselves, let a corner of their cards be seen, De
Valera — and this is an act of courage for which he will
eventually have to answer to the more rigid — shows
himself disposed to the Cubanisation of Ireland, that
is to say to the concession by Ireland to England, of
the same strategical guarantees that Cuba, by the
first article of the Platt amendment, assures to the
United States. In an interview given to the Gazetta
del Popolo at the end of September, Griffith cries :
" Let England recognise our right to a separate and
independent existence, and then the question of strate-
gical guarantees need not be an insurmountable
difficulty." In another form, slightly more veiled
perhaps, this is the same proposition made by De
Valera ; and if I did not fear an accusation of hetero-

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 119

doxy, I would even risk this rather free translation :
" Take all your securities, military and naval ; give
us the substance of Home Rule, that is to say with
fiscal autonomy and no partition, and the baigain is
struck/'

But if you prefer, let us cease to interpret hidden
thoughts — always a risky operation. L,et us simply
suppose that Home Rule, sincere and without trickery,
is at last realised. ^L,et us suppose that the Republicans
also are absolutely sincere, when they disdainfully
reject this Home Rule to-day ; let us even credit them
with an honesty bordering on ingenuousness. Faced
with this new situation what, at most, could they do ?
Appeal to the people from whom they hold moral and
material power, and ask their opinion. That opinion
would not be doubtful. A political staff may be im-
bued with idealogy ; in a certain sense it is even fitting
that it should be so. The mass of a people is not.
When the Irish people would see conceded to it the
essentials of freedom, liberty to learn its own language,
to pursue its own ideal, above all to manage its own
affairs, how can one doubt that it would accept, at
least by a large majority, an amelioration, this time
so substantial, of its lot ?

And then what alternative would remain open to
the leaders of Sinn Fein ? Either, abandoned by three-
fourths of public opinion, to persist in their absolute
radicalism, to return to obscurity, or loyally to answer
the fresh call of the people and continue to serve in
Ireland, enjoying the liberty won by their efforts. I
am dreaming ? But after the Boer War did not Botha
become Prime Minister of South Africa ?

And who, even among the most extreme Irishmen,
would hold that nothing had changed ; when, instead

120 IRELAND IN REBELLION

of the dizzy kaleidoscopic procession of Scotch, Ulster
and English Chief Secretaiies at the Castle, one would
see De Valera, or even Sir Horace Plunkett, Prime
Minister of Iieland ? That is why I say that, contrary
to appearances, a settlement would be possible, even
easy and rapid, if the wish weie there.*

Even if England, to save the self-esteem of Sinn
Fein doctrinaires, and cover their retreat, were to
add to the reality of Home Rule, the empty words
Independence and Republic, what would it really
matter to her ? Is she not accustomed to compromise
about words, if not about things ? Is she not, weary
of noise and trouble, about to recognise the " Inde-
pendence " of Egypt, requiring precisely a few " stra-
tegical guarantees," including control of the Suez
Canal ? Yes, for the realistic London Government,
which has never quailed before words, it would be easy
to arrange things, if the wish were there. But it is not.

* It is peculiarly gratifying to me to find myself here in agreement
with General Lawson, who is so much of my opinion that he even
quotes the same historical examples : " The majority of those with
whom I have conversed thought that the road to peace (between
England and Ireland) was Home Rule within the Empire, with
fiscal autonomy, Ireland giving the necessary guarantees for Imperial
security, and that such a solution would be welcomed by the mass
of Sinn Fein. It must be remembered that last year there was a
considerable change from right to left in Irish opinion ; a number
of people who were decided Unionists have become partisans of
Home Rule, and the point on which all seem to agree is that Home
Rule without fiscal autonomy is not Home Rule at all.

" If such a scheme were submitted to an Irish electoral body,
abandoning, it is true, the Republican idea in favour of a monarchy
more conservative and more in harmony with historical tradition,
but giving to Ireland real liberty to manage her own affairs and work
out her own life, Dail Eireann might say in all sincerity and honour :
' We shall accept, with deference, the decision of the Irish people.'

" There is a considerable analogy between the present situation
in Ireland, and that in South Africa towards the end of the Boer
War " (Lawson Report, p. 6 seq.).

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 121

It is not precisely because there is no desire to give
this unrestricted Home Rule to an undivided Ireland.
The tremolos of Lloyd George and Carson, modestly
veiling their faces before the abhorred spectre of the
Republic, have indeed no other meaning. Carson goes
on repeating, " To yield ever so little to Ireland is to
dethrone King George in this country."

To the Member of Parliament Kenworthy, speaking
of eventual " Cubanisation " (3rd August), the Premier
replies : " This proposition would imply the acceptance
of an independent Republic — (it is almost the exact
opposite] — and to that we will never consent." Finally
and above all, these English statesmen, this lyloyd
George who has the craftiness in guessing of a horse
dealer bargaining with a peasant, pretends not to
understand the meaning that behind all the array of
ultra- Republican formulas, lies the offer of guarantees,
and he loudly affects to believe Sinn Fein irreconcilable,
entrenched in rancour, that he may have a pretext of
refusing everything to Ireland*. M. Pierre Mille
pretends somewhere that an English lawyer told him
a very pretty and very topical story. A man accused
of murder appears before the Bow Street judge. The
enquiry centres on a cap, the only piece of circumstan-
tial evidence ; if it belongs to the accused he is hanged ;

* The following is one proof among many : Dr. Gilmartin,
Archbishop of Tuam, having published a message in which he asks
for a truce of God, and affirms that \\ith " real concrete Home Rule
all serious conflict would at once cease," the Temps, which picusly
obeys London inspiration in all that concerns Ireland, adds at once,
"It is pointed out that this Prelate here expresses a personal
opinion." It is pointed out ; who points out ? The English Govern-
ment, because if the legend of Irish irreconcilableness were dissipated
its last pretext would crumble away. Dr. Cohalan, the very influential
Bishop of Cork, has repeated with greater precision, Dr. Gilmartin's
ideas.

122 •-.; IRELAND IN REBELLION

if not, free. The man, a heavy sort of brute, hardly
answers, seems not to follow the cross-examination of
the witnesses, scarcely to understand that it concerns
him. The witnesses clash, get mixed up, contradict
each other ; for lack of proof the man is acquitted.
Then he, stretching his hand towards the piece of
evidence, says very tranquilly, " May I take my cap ?"
" For," added the storyteller, " we English have that
great force of never understanding what it is not to
our interest to understand."

That is the meaning of the Carnarvon speech (gib.
October) :-

" If present opinion in Ireland were to be
satisfied it would be necessary to accept separation
and establish an independent Irish Republic. As
for Dominion Home Rule it is no use talking about
it."

And we are informed that it would imply for Ireland
an Income Tax of 2s. in the pound *, a navy, the
control of its ports, conscription, an army of 500,000
men ; how is one to afford all that on two shillings
in the pound ? — which would oblige England also to
establish conscription — and I know not what besides.
What nonsense ! At one solitary moment the cat
peeps out of the bag. " Against such a proposition
(that of the Republic) Ulster would have something
to say." There lies the difficulty. Again we fall back
on the dead point.

* The Income Tax in Great Britain is six shillings in the pound.

^we<v

CALCULATION OF PKOBABlLgIEjO£2r ^123

IV ONTARIO

Chances of a settlement — The opposition in Parliament
— Fear of contagious anarchy — Lassitude and
sentiment of the vanity of force — Pricks of conscience
in the English soul — Fear of Universal opinion.

Arrived so far, what remains to be done save to
calculate the probabilities ? Save to weigh the chances
of settlement, for and against ?

For ? There is in the first place the existence of an
English opposition. Certainly the sincerity of Asquith
or of the Labour Party is most suspect ; but that is
not the question. However hollow and hypocritical
be their tenderness for Ireland, they speak and agitate
in her favour, and for tactical reasons must continue
to do so. Assuredly also, the opposition is numerically
weak, and on big questions of principle hardly secures
in the Commons one-fifth of the votes. But it may
suddenly and dangerously increase, if it should chance
to meet, or if experience should bring it an argument
which comes home to the heart or interest of the
English people. And if in the last by-elections the tide
of disfavour against the Coalition seems slack, the
entry into line of a man so universally respected as
Lord Grey, so evidently disinterested, who, despite
the state of his eyes, gives us to understand that he
is ready to accept the burden of power, the entry of
such a recruit is of incalculable value to the opposition,
and may be the beginning of a change in opinion.
Coalitionists, such as Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Henry
Cavendish Ben tick, already manifest uneasiness.

To wage war as it is waged in Ireland is, naturally,
not without disadvantages even for the stronger side.

124 IRELAND IN REBELLION

The troops, police or regular, who feel that in a more
or less underhand way they are invited to savage
tasks, cannot sustain a high morale in such employ-
ment, and one must not be astonished to see them
accused of drunkenness, looting, assassination,* even
indiscipline. The Irish Bulletin asserts that on the
23rd August, at the R.I.C. Depot, Phoenix Park, 600
recruits in training mutinied against a general order
of General Macready, threatening to leave the force
if not given entire liberty to continue " reprisals."
This, if not true, is likely. Things have been so
managed that the struggle turned to a private quarrel,
an endless vendetta, between people and troops ; men
are no longer there to execute orders, they are en-
couraged to take the initiative in terrorising ; if now
the police and Auxiliary foices have a tendency to
escape from the control of their leaders, who can be
surprised ? The occupation of butcher has never
been a good school of discipline for an army. There
are Englishmen sufficiently far-seeing to become un-
easy.

The same reasoning holds good for the civil anarchy
into which the Government seeks to plunge the country.
To suppress Republican law courts and Republican
police, thereby increasing insecurity of person and
property, is assuredly a powerful means of spreading
suffering, lever to force surrender ; but who can
be sure that anarchy will remain confined to the
area where it is fomented ? This is the explanation of
certain protests, such as that of the Times (2ist

* Major Bvan Bruce, of the " Auxiliary Police Force," is com-
mitted for trial by court-martial, accused of having stolen £75 from
a creamery which had been burned down. Sir H. Greenwood told
the House of Commons that of nine R.I.C. men arrested for various
outrages, two were accused of murder.

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 125

August, 1920) against the suppression of Republican
arbitration courts. Just at the moment England has
rather serious social troubles, a really dangerous revo-
lutionary agitation. Prussia was in a healthier condition
when she inoculated Russia with Bolshevism, and yet
she has not, in the end, avoided contagion. There
are Englishmen who see far enough ahead to become
disquieted.

Assuredly, if the Empire employs force without
reserve or scruple it will finally crush Ireland under
its weight. In the meantime victorious England has
on hands important suspended interests in all parts
of the world : Egypt, the Black Sea, Middle Asia,
India ; it is indeed a moment to squander £1,150,000
a month and tie down in Ireland 50,000 soldiers and
15,000 police. And this waste of men and money
may last for a long time yet ; at any rate it has lasted
for four years, with occasional respites, and this year,
a terrible recrudescence, and none can foresee the end ;
even if the revolt be crushed, one must anticipate
for a quivering Ireland many long years of powerful
military garrisons. And towards what end, after all,
is this formidable effort directed ? Ireland subdued
does not mean Ireland conciliated.* Cannon cannot
prevail against souls. Solutions based on force are
in themselves precarious. Will it then be necessary
to have taken so much trouble in order that, at the
first great danger to the Kingdom, Ireland may rise
once more ready to stab England in the back ?

Assuredly even to-day some risks would be run in
giving to Ireland freedom or partial freedom. The
longer London tarries, the more bitter the rancour

* " The best method for England of securing a friendly Ireland
is to have a free Ireland " (L,awson Report, p. 7).

126 IRELAND IN REBELLION

and the deeper the suspicion ; and if England delays
until she seems to yield only when weary of the
struggle, it is to be feared that Ireland, then become
incurably distrustful, will arm to protect by force
what she will believe she holds by force, and fears to
see taken from her, as in Grattan's days, by faithless
jealousy. But would one not be exposed to these same
dangers and to worse should force be lacking to face,
at the same moment, a great exterior danger and an
Ireland in insurrection ? When one is threatened with
a serious operation is it not better to face it voluntarily,
when one is in one's health, without waiting until
obliged to by a crisis at the most unfavourable and
dangerous moment ? There are Englishmen who see
far enough ahead to experience this feeling of lassitude,
of discouragement, and of " What's the use ? "

And finally there are others — an element that shall
never be dominant in realistic or negligible in pietist
Albion — who recoil before the immorality of brute
force. As always with these minds so far removed
from I/atin limpidity, so synthetic, incapable of truly
knowing themselves, egoistic and religious at the
same moment, and without being disturbed by the
contradiction, in short, as far from being lucid to them-
selves or to others, it is difficult to discern the more
or less pure motives of the moral shock, how much
of it is genuine aversion from evil, how much fear of
opinion, how much interest nicely understood. The
Times (soth August) declares to the Irish people that
English opinion regards MacSwiney's imminent death
" with deep regret and no small measure of shame " ;
the Bolshevik Daily Herald strews flowers on his
coffin ; the Daily News accuses Sir H. Greenwood of
lying, when in the House of Commons he denies the

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 127

barbarities of the troops. In these manifestations of
British feeling who shall distinguish what is sincere
and what mere opportunism ? But at any rate, what-
ever this sentiment be, and however mixed its nature,
it exists and must be reckoned with.

England has always surrounded herself with such
a halo of humanitarian liberalism, uttered such loud
cries against all terrors, the Russian terror, the Turkish
terror, the Prussian terror, the Hungarian terror, that,
willy-nilly, she is partly the prisoner of her legend ;
even if it were only Pharisaism — and that cannot be
altogether so — what does it matter ? That would still
be of some avail : Pharisaisme oblige. L,et it not be
said that I am jeering ; an affectation of virtue may be
the first rung on the moral ladder, and would to God
that it were less rare between nations ; because if
hypocrisy finds it necessary to carry brutality to too
great an extreme, it is the first to be made uncomfort-
able. Hence these alternatives of the closed fist—
debellare superbos — and of the extended hand — •
par cere subjectis — which, in addition cost rebels more
dearly than a decided and decisive repression, exercised
once for all. But this lack of coherence is exactly
the British spirit, hesitating between the mailed fist,
to which its instinct urges it, and the world's opinion,
which its prudence fears.

Powerful as she has emerged from the war, England
is not, nevertheless, a colossus as massive as the
Germany of yesterday, and cannot afford to run
counter to universal opinion ; moreover, being cleverer,
she prefers to try and turn it in her favour. Such is the
object of those persistent communiques, (Reuter ist
September ; Sir E. Carson, interview in the Matin)
and other of more recent articles where America and

128 IRELAND IN REBELLION

France are adroitly reminded of Irish pro- Germanism
during the war ; this is to counter-balance Sinn Fein
propaganda and stifle dawning sympathy with the
Republican cause. But this cleverness is indirectly
yet another proof that England fears to clash with
universal opinion ; and in her quarrel with Ireland she
will have a good deal of trouble in keeping this opinion
on her side.

Thus the liberalism — tactical or sincere — of the
opposition, fear of contagious anarchy, lassitude,
remorse of conscience, uneasiness for her good name,
these are reasons which, in concert, would impel
England to a friendly settlement. Some are yielding
to them, to the scandal of the Morning Post, which
groans that the British people itself is passing over
to rebellion. Such is the Evening Standard, still classed
as Unionist, which finally asks on the 25th July last : —

" Can it be that the Irishman is less fit to govern
himself than the Egyptian ? If the autonomy of
Ireland be a danger for the Empire, is that of
Egypt not ? If it is found possible to accord to
Egypt an autonomy bordering on independence
why this obstinate refusal to give the same to
Ireland ? "

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 129

V.

Chances against settlement — Strategic value and prox-
imity of Ireland — History — The perpetual out-
bidding between oppression and revolt — The English-
man's innate unconscious conviction of his essential
superiority to the Irishman ; victors and vanquished
— That Orangeism voices this sentiment of racial
Pride, hence its magical power over the English
mind — The Empire must crumble before the English
mind renounces Empire.

Why ? Because Ireland is fifty miles from the
English coast and Egypt at the other end of the
world. At worst a hostile Egypt could only delay,
not cut, communication between I/ondon and India ;
and besides Condon has fortified itself in advance
against this risk, by solidly occupying the Suez Canal.
But from a hostile Ireland, lending her ports to some
powerful adversary, a deadly blockade might spring.
That is why, if England yields to Egypt, instead of
a favourable precedent this will be for Ireland a
sinister indication, an indication that not being able
to hold on everywhere they loose hold there to have
their hands free here.

Why ? Because between them and Egypt there is
as yet no history : what is forty years in the life of
a nation ? whereas between them and Ireland there
are seven inexpiable centuries. And when one thinks
it over, when one seeks to establish a hierarchy in
one's ideas, one finally realises that the great obstacle
to a settlement, the insurmountable, perhaps the
only obstacle, is history. There are certain chains of
fact that the past has bequeathed to the present, like

130 IRELAND IN REBELLION

an immutable and accursed tradition ; generations are
born into which, before their birth, this hard past
breathes the soul of Cain.

Yes, the English, especially since the Tudors, have
heaped up so much injustice and cruelty in Ireland
that they think they have everything to fear from her,
if this victim were ever to become free. They hold her,
therefore, in bond. Irish resentment becomes more
embittered thereby, revolt increases English distrust,
distrust increases oppression ; and the infernal circle
closes, and none can see how to get out. Violence of
by-gone days commands the violence of to-day. An
inexorable Nemesis pursues the sons of Cromwell, and
in punishment for the murder of yesterday, slips into
their hands, as if in spite of them, the knife with which
they shall kill to-morrow.

History ! It is from it one must learn the spiritual
value of Ireland for the English. She is to them what
Alsace-Lorraine was to the Imperialists ; the witness
and trophy, the living, speaking proof that they were
and remain a master people, since here is the slave
to attest it ; a proof all the more living in that the
slave remains rebellious, and that in subduing her
from age to age one demonstrates to one's self that one
has not degenerated from conquering ancestors ; a
palladium also, a palladium to the race of its strength
and virtue.

All this the average Englishman does not know,
does not feel ; say it to him, he would protest. But
he oozes it forth. He has for the Irishman a gentle,
tranquil, benevolent, established, unconscious, innate
contempt. This is a thing which can neither be
expressed nor discussed ; it is an axiom, a revelation,
an innate idea. There is, in theatre and music hall,

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 131

a stereotype sketch of the Irishman : frivolous, talka-
tive, inconstant, dirty, rather a good chap after all,
a boaster, liar and thief ; who would contest this
stereotype ? it is a primary truth, it is " The Irishman."
Oh ! They recognise his merits, they even affect
to give him good measure ; but so much sincerity, you
see at once, only lends additional weight to the severe
judgments pronounced on him : —

"* Irishmen have many splendid qualities ; but I
see no signs of sweet reasonableness in them,
whether they live in Ireland, or America, or
elsewhere."

So writes Lord Salisbury in the Times (i7th October)
— this is the gilding, this the pill. Recently the Sphere
devoted a page to the troubles in Ireland ; it gave,
amongst others, a photograph of three small boys
wearing petticoats ; " this is the West," ran the
legend, " they believe they deceive the bad fairies who
carry off children, but attach importance only to
males." Ireland-? Quite so ! Beautiful and curious
country, charming folklore, population so picturesquely
backward, so quaint with its primitive superstitions ;
wild children ! pretty place for the holidays. Such is
the tone. And so comic, with their Republic, their
cardboard army and straw ministers ! their pretence
of grumbling against the Empire, the most glorious
Empire under the sun ! Terrible youngsters, and so
noisy at times that they simply must be whipped.
That is what London thinks, not even maliciously, I
swear, of this unhappy country, where daily men die
for freedom.

I seek in our own country a sentiment to be
compared to this. Not anti-clericalism, which is much

132 IRELAND IN REBELLION

mote clearly defined, bitter, aggressive in some, and
in others a rather superficial attitude. Not the anti-
Semitic prejudice, which is as instinctive, but much
more violent ; the Englishman rather likes the Irish-
man, readily adopts and intermarries with him,
adores Celtic animation, wit, and delight in life,
celebrates Irish beauty, his favourite actresses come
from Ireland and many of his writers and artists.
No, the nearest parallel, product of the same reactions,
would be, perhaps, with less of amused and complacent
superiority, the feeling of the Roman for the Grseculus,
or of the Prussian for the Pole, as Sienkievicz has
painted it in " Bartek the soldier." A feeling of
protective superiority, turning the extreme fury and
boundless indignation, when the inferior race, inso-
lently putting itself on an equal footing with the
other, bethinks itself, on regaining independence, of
retaking " Posen and threatening Breslau," or of
claiming Ireland for the Irish.

It is useless to reason about all this. It is a condition
necessary to being, as necessary as the air one breathes,
or pulsing blood. And the observer, on the other hand,
experiences the little joyous shock of certitude, when
he descends to these depths, because he feels he has
reached the indestructible, bed-rock, the man himself.
The man ! beyond all humanitarian phraseology, all
hypocritical morality and nauseating declamations,
this is he at last, naked and in truth, incapable of
knowing himself, or making himself any better, such
as the accident of destiny, the blind past, have made
him.

An off-set of victory is that it too often warps the
victor's mind, whether the victory be the result of
superiority in organisation, arms, or numbers, or of

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 133

pure chance ; at the best it would merely prove a
dynamic superiority, and numerous are the incidents
where it has sacrificed precious things to the giossness
of the stronger side, Corinth to Mummius, the world
of antiquity to the Barbarians. But it sovereignly
persuades the victor that in everything he is better
than the vanquished ; otherwise how could he have
conquered ?

Have you noticed, in the most refined societies,
which one would have considered spiritualised, how
proud man is of his strength, how easily consoled for
ignominy, but how horribly humiliated by the least
infirmity ? Victory is the sacrament of force. For
the animal that man is and remains, it is the test,
the proof from which there is no appeal. How is he ever
to see an equal in that other man whom he has had,
inert and defenceless, under his heel ? How could
he doubt that henceforth the property of the van-
quished is his ? And that feeling which swells his
heart with the fulness of pride, he transmits, mysteri-
ously, to hereditary generations. His descendants
shall carry it, even unknown to themselves, in the
flow of their blood, in fibre of their flesh. A secret
spirit shall repeat to them from age to age, that it is
their tradition and duty to put in their turn, as
formerly their fathers, their foot on the neck of the
vanquished ; a secret voice shall repeat to them that
the country of the conquered belongs, in fact and by
right, to the sons of the conqueror.

In the Englishman everything cries it out, every-
thing trumpets abroad his ingenuous faith in an
evidence that only pure perversion or intellectual
sadism can call into question ; everything testifies to
it, as if in spite of them, even those apparently in-

134 IBELAND IN EEBELLION

significant words in which suddenly and without
warning a soul peeps forth.

As an old Protestant lady, respectable and devout,
bewails the troubles. :t What madness," she sighs,
" is this longing for secession ! How is it they can't
see in the proximity of the two islands, the finger of
God, Who desired to unite them for ever ? " " And
if," asks a malicious little girl, " it were the Irish who
had invaded and conquered England, would it still be
the finger of God ? " Faced with this absurd paradox
the lady remains open-mouthed.

One night, in the last few months, the police were
raiding a Dublin hotel. In one room a traveller,
having been questioned and searched, was about to
be set free, when they found in his valise a simple
business letter, but beginning with the Irish " A
chara " (Dear friend). He is immediately arrested,
and the officer says to him angrily : " Do you know
that the Orangemen begin to be fed up with you ? "
" Ah," said the other, " for three hundred years we
have been fed up with them ! " Never, assuredly, had
the worthy officer considered this singular point of
view ; the calling into question of the conquest.

And now, just look at Carson, at these carnivorous
jaws ; that is what he represents, the conquest, the
victory, the triumph enduring through the centuries,
the eternal joy pulsing in the veins of the master tribe,
to feel itself the stronger, the greater, the better. It
is not the material Ulster, itself divided in opinion,
with Belfast fed by the hinterland of the three pro-
vinces, and interested in the unity of the island, that
is the true obstacle to the liberation of Ireland ; the
invincible obstacle is the historical spirit of the four
Oiange counties ; it is the inflexible soul living there

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 135

and inflexibly facing that other hostile soul, the soul
of Sarsfield, of the traitor Wolfe Tone,* and of
MacSwiney.

Assuredly the Ulster planters are dear to England
as the German immigrants in Alsace were once to
Prussia ; they are perhaps the dearest of her children.
Colonists of Empire risked among the barbarians ;
but if she had to lose hold of Ireland and see her
favourite sons submerged in the native masses, she
would weep less for them than for the bloody mirror
in which she had been wont to admire her glory.

And Carson knows this well. Read one of his
speeches, not those of the London Parliament, but
those made in Belfast to his people. Does he speak
of justice, of constitutional rights, of interests ? Little
or not at all : —

" The enemy is at your gates. You require good
healthy advance guards, solid and determined to
sound the trumpet and assemble the necessary
troops " (i2th July).

That is how he speaks. Cries of contempt and hatred
of Papist heresy, of Catholic bishops, of the Irish mob,
appeals, brutal to the point of beauty, to religious
and racial passion, therein lies his eloquence. " He
beats the Orange drum," and representing only a
tribe at war, does well. Every year, at Belfast, at the
anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, festivals take
place at which he gives, vent to his most virulent
invective ; milksops complain of it as a needless
provocation, thrown out lightheartedly. There is no
needless provocation ; what you call provocation is^a

* Doubly a traitor, since Ulsterman and Protestant, he gave his
life for the freedom of Ireland.

J36 IRELAND IN REBELLION

necessary and sacred affirmation, the reminder to the
vanquished that they are vanquished.

Now you can understand Carson's frantic eloquence,
threatening cries, calls to arms, triumphal chants
whose wild accent sometimes reminds one of a scalp
dance. Now you understand the fascination which,
apart from all political bargaining, Carsonism exerts
on the oldest, most traditional, most English England ;
it is the battle of the Boyne resurrected, ever living
and young ; William's English and German battalions
breaking through the Irish vagabonds, the French
Huguenot squadrons driving before them the Papist
and Jacobite rabble, the traitor king in flight ; it is
Aughrim, it is limerick, it is — for in our modern souls
hatred of the heretic survives faith itself — the victory
of the true religion of the chosen nation, of virtue ;
it is the certainty rooted in English souls that the
English people is a great people destined from all
times to empire.

Is not this pride of race the fundamental note in
the poetry of Kipling — the chief reason of his immense
popularity ? If it has been naturally exalted since the
war by the greatness of the peril and the triumph,
do you not now feel how well the Carsonite song
harmonises with passions developed by victory, how
it crowns souls already prepared ? L,et us try to be
just, or at least to understand ; to penetrate the
depths of every conscience, remembering that they
are only human ; and, let us admit, that to ask a great
conquering nation, fresh from a deadly struggle, in-
toxicated by the fight and victory, to ask it to remove
its claws from a prey that it has helped for centuries,
solely in the name of justice, is to require from it a
supernatural effort of self -con quest. If she were to

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 137

do it, it would be the eternal honour of her history ;
but how can one believe that she will do it ?

L,loyd George expressed in other terms the same
doubt when he said, in effect, on the 22nd December,
1919, that, to accept the liberty of Ireland the Bmpire
would have to be beaten to its knees. What does that
mean, if not that the Bmpire must fall before English
consciousness lose faith in its right to Bmpire ? The
failure of force alone can unmake the soul that force
has made.

VI.

Conclusion — The future of Sinn Fein — The rise of
Ireland during the past century makes it impossible
to keep her in servitude — England can only complete
the extirpation of the Irish race, or yield.

Then?

Trust to coercion ? Anticipate that in the long run
the adversary will be exhausted and that one will be
able to return quietly, perhaps under the mask of a
faked Home Rule, to the good old way of the good
old times.

Bven in this hypothesis what would be the future
of Sinn Fein ? As a party, one may suppose that it
would encounter a certain disaffection of the masses.
The men who, having asked of the country a formid-
able effort, lasting several years, would return with
empty hands, having made only one real demonstra-
tion, that of Irish powerlessness, would doubtless see
rise against them the resentment of many ; it is the
usual thing foi the vanquished to blame their chiefs.
On the other hand, however unanimous and violent
be the national sentiment, however fostered by

13S IRELAND IN REBELLION

historical rancour and English clumsiness, it would
be impossible to think of keeping the country in a
state of perpetual ebullition. Lassitude and collapse
would come. Even now in a general fashion, the
business world, and, it is said, quite a number of
country proprietors are hostile to Sinn Fein, not
certainly on questions of principle — to which they
are indifferent — but because the semi-revolutionary
atmosphere which it creates in the country disturbs
and diminishes trade. Among Irishmen, too, there
are a good number

" Who live on good soup and not on fine language/'

and for whom individual prosperity is the chief good.
In short, if Sinn Fein is defeated, it might easily be
gradually abandoned by all the carnal elements in
the country. That is what it has to fear.

But, on the other hand, it may first of all count on
that peculiarly Irish sentiment of instinctive tenderness
for the valiant who fought a hopeless fight. It is this
which old John Mitchel expresses with savage and
corrosive irony : —

" Success confers every right in this enlightened
age ; wherein, for the first time, it has come to be
admitted and proclaimed in set terms, that Success
is Right and Defeat is Wrong. If I profess myself
a disbeliever in that gospel, the enlightened age
will only smile and say ' the defeated always are/
Britain being in possession of the floor, any hostile
comment upon her way of telling our story is an
unmannerly interruption ; nay, is nothing short of
an Irish howl."

It is to this generous love for the unfortunate that

CALCULATION OF PBOBABILITIES 139

Germany, enveloped in the poetry of defeat, owes the
persistent sympathy which she has retained here.
Even defeated — I do not venture to push the paradox
to the point of saying : especially defeated — Sinn Fein
would seem the hapless hero who fought a good fight
for Ireland, and to whom is in honour due faithful
remembrance and faithful love.

On the other hand, economic prosperity, a care for
which might bring about the decline of Sinn Fein, may
also, on the contrary, by its very progress, keep for it
the favour of the country. It is quite usual, I am
told, to see to-day in the country father and son at
variance politically ; the former who has lived during
the time of precarious work and of the evictions,
pleased to have become a proprietor, would gladly
continue to enjoy peacefully what he has won ; the
next generation, careless of a comfort which it has
always known, and all the more ardent because no
longer curbed by poverty, thirsts only for liberty.

The same results follow from education, which,
besides, is so closely connected with material riches.
The richer people are, the more pupils there are in
the schools, and the more students in the University ;
the more educated people are the more keenly do they
feel that they have come of age, the more fiercely shall
they claim liberty and the more shall Sinn Fein retain
favoui. From this point of view, and if the English
mean to keep Ireland under, the setting-up of a
National University (about which, indeed, they so
long hesitated) was an unpardonable blunder. These
are the trump cards of Sinn Fein.

And now, if we see in Sinn Fein something else
and something better than the name of a party, the
more vigorous because restricted, but slightly jealous,

140 IRELAND IN REBELLION

slightly narrow as is every faction, the future is even
clearer. If it be true that Sinn Fein, even more than
it realises, resumes and capitalises the whole history
of enslaved Ireland, if it is only the actual phase of
an eternal protest, how can it die ? The interests
which it thwarts shall sometimes be driven to fight it,
yes ! but it shall always have with it the spiritual
force of the nation, and in no nation has the soul, in
conflict with material interests, kept such power of
flight. Certainly there will be moments of flagging
and of quickening in the will to fight, constitutional
periods and others more violent, moments of enthus-
iasm and of languor. Sinn Fein may lose its very
name and its deluded enemies rejoice in its death ;
under this name or another it shall rise again, and
conquered to-day, conquered to-morrow, it finally
remains, like a nation which keeps the will to live and
persist in its being, imperishable and invincible. In
this sense it is Ireland herself, and Ireland to-day, as
three hundred years ago, refuses to accept the English
conquest. The one thing that would have made her
accept it would have been beneficence and superiority
in the victor. Ireland sees neither.

Then?

Things cannot rest there. They get worse every
day. Hostile wills clash in ever sterner conflict. The
English, with the obstinacy of the race, the more
resistance it meets with the more stubborn it be-
comes, and the more it gives way to fury, and to its
faults. The Irish will no longer yield. They may have
let MacSwiney die, they may deport, shoot, hang, or
subdue the country by dragooning or famine, it will
never be silenced save for a time. If they really desired
to keep it meek and mute, they ought to have left it

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES

in the state to which the Penal I^aws had
its princes gone ; its property confiscated, its religion
proscribed ; uncultured and with no right to seek
culture ; brutalised by want, and having lost even the
desire of escape, finally losing slowly with its language
the very consciousness of its degradation. Such men,
who had arrived at the point where they spoke
English to " gentlemen " and Irish to their cows
" because it was good enough for the cattle," might
have made good slaves. But their Church was restored
to these people, and in the last century they found
leaders in their priests. A beginning has been made
in selling back to them lands confiscated from their
ancestors, and with these lands they have recovered
the dignity which results from easy circumstances
and certainty for the morrow. The school has been
restored to them and, yesterday, the University ;
each year hundreds of young men leave college who
feel themselves the equal of any living man, already
designated as the new chiefs and burning with what
flame they have shown us ; no longer restrained as
were their elders of the clergy, by conservative
prudence and the passion for law and order at all cost
which characterise the Church. Go backwards ? It
is too late.

Then?

Fashion no longer favours those massacres on a
large scale, which relieved such wounds by blood-
letting ; it would even be difficult to repeat the
evictions which followed the Gieat Famine. But what
sword or bailiff can no longer do, may be managed by
indirect but surer methods. One must sometimes
give ear to soldiers ; their candour is refreshing after
the politicians. Questioned by M. J. Marsillac of the

142 IRELAND IN REBELLION

Journal in January, 1920, Lord French answers him
good-humouredly : —

" The history of Ireland has never changed ;
trouble, repression, a period of apparent calm ;
when the circle is finished it begins again. The
present disorders ? That comes of having 100,000
surplus young men. For five years, because of the
row, emigration has been suspended : hence all
the trouble."

There you are. These chaps are kicking up a row ;
they are energetic ; they might become dangerous ; if
they were to rid the country of their presence, it would
be pure gain for the "mother" country. And doubtless,
by encouraging 01 creating economic conditions which
leave them workless, for example, by handicapping
industry, as has been so often done in the past, one
might obtain without fail, and without scandal, the
desired result. Then one might see returning those
happy times when Ireland, peopled principally by
children and old men, troubled not England's sleep,
and meantime, through alternating outburst and
languor, one would await long enough this death so
slow in coming.

This is not the first time that the Saxons would
have cleared out a troublesome population ; not a
native remains in Tasmania ; hardly any in North
America, and the Maoris of New Zealand are going
fast. About 1801 there were 5,400,000 Irish, less than
ii million English, Scotch and Welsh ; in 1846, 8
million and a-half on one side, 16 on the other ; the
proportion favoured the Irish. In 1905, after the
famine and evictions, there are only 4,400,000, and
the inhabitants of Great Britain number nearly 40

CALCULATION OF PROBABILITIES 143

million. Thus, while the latter were quadrupling
their numbers, the former, in spite of fecund marriages,
were losing a million inhabitants ; and in the last
seventy years they were diminishing by half. Another
such century and the Gael will have had his day.

This plan, yesterday of destroying, to-day of dis-
pl an ting Celtic Ireland, proclaims itself in all past
English policy ; it finds unreserved expression in the
mouths of statesmen. At the time of the discussions
on the first Home Rule Bill, the then Marquis of
Salisbury, later on Prime Minister, said in St. James'
Hall :—

" There are races like the Hindoos and Hottentots
(sic) who are not fit to govein themselves. As for
me, I would prefer to spend Treasury money in
transplanting a million Irishmen than in buying
back for them the lands from the landlords."

About the same time Stuart Mill writes :—

' When the inhabitants of a country leave it en
masse because their Government no longer leaves
them a place to live, that Government is judged
and condemned."

And the cry of deliverance of the Times, when famines
were sweeping the country shall never be forgotten : —

" Soon the Celt will be as rare on the banks of
the I/ifley as th^ Redskin on the banks of the
Manhattan."

Ireland emptied of the Irish, the diaspora of the
Gaels as formerly of the Jews, dispersing their race
to the four winds of Heaven ; an ancient and original
culture touching or venerable, delicate or beautiful
things, great memories killed ; it is not a very elegant

144 IRELAND IN REBELLION

conclusion to seven centuries of desperate struggle
sustained by a people against death ; but it is a possible
one. And it can be urged in its favour that half the
work is already done.

There is a solitary disadvantage, it is that the affair
requires a hundred years. And during this hundred
years England cannot, without having Ireland at her
throat, suffer a disaster or even seem to be in danger ;
is she quite safe ?

And if not, what is to be done ? Certainly, Ireland
alone will never be strong enough to free herself from
the English, but she is too big not to be an embarrass-
ment to them, sometimes a danger, always a source
of shame. The only method that remains to them of
disarming this inexpiable hatred, and of ridding
themselves of a nuisance, would be to offer, and very
quickly a sincere and radical settlement, on a footing
of equality between the two races. It would be to their
interest ; does it seem to you that they are thinking
of it?

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Briollay, Sylvain

Ireland in rebellion