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THE IRISH REVOLUTION
AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT

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THE IRISH REVOLUTION

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT

BY WILLIAM O'BRIEN

" Rosebery's ('predominant partner') speech about convincing
England in connection with Home Rule was most unfortnate
and easily answered by Irishmen who might say " : (and
here he became earnest and very serious) "'How are we
to convince you ? Is it as we did by the Volunteers, by
the Tithe War, when Wellington said it was yielding to
Civil War, or by the Clerkenwell Explosion, which are the
only means that ever have convinced England ? ' " —
GLADSTONE TO SIR ALGERNON WEST.

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LIMITED
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.

First published in 1923.

CONTENTS

Chapter Page

INTRODUCTION I

I. HOW THE ALL -FOR -IRELAND LEAGUE BECAME

A NECESSITY (1910) 55

II. " A DESPERATE VENTURE " (19! l) 66

III. A PSYCHIC ANALYSIS 77

IV. THE HOME RULE LIBERAL DESTROYERS OF

HOME RULE

V. HOW " ULSTER " BECAME THE DIFFICULTY H2

VI. THE TWO POLICIES IN ACTION 125

VII. THE HOME RULE BILL OF 1912 142

VIII. MISMANAGEMENT AND DECEIT (1912) 156

IX. NEITHER FORESIGHT NOR BACKBONE (lQI2-

X. THE FIRST SHADOW OF PARTITION 182

xi. LORD LOREBURN'S INTERVENTION 195

XII. THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WORLD WAR 20Q

XIII. THE LAST STRAW FOR YOUNG IRELAND 214

XIV. THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR 228
s»XV. THE EASTER WEEK REBELLION (1916) 240

XVI. " AN IRISH PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT " 256

XVII. THE FINAL SURRENDER OF THE SIX COUNTIES 28 1

V

vi CONTENTS

Chapter Page

XVIII. HOW THE PLOT MISCARRIED 292

XIX. A TALK WITH MR. BONAR LAW (1917) 309

XX. MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S " IRISH CONVENTION "

(1917) 316

XXI. TO TAKE PART OR NOT TO ? 332

XXII. THE DEATH OF MR. REDMOND 345

XXIII. A TRUE " NATIONAL CABINET ' 357

XXIV. WAS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO RECONSTRUCT THE

PARLIAMENTARY MOVEMENT ? 373

XXV. THE GENERAL ELECTION AND THE GENERAL

JUDGMENT (1918) 385

XXVI. PEACEFUL SELF-DETERMINATION 394

XXVII. A PEACE OFFER THAT WAS SPURNED 408

XXVIII. THE BLACK AND TANS 421

XXIX. THE TRUCE OF IITH JULY, 1921 429

XXX. AND AFTER ? 446

APPENDIX 459

THE IRISH REVOLUTION AND
HOW IT CAME ABOUT

INTRODUCTION

WHEN the United Irish League re-established the
Political Unity broken up for ten years by the Parnell
Split of 1890, the " miracle ' (see page 18) was
followed up by a movement for a wider National
Unity, the effects of which are only now beginning
to be understood. Its aim was the daring one of
reconciling the two antagonistic hosts of the Land
War, and combining them for the crowning achieve-
ment of a National Settlement by consent.

The inspiring principle of the new movement wras
the healing of animosity between Irishmen of all the
warring classes and religious persuasions, and, upon
that basis, an international peace with England. Its
fundamental axioms were (a) that a solution of the
Irish Difficulty must first be sought among Irishmen
in Ireland, and (b) that its legislative enactment must
be the work, not of one particular English Party,
Liberal or Unionist, but of all British and Irish Parties
in common. These are the principles which — received
at the time with mild contempt by English politicians
as an Eirenicon, and persecuted by certain powerful
Irish ones as though they covered some monstrous
treason against the Irish Nation — have by this time
found all but universal acceptance in both countries
and among all Parties in the Act of 1903 for the aboli-
tion of Landlordism and (although in a mutilated
shape) in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Not,
however, before armed Revolution had to be called

2 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

in to repair, so far as was possible, the tragic mistakes
of Irish and British politicians during nearly twenty
ignoble years.

The era of confessions and of contrition has already
set in from the British side. One passage from a
confidential letter of Mr. Lloyd George to the writer
(dated i4th July, 1919), which Mr. Lloyd George has
given me permission to publish (see page 416) reveals
at a flash the secret of the failure in the intermediate
years and explains the necessity for the present volume :
* I think you were fundamentally right when you
sought an agreement amongst all sections, creeds and
classes of Irishmen. I am afraid settlement is im-
possible until that has been achieved."

Here is the mature conclusion of the British Prime
Minister that the Policy of Conciliation plus Business
of the All-for-Ireland League was * fundamentally
right " from the start, and that its defeat was the defeat
of everything that mattered for the two countries.
The confession is all the more interesting because it
comes from the man who was long the most potent
British instrument in deriding and thwarting the
policy to which he now has the courage to do justice.
And it will be found that even at that late date he had
only half learned the lesson taught by the Irish
Revolution.

Another testimony of transcendent interest is that
of one who, of all the Liberal Cabinet who might have
carried Home Rule and did not, had least of the party
politician and most of the far-ranging statesman in his
composition — Viscount Grey of Fallodon (the Sir
Edward Grey of the Home Rule debates). Here is
the fruit of his musings over the Liberal mishandling
of Home Rule (House of Lords, 24th November,
1920) :

" The question I put to myself is this : In the
years of failure where have we gone wrong ? What
has been the root-cause of our failure ? I think

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 3

the mistake we made in the beginning was that we did
not sufficiently realize the absolute necessity of taking
into consideration the feeling of Ulster."

Truly, a Daniel come to judgment ! But that
was only half the mistake — the other and the still
graver half being that they " did not sufficiently
realize " the feeling of Ireland for Ulster as bone of
her bone, and the breath of life of her unity as a Nation.
The result was that having first refused to woo Ulster
by " compulsory attraction " they proceeded to their
opposite extremity of folly by cutting her off from
Ireland with the slash of a clumsy surgeon's knife.

The Hibernian politicians, who were the prime
movers of the mischief which undid the country and
the Liberals and themselves, have not yet imitated
the good sense of their British patrons by (as the
French would say) entering upon the way of avowals
on their own part. They have, however, ceased to
count. It is only the evil they have done that lives
after them. But how completely all the leaders who
succeeded them as the authorised spokesmen of the
Irish race since the downfall of the Parliamentarians,
share and have made their own of the aspirations
which used to be the special reproach of the All-for-
Ireland League, two short quotations will sufficiently
demonstrate. Wrote Mr. Arthur Griffith, the founder
of Sinn Fein and the first President of the Irish Free
State :

" The exclusion of Ulster or any part of Ireland
would mean for us the nullification of our hopes and
aspirations for the future Irish Nation. It would
mean the erection of sharp, permanent, eternal
dividing-lines between Catholics and Protestants,
whereas our ideal has been an Irish nation in the
future made up of a blend of all races, of all classes
and of all creeds."

Mr. De Valera himself, the first President of the
Irish Republic, said to me so late as August I2th,
1922 (see page 429) :

4 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

" I have been all along in favour of peace with
England, and at one time could have carried it all
right, if Lloyd George had placed me in a position
to offer the young men a measure of National Inde-
pendence for the whole country on reasonable terms
of external association. In the London negotiations
I should have preferred to make our first stand upon
the Integrity of Ireland, and the inclusion of the Six
Counties. All the world would have understood our
stand against Partition and would have been with us,
and in England's then fix Craig could have been
certainly brought to consent. ... I was always ready
to go as far as you went yourself to bring in Ulster by
friendly means. "

To clinch the matter, President Cosgrave and
the Chamber of Deputies of the Irish Free State,
while these sheets are passing through the Press,
have invited the whole four of the representatives of
the Land-owners at the Land Conference of 1902-3
— the Earl of Dunraven, the Earl of Mayo, Col.
(now Sir) W. Hutcheson Poe, and Col. (now Sir)
Nugent Everard — to accept seats in the new Senate,
and have acclaimed Mr. T. M. Healy as their first
Governor General, thus singling out for honour in
the eyes of posterity the Conciliationists who for the
previous fifteen years were covered with opprobrium
as " swindling landlords " or traitors to Home Rule.

How came it to pass that the policy which all the
weightiest of the elder statesmen of Britain and the
two most considerable personages of the Irish Revolu-
tion are thus united in pronouncing to have been
elementary wisdom, had to struggle for a bare hearing
throughout a fifteen-years' losing battle ? By what
arts were a people of keen political intelligence like
the Irish hypnotised into silence while they were
being led into an opposite policy which it is now hard
to distinguish from insanity and which was to bring
them nothing but six years of unspeakable anguish and

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 5

a prodigal waste of their best blood and treasure ?
How did it happen that those who, with an all but
unanimous mandate from their country and from the
Parliamentary Party, had succeeded in restoring four-
fifths of the soil of Ireland to the people, and were
proceeding to incorporate a million of Irish Protestants
with our nation by their free consent, were actually
arraigned as though these were the crimes of traitors ?
Above all, how came it that those who, themselves
confessing they were rebelling against the policy which
received from the country " an absolutely overwhelming
vote of confidence " (see page 17) rose up to frustrate
these great enterprises and to alarm and alienate that
powerful minority of our countrymen by the establish-
ment of a pseudo-Catholic Hibernian ascendancy
leading to no alternative except the Partition of
Ireland, to which they became themselves consenting
parties — how came it that the mutineers were for a
long course of years glorified as the anointed apostles
of " Majority Rule ' and the heroes of National
Unity ? These are amongst the enigmas to which the
present volume is designed to supply the answers.
Not the least strange part of the story is that this
is the first time when the truth will have a dog's chance
of coming to the knowledge of the masses of the nation
it most vitally concerns. Such is the completeness
with which the facts have hitherto been travestied
beyond all verisimilitude, it may be safely affirmed
that there are comparatively few in Ireland and scarcely
a handful in Britain, who can yet see in their true
perspective the long train of events which brought a
degenerate Parliamentarianism to its doom, and
necessitated and justified the Irish Revolution of
1916-21. The time has come when the attempt can
be made at all events without unworthy heat, to
imitate the triennial custom of the ancient Parliament
of Tara and " to purge our contemporary annals of
all false and spurious relations." He that is but flesh

THE IRISH REVOLUTION

cannot always hope to preserve a spirit of heavenly
detachment while he brings to light the system of
suppression and persecution from which his friends
and himself suffered during a considerable space of
their lives, without any hope of redress or even of an
honest hearing. But the protagonists on all sides
have by this time passed from the arena of Irish public
life. For the personal part of the injury, events have
already made generous atonement to ourselves. No
tongue, however unclean — no pen, however obscure —
is likely henceforth to repeat the accusations which, to
the ruin of the country and of our accusers, bewildered
the older generation now passing to its account.
Nobody of sense will repine if sic vos non vobis melli-
ficatis, apes is the decree of Fate for all the pioneers ;
what matters is that the honev should be hived if it

tt

were only to give to the life of this poor world some
taste of sweetness. The young Harmodiuses of the
Revolution are, doubtless, still easier in their minds
as to their own part of the vilification and of the
vindication. But these, after all, are matters of stern
historic truth. What remains is that the coming
men with whom must lie the making or marring of the
nation their valour has called into being should not
grow up in piteous ignorance of the deceit which, for
their predecessors, placed the events of the early
twentieth century in a light so grotesquely the reverse
of the truth that the falsification might well pass for
some Satanic practical joke at the expense of a whole
people. The primary appeal of this book is to the
increasing company of scholars, thinkers, and students
for whom the truthfulness of her History is the most
sacred charge of a nation. They have only — it is
submitted with some confidence — to scrutinise the
facts and documents herein presented, to be in a
position to furnish the youth wrho will be the architects
of our future with the means of demolishing for them-
selves the edifice of topsy-turvy falsehood which has

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 7

hitherto been accepted as our contemporary history,
but which will be found to crumble at the first touch
of honest investigation. Assuredly it shall be the
fault of the writer, if the narrative do not prove to be
one of fascinating human interest, as well as paying
a long overdue debt of truth and justice to the History
of our times.

The suggestion of an Inter-Party Home Rule
Settlement was first broached by Gladstone after the
General Election of 1886 had placed Lord Salisbury
in power. For their own sake, as well as Ireland's,
wo's the day the Liberal Party were not wise enough
to follow the counsel of their greatest leader during
their own long spell of power from 1906 to 1914 !
It has been the hard fate of the Liberal Party that they
who were generally the first to sow the seeds of great
Irish measures were rarely able themselves to gather
the harvest. It was the Liberal Party who dises-
tablished the Irish Church in 1868 and essayed the
first considerable reform of the Irish Land Laws in
1 88 1, but it was only the Tory Party who could have
ended the Agrarian War by abolishing Feudal Land-
lordism root-and-branch, and it was only a combination
of the two Parties which could have beguiled England
into submitting to the Irish Free State Treaty of 1921.
For Irish Nationalists, at all events, the lesson of
wisdom in our dealings with English Parties ought to '
have been burned sufficiently deep into our hearts
and it was this : Take all you can get from the com-
petition of Tories and Liberals, but enslave yourselves
neither to the one English Party nor to the other, and,
above all aim at the combination of them both — whether
inspired by lofty British statesmanship or by more
earthy motives — if you want to ensure legislative
sanction to a scheme of National Independence —
cautious and gradual, it may be, but unfettered in
its force of expansion and broad-based upon a good
understanding between the Nationalist majority and
the Unionist minority at home in Ireland.
B

8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

The new movement began with an achievement
not less splendid, and at the time immeasurably more
surprising than the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921,
which, indeed, its chief Sinn F£in signatory, as will
be seen, freely confessed, the work of his predecessors
alone could have made possible. In one respect,
more splendid still, for it was the work of a United,
not of a Partitioned Ireland. The declaration of the
Tory Chief Secretary (Mr. George Wyndham) but
for which the Land Conference of 1902-3 could never
have been assembled pronounced the bankruptcy of
English Rule twenty years before it was formally
acknowledged by the Imperial Parliament. Here
were Wyndham 's momentous words : " No Govern-
ment can settle the Irish land question. It must be
settled by the parties interested. The extent of useful
action on the part of any Government is limited to
providing facilities, in so far as that may be possible,
for giving effect to any settlement arrived at by the
parties."

It was the germ of National Self-Determination
thirteen years before President Wilson's Fourteen
Points. The admission and the undertaking pointed
the way by which Landlordism was bloodlessly ex-
tinguished, and by which, had the fates been kind,
English rule might have been extinguished no less
bloodlessly. Four representatives commissioned by
the Irish Parliamentary Party (Mr. John E. Redmond,
Mr. T. C. Harrington, Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mrg
T. W. Russell and myself) and four representatives of
the Irish Unionists elected ad hoc (the Earl of Dun-
raven, the Earl of Mayo, Col. afterwards Sir William
Hutcheson Poe, and Col. afterwards Sir Everard
Nugent, His Majesty's Lieutenant for Meath), met in
the Dublin Mansion House, and in the course of five
sittings effected a settlement of the Irish Land War
which had raged without intermission for more than
a century, and, notwithstanding more than forty

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 9

Abortive Acts of the British Parliament to assuage it,
was raging more furiously than ever when the Land
Conference of 1902-3 assembled for its apparently
desperate task.

Incredible as the happy outcome was for the
cynics, the conditions of the moment were extra-
ordinarily propitious. The Tories were in power and
enjoyed the more or less rueful co-operation of the
Liberals in Irish affairs. George Wyndham, the
Chief Secretary, inherited the vision and the romance
of his great-grandfather Lord Edward Fitzgerald, to
whom he bore a singular resemblance, in captivating
address as well as in physical beauty. In deference
to the diseased suspiciousness which is apt to poison
all Irish controversies, I never personally exchanged
a word (or except on one occasion, even a letter) with
the man with the greatest work of whose life circum-
stances gave me a closer association than, perhaps,
fell to the fate of any other Irishman ; l but if all who
knew him are not in a conspiracy of untruth, his
inmost sympathies would have impelled him to go as
far in the direction of the most glowing aspirations of
Ireland as Irishmen would let him ; and he had a
Lord Lieutenant (the Earl of Dudley) and an Under
Secretary (Sir Antony Mac Donnell) no less sympa-
thetic, if less passionate, than himself. When King
Edward the Peacemaker, on the day when the House
of Commons was passing the final stage of Wyndham's
Bill for the expropriation of Landlordism, was making

1 Wyndham's own Irish instinct led him to be equally cautious.
In the only letter that ever passed between us he wrote (April 14,
1908) :

" I have felt that the conditions of Irish political controversy
precluded me from communicating with you. I have regretted
this. For I have often wished to express to you personally, and
to express in public, my sense of the loyal — I would say chivalrous
— manner in which you stuck to the sp;rit, as well as the letter,
of the agreement between classes and parties on the Land Question
which alone made the Act of 1903 possible."

io THE IRISH REVOLUTION

his triumphal progress through a Dublin delirious
with joy (of how many ages ago we seem to be writing !)
he as justly as tactfully picked out the handsome young
Chief Secretary to sit with him and the queen in his
carriage as the real hero of achievements in Ireland
which were bound to go a good deal further.

If ever there was an United Ireland it was that
which at one stroke and for ever put an end to the
Land War — an infinitely deeper dividing-line between
Irishmen than Home Rule, because it was a question
of their very existence for tenants and landlords alike —
and put an end to it by the co-operation of the warring
classes themselves, and upon terms which have stood
the test of satisfying both sides equally well. The
Protestant and Presbyterian farmers who form the
bulk of the Unionist inhabitants of Ulster — at all
times as determined foes of Landlordism as the
Catholics of the South — found themselves the owners
in fee of their own lands and homesteads, and that
through the direct agency of those whom they had
been brought up to regard as the most extreme of the
Nationalist leaders. The Unionist landlords them-
selves— again, thanks to that co-operation of the
fiercest of their old Nationalist antagonists " which
alone made the Act of 1903 possible " — became the
happy possessors of an income as safe as the Bank of
England, in lieu of one that had to be every year
fought for by hateful and costly eviction campaigns,
when it was not being hacked to pieces by Judicial
Rent Commissioners or legislators at Westminster.
The most influential of the Irish nobles and country
gentlemen who, later on, did not stop short of pro-
claiming their adhesion to the National Independence
of Sinn Fein were, even already, eager to follow Lord
Dunraven in continuing the work of the Land Con-
ference by a Home Rule Settlement conceived in the
same spirit which had already given them the status
of honoured citizenship in the pleasantest country

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT n

in the world. Mr. Redmond and myself had actually
to interfere, not to stimulate but to moderate their
pace, lest it should be charged that their "surrender '
to Home Rule was their price for the handsome terms
the Land Conference settlement was to yield to them.
The apprehensions and the religious rancour
which, five or six years afterwards, were to constitute
the Ulster Difficulty the most formidable of all
stumbling-blocks to the unity and freedom of Ireland,
had at that time no existence outside the most arri6r6
quarters of Belfast and the surrounding towns. Even
there a new spirit was arising. Lord Dunraven and
Captain Shawe-Taylor received a sympathetic welcome
in the city where " six special trainsful of troops '
could not in later days protect Mr. Winston Churchill
from being obliged to fly for his life. They were heard
without an interruption in the Ulster Hall, the future
headquarters of the Provisional Government of the
Covenanters. The Loyal Orange Institution itself
was undergoing an internal reform, not to say revolu-
tion, which has strangely escaped the notice it deserved.
An Independent Orange Order was established whose
watchword — " Irishmen first of all ! " — was its sufficient
programme. The new Order came to a pitch of power
at which it was able to organise vast rival processions
of its own on " the Belfast Anniversaries." One of
its leaders was Mr. Tom Sloane, who, as a Democrat,
had won a seat in Parliament for Belfast, without the
leave of the local Tory panjandrums, and com-
manded an enormous influence with the Protestant
populace of that city as a religious zealot by his Sunday
revivalist preachments from " the Custom-house
steps/' That I was paving the way for some traitorous
" scratch alliance with Tom Sloane " (with whom, as it
happened, I had never had the good fortune to ex-
change a word) came to be positively one of the most
heinous of the charges thundered out against me by
Mr. Dillon in his rabble-rousing days. The new

12 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Order had produced a young leader of vastly greater
capacity in Mr. Lindsay Crawford, who had inherited
the finest of the National and tolerant traditions of the
United Irishmen of the older day when Belfast was
a fiery furnace of Irish revolutionary thought.
Mournful to relate, it was the fate of Mr. Lindsay
Crawford, as it was Wyndham's, to be compelled to
quit the country, less by the force of Orange fanati-
cism than of Hibernian intrigue. He had to take
refuge in Canada, where he carved out for himself a
position of considerable distinction, and true to the
last to the Independent Orange watchword, " Irish-
men first of all ! ' is, at this writing, President of
the Irish Self-Determination League of that great
Dominion.

Lastly, be it remarked, Sir E. Carson — the only
leader with the genius and daring that could have
made Orangeism a power of the first political magni-
tude— had probably up to that time never set his foot
within the Ulster border. He was a rather effac6
English Solicitor-General, who, it is curiously for-
gotten, prophesied ruin and bankruptcy as a result of
Wyndham's Purchase Act in as sepulchral terms as
Mr. Dillon himself, and assuredly had then as little
thought of becoming the ringleader of an Ulster
Rebellion as of snatching the King's Crown off his
Majesty's head and assuming it himself.

On the other hand, the Parliamentary Party and
the Nationalist masses were as nearly unanimous as
it is given to thinking men to be. Mr. Devlin had
not yet emerged from the obscurity of his Debating
Society on the Falls Road in Belfast and was little
known outside save for a bitter local quarrel with his
Bishop. The Secret Society of the Hibernian " Board
of Erin " of which he became in after years the master
and which in turn he caused to overmaster and absorb
the public organisation of the United Irish League,
had not yet gained a footing save in one or two corners

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 13

of the North, and was too insignificant to make any
appeal to his ambitions. Singularly enough, the
Hibernians who gradually assumed the function of
accredited apostles of Catholicity and admitted no
catechumen to the Order who did not make profession
of the Catholic faith and pledge himself to frequent
the Catholic sacraments, were themselves at the time
we are speaking of under the ban of ecclesiastical
censures and threats of excommunication. We were
still far from the days when the Board of Erin erected
far and wide a self-styled Catholic ascendancj
which did more than all other causes to work up
Protestant Ulster into an irreconcileable aversion to
Home Rule. Nor did " the extreme men " present
the slightest obstacle. It was not until two years later
that Arthur Griffith was able to form the group of
earnest young believers in his teachings into an almost
unnoticed Sinn Fein organisation. They were not
revolutionists but evolutionists. They were to the
full as " constitutional " in their aims as the Parlia-
mentary Party, and would never have developed to
anything more dangerous than a Platonic aspiration
for super-Parliamentary methods had not " the Party "
fallen from one depth to a deeper of inefficiency and
self-seeking. The Republicans had no vocal or
organised existence at all. The youth of the country
still found satisfaction for their most ardent aspirations
in the triumphs of a Parnell movement conducted in
the Parnell spirit and the most thrilling of those
triumphs had only just been gained. They would
have abhorred, if they could have conceived, the
doctrines of religious disability which subsequently
proposed to exclude the co-religionists of Parnell from
equal participation in the tasks of Irish patriotism.

The trouble came, not from the bottom, but from
the top. The more conscientiously the records of
the time are searched, the clearer, I believe, must
be the conclusion that, were it not for the revolt of

I4 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

three or four leading Irish politicians against the
" absolutely overwhelming ' determination of the
country (the words are Mr. Dillon's own), a Home
Rule Settlement by consent must have been devised
and passed into law with little more difficulty than the
Land Conference Settlement, and with effects upon
the stability and strength of our nation, and upon the
ordered expansion of her liberties, for which, it is to
be feared, children yet unborn will sigh in vain.

Here were all the materials (including the endorse-
ment of 82 out of the 83 members who then composed
the Irish Parliamentary Party) for an amalgamation
of all the racial and denominational elements of the
Irish Nation such as must have irresistibly effected
its purpose without a trace of the hideous sectarian
passions and political demoralization which were to
disgrace the succeeding years — without the shedding
of the smallest rivulet of the blood with which the
country was to be drenched during the prolonged
revolutionary war which was required in order to
work out a remedy — must have effected a settlement,
too, upon terms of moderation which can scarcely
be recalled without a remorseful pang by the Prime
Minister who was to welcome the chiefs of the Irish
Republican Army to Downing Street upon practically
their own terms.

How these propitious omens were cast to the winds
and Parliamentary methods finally abandoned for the
ruder ones of Revolution, it shall be the business of
these pages to endeavour to make clear. In order to
make all that is to follow comprehensible, let us first
dispel the darkness in which one of the most funda-
mental realities of the case has hitherto been artfully
enwrapped. The favourite device for deadening
public interest in what was going on was the hardi-
hood with which it was pretended there was no real
difference in public policy between those who ad-
vocated the Policy of Conference and Conciliation and

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 15

its remorseless antagonists — nothing better worth
serious public attention than the personal rivalries of
politicians. Inasmuch as the bulk of the public was
deprived of all means of listening to or reading our
answer, the deceit was never fully found out until the
final thunder crash, which did indeed awaken the
Irish people from their infatuation sharply enough,
but only to discover that the worst had already
happened. It will be convenient to begin by giving
the reader a birdseye view of those differences from
which it may be judged how deeply the division cut
into the most vital interests of the nation — how true
it was that the chasm between the two policies was so
profound and fateful as to make all the difference
between a bloodless triumph for an United Ireland
and the degradation and annihilation of the Parlia-
mentary movement and the Partition of the country.
And perhaps the bitterest drop of the water of gall
which the nation was given to drink was that the
Revolution was not the work of the Revolutionists but
of those who were careful to describe themselves as
" Constitutionalists. "

I.

The root-difference was this : That, once the
Abolition of Landlordism brought the main cause of
class antagonism to an end, we saw the surest hope of
the country's freedom in a combination of the most
enlightened men of all its parties, creeds and schools

of thought our assailants, in the undivided

authority and supremacy of the Irish Parliamentary
Party and in that alone ; we, in inviting and cherishing

the united aid of all British Parties they, in making

the Irish Cause the appanage and monopoly of one
particular British Party, the Liberal Party.

n. 9 ;../.-••:. ' .;.' ;• '"

We looked for the extension of the Land Con-
erence Agreement to a Home Rule Agreement as its

1 6 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

natural sequel they persuaded themselves that the

Land Conference Agreement, by reason of its very
success, must lead to the destruction of the National
Movement by divorcing a race of selfish peasant-
proprietors from politics, and in that belief applied
themselves to obstruct and frustrate the Agrarian
Settlement itself, as a National misfortune, and to
denounce as treason any extension of the Land Con-
ference accord.1

III.

We held with Parnell to independence of all British
Parties as a first principle, while always ready to
reciprocate good will on the part of either or both of

them our critics, in a fatal hour, accepted salaries

and an enormous mass of patronage from the Liberal
Government of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George,
thus enfeoffing themselves to that special band of
British politicians, and committing themselves to
follow their fortunes, even to the extent of joining
them in the Partition of their country.

IV.

The delusion was successfully propagated in
Ireland and in England that Mr. Dillon represented
the principles of " Unity " and " Majority Rule," of
which those of us who stood fast by the Land Con-
ference Policy of Conciliation plus Business were the
violators. The truth is directly the reverse. No-
body who investigates the facts can by any possibility

1 The three distinguished Irishmen (only one of them a member
of the Irish Party) \vho " launched a determined campaign "
against the Policy of Conciliation, were not members of the Land
Conference, owing to a mischance for which no member of the
Conference was in the remotest degree responsible. It is
impossible to imagine that, had they shared in its councils, they
should ever have fallen victims to their infatuated misjudgment
of its real objects and possibilities.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 17

dispute that it was the self-constituted defenders of
" Unity " and " Majority Rule " who themselves
defied these principles and destroyed them. The
Land Conference Policy was ratified by the entire
body of the Irish Parliamentary Party, with the solitary
exception of Mr. Dillon, and was adopted as the
authorised National Policy " with substantial unani-
mity ' (as the Freeman itself confessed) by the
sovereign authority of the National Convention (from
which Mr. Dillon of set design absented himself).
In his first overt proposal for the repudiation of that
Policy he could not find a seconder at the meeting of
the Party. The only two men of consequence who
joined in his " determined campaign " at the outset
were Mr. Davitt, whose attitude as a fanatical Land
Nationalizer every body made allowance for, and Mr.
Sexton who had seven years previously withdrawn
from the Party and from public life in a mood of
disappointment and despair, and had only obtained
his appointment as Business Director of the Freeman's
Journal on an express public pledge that he would not
interfere with the faithful support of the policy of the
Irish Party in its pages. These gentlemen will not
think of contesting that during more than six months,
they carried on with the tremendous assistance of the
Party's own official organ a bitter daily campaign with
the avowed object of wrecking the Land Conference
Settlement on grounds which are now universally
acknowledged to have been wrong-headed and even
childish — in open defiance of every representative
authority in the Party and in the country, and in
flagrant violation of those principles of " Unity " and
* Majority Rule " in virtue of which they subsequently
had the effrontery to claim the allegiance of the
country. No sharper condemnation of Mr. Dillon's
revolt could well be penned than his own admission
in the last letter which to my keen regret was ever to
pass between us : (nth February, 1903) : " Redmond

1 8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Harrington and you are at all events in a position to say
that you have received from the country an absolutely
overwhelming vote of confidence so far as your Con-
ference proceedings go."

V.

After the war upon those who had " received from
the country an absolutely overwhelming vote of
confidence " had gone on tfiroughout the summer and
autumn of 1903, while our plans were being laid for
an experimental test of the new Purchase Act, I took
a step about which doubtless controversy will long
rage whether it was a weak surrender of an unassail-
able position, or a patriotic self-effacement as the
only means of making a renewal of the horrors of
the Parnell Split impossible. It was in any case
an act of self-renunciation such as was never made
before, and assuredly will never be made again by
any Irish leader who studies how he who made it
was rewarded. In November, 1903, I resigned my
seat in Parliament and on the Directory of the
United Irish League, which I had founded to put
and end to the disunion caused by the Parnell Split
and which for more than two years I had to carry
on my own all but unassisted shoulders,1 and in order

1 This is the subject referred to in a letter dated December 29,
1920, from one whose judgment ought to carry more weight with
Mr. Dillon than that of any other living man. Referring to the
author's book, Evening Memories, which he characterises as a
*' wonderful and most fascinating book," the writer adds :

" It is, of course, quite beyond my knowledge and my capacity
to criticise such a book. But one thing, I must say, I can't forgive
in it, and that is the way in which one of the most astounding
achievements of one man in history is merely referred to in a
very few words as ' a miracle.' Saints can afford to make little
of their miracles, but politicians should not — far less, writers of
history. I allude, of course, to the most wonderful rescue of
Ireland from eight years of unspeakable discord. Why, I find
it is not even called a miracle, and the men who did not do it are
referred to, not the man who did do it ! "

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 19

to put an end to the last danger of perpetuating public
controversy, I at the same time suppressed my own
newspaper, The Irish People.

This step naturally created consternation among
a public from whom I had up to the last moment
striven to conceal the intolerable difficulties that were
accumulating upon me, and who only saw (as Mr.
Dillon confessed) that the country was " over-
whelmingly ' ' with me. Long after they had fallen
under the control of Mr. Dillon, members of the
Irish Party told me (what I very well knew) that, up
to the moment of my resignation, the Party, all but
an unimportant group, would have supported Mr.
Redmond and myself in resolutely putting down the
mutiny, if they had only known. They pathetically
reproached me with having left them, like sheep
without a shepherd, to fall a prey to the first comer.
It was never doubtful that, had I chosen to distract the
country with an open exposure of the conspiracy that
was in progress, and met with and fought it outright,
I could have spoken for ninetenths of the Nationalists
of Ireland and of the Parliamentary Party (including
their leader) in the conflict that must have followed.
But, conflict there must have been, a fierce and un-
forgetable one, with its conquerors and conquered,
and that was the whole question for one filled with
abhorrence of the dissensions of the Parnell Split,
the wounds from which were only just half-healing.

Those who, without a more intimate knowledge
of what was going on, condemned my retirement as
the principal mistake of my life (as, if it were only the
tactics of a politician with an eye on his own future,
it most obviously would be) forgot that the minority,
numerically small though it was, included three dis-
tinguished Irishmen, enjoying a well-deserved popu-
larity as patriots and a reputation for wisdom in the
matter of Finance which events proved was not so
well deserved. Reduced to silence, as they must

20 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

undoubtedly have been, it could only have been by a
public exposure which would not quite get rid of an
uneasy suspicion that they had suffered merely for an
uncompromising hatred of Landlordism which was
the most pardonable of crimes in Irish eyes, and the
advantage sure to be taken of our intestine differences
by unscrupulous landlords would dangerously com-
promise our plans for an equitable test of the Act, if
not occasion its breakdown altogether. There was a
fourth Irishman of more eminence still, under whose
countenance their campaign against the Act would
have been at that moment consecrated. The Arch-
bishop of Dublin, Dr. Walsh — next to the famous
Archbishop of Cashel Dr. Croke, the most potent
patriot Churchman of his generation — had unhappily
conceived the conviction that the Finances of the Act
would prove unworkable, owing to his doubt that the
Treasury could ever be got to consent to the Imperial
Bonus on which the whole Land Conference scheme
hinged. As soon as His Grace found that his
apprehensions were unfounded and that the Imperial
Bonus was forthcoming, he retired altogether from
the controversy (as did also Michael Davitt long befors
his death) and in after years His Grace was one of the
decisive factors in the overthrow of the degenerate
Irish Party.1 Dr. Walsh's initial doubts however

1 It was never my privilege to meet Archbishop Walsh again,
but shortly after his death I received a letter (dated April 26, 1921)
from his Private Secretary (Rev. Fr. Patrick J. Walsh) which is
highly relevant to the point we are discussing as a proof that
His Grace's misunderstanding of the Act of 1903 had long been
dismissed from his mind. It is quoted also to gratify a human
feeling which, in the circumstances, may not be altogether
unpardonable as evidence that he was never a party to the virulent
misrepresentations subsequently heaped upon my name, and
looked back with pleasure unalloyed upon " the memories of
happier days " recorded in my book :

" There is a slight matter in connection with the late
Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Walsh, about which I think I ought
to write to you. It concerns your latest volume, Evening

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 21

were at the moment a grievous addition to the
difficulties of repressing the growing mutiny in our
camp. The illness of Mr. Redmond's son and his
own indolent habits of business, as well as the internal
malady which was already undermining Lord Mayor
Harrington's iron constitution, deprived me largely
of their assistance in working out the plan of test cases
resolved upon by the National Directory of the League.
We were furthermore handicapped by the danger of
explaining in public to the country our own con-
fidential machinery for testing the Act, for fear of
giving the insatiable section of the landlords a weapon
against the tenants, while Mr. Dillon was free to
incite the Convention in his own constituency to open
repudiation of the plans of the Directory and Mr.
Sexton was daily demonstrating in the Freeman —
the recognised official organ, be it remembered, of the
Party — that the Act demanded ruinous prices and
that the tenants had only to boycott it altogether to
obtain the land at 13^ years' purchase. The Freeman
was meanwhile debauching public opinion by all the
subtle arts of exaggeration or suppression within the
power of a daily newspaper, displaying under scare
headings the carefully organised resolutions which

Memories. This book was the last which His Grace read through
before leaving here (Archbishop's House) for the Nursing Home
in which he died a couple of weeks ago.

" For years it was the Archbishop's custom, when leaving his
study at night to retire to his bedroom, to bring with him some
book of interest which he would read before going to sleep.
The evening that Evening Memories arrived, he brought the volume
to his bedroom, and indeed to bed with him, and he found it so
deeply interesting that he was unable to lay it down till the small
hours of the morning. It brought back to him, very vividly,
memories of happier days. The next night he took up the book
again, determined that he would give up reading at a seasonable
hour and go to sleep. But again, he was so excited and interested
by the thrilling pages, that sleep was unduly curtailed.

'* Accordingly, he had the volume brought down from his
bedroom to the study, where he finished the reading of it."

22 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

were hawked about to the local representative Boards,
assailing the National Policy under the plausible
shelter of votes of thanks to Mr. Dillon and Mr.
Davitt for their speeches, and ruthlessly mutilating
such speeches of the members of Parliament deputed
to the local Conventions as might have supplied
adequate answers. While this demoralising process
went on unchecked for months, the necessary silence
of Mr. Redmond, Mr. Harrington and myself seemed
to let judgment go against us by default.

But what is quite certain is that my withdrawal
would never have been thought of, had Mr. Redmond
been at the time in a position to exercise his authority
as leader in a crisis in which his judgment and mine
as to the highest interests of the nation were absolutely
at one. By a woeful mischance, he was disabled
at that very moment by private embarrassments
arising out of the clamour set going against him in the
Freeman on the report that he was demanding 24!
years' purchase for his own estate in Wexford. The
allegation was, save for the price of one specially
circumstanced farm, a cruelly slanderous one, but it
contained that small modicum of truth which was
grasped at by unscrupulous landlords as an excuse for
demanding " 2\\ years' purchase — your own leader's
price," and it created such an alarm and even panic
in the country as paralyzed Mr. Redmond's liberty
of action and endangered his continuance in the
leadership. Preparations were actually in progress
to refuse him a hearing on his visit to Limerick. I
did not act without frank and constant communication
of my views to Mr. Redmond. Thrice over I wrote
urgent letters which were in after years published,
impressing upon him how fast the infection was
spreading in the Party and in the country ; that it
had not yet got so far that it would not promptly
disappear if he would in the temperate and measured
language of which he was a master apprise the country

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 23

that the National Policy again and again ratified by a
practically unanimous Party and National Convention
was in danger ; but that failing such a pronounce-
ment from the only leader with authority to issue it,
it would be no longer possible for me to undergo the
insupportable strain upon my health and upon a tem-
perament perhaps ultra-sensitive when the wounds
came from those of our own household, of being
compelled to stand silently by while the fruit of our
labours was slowly rotting under our eyes ; and that
my withdrawal altogether from the scene would be the
only other means left of warning the country of the
danger and of recalling the organizers of dissension
to their senses. I ventured upon the prediction,
which was promptly justified by events that my with-
drawal would rally our assailants in a panic-stricken
alarm to his support, and assured him of my own
undiminished sympathy and good will in whatever
course his new advisers might be prepared to re-
commend. His letters in reply were full of the
friendliest and most anxious remonstrance and en-
treaty not to withdraw from the scene ; but as to the
practical matters at issue he only pleaded that the
farmers would pay no heed to the advice of the Freeman
and that those responsible for the trouble would soon
disappear from the country altogether : in a word, he
was plainly intimidated, and would let the emergency
take care of itself.

Mr. Dillon and the Freeman verified my anticipa-
tions by eager and violent protestations of their loyalty
to Mr. Redmond against whom they had just been
organising a Holy War in the Freeman ; but Mr.
Dillon verified also the anticipations of Mr. Redmond
as to his moral courage. Criticism when in opposition
can only be justified by efficiency when in power.
Far from being ready with any constructive plans of
his own, when my retirement left him master of the
situation, Mr. Dillon quitted the country in a panic,

24 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

leaving the Party derelict, dismantling our ma-
chinery for working the Act and throwing the farmers
into a state of chaotic disorganisation, and he did not
return to Ireland until after I had been prevailed upon
to come back to their rescue. He returned then only
to raise against me the incredibly base war-cry of
" Unity ! " and " Majority Rule ! " with a temporary
success as an electioneering trick, but a success which
was to lead to the ultimate extinction of " the Party '
and the destruction of Home Rule.

More contemptible still, if that were possible, was
his imputation that it was all an affair of jealous
competition on my part with Mr. Redmond for the
leadership. The truth happens to be — and nobody
had more cogent reason for knowing it than Mr.
Dillon who set the calumny going — that Mr.
Redmond pressed me earnestly to accept the
Leadership of the Party when Parnell had offered
it to me as the condition of his retirement in 1891,
and that it was in favour of Mr. Dillon himself I
rejected the proffer. Apart from any question of
taste, that the insinuation should come from him, of
all men, Mr. Dillon was listening when at meetings of
the Party Mr. Redmond declared again and again that
he was unreservedly in agreement with me in every
particular up to the date of my withdrawal from public
life, and wholly shared my belief in the National
Policy for which he was every whit as responsible as
I. Even in one of his public speeches, after my
withdrawal, Mr. Redmond paid me the somewhat
exaggerated compliment of saying that " but for Mr.
William O'Brien there would have been no Land
Conference and no Land Act." Some indication of
the uninterrupted cordiality of our personal relations
may be gathered from the fact that, four months
after my retirement from Parliament, it was to me he
turned for advice in the subjoined letter, when the
men who had driven me out had no counsels to give
him except those of sheer destructiveness.

«

14

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 25

House of Commons, 23 — 3 — 1904.

My dear O'Brien, — Notwithstanding all that has
occurred, and our difference on the subject of your
resignation, I am certain you are as anxious as ever to
aid me in my difficult position. You could not do so
more effectively than by giving me your views on the
situation, in view of the coming Convention. Is there
any practical way in which we can again close up our
ranks by inducing you to rejoin the Party ? I assure
you I feel the position keenly and am fully alive to its
dangers. Would any sort of private conference be
of use ? I hope your health is good. I need not say
this note comes from myself alone. Very truly yours,

JOHN E. REDMOND."

" From myself alone " — be it observed, without
this time asking the leave of the new Hibernian turnkeys
who had taken him under their protection. In my
reply, full of heartfelt sympathy for Mr. Redmond's
difficulties, I concluded :

" My own fixed belief is that so long as Dillon and
Sexton continue in their present temper, no brave
National programme requiring the loyal co-operation
of responsible and patriotic men will have the ghost
of a chance of succeeding during our generation.
The first step towards any remedy for the situation
is that they should be brought to realize the country's
sense of the immeasurable mischief they have wrought
in destroying what will yet be recognised as the most
glorious opportunity Ireland ever had for winning
peace and freedom with the assent of all English and
Irish parties. The excitement of a General Election
and a change of Ministry will, no doubt, blind many
unthinking people for a time, but a few years will
bring the inevitable desillusionnement and break up."

All this notwithstanding, the trick of shouting
" Unity " and " Majority Rule " and " a plot against
our trusted leader," succeeded in diverting attention

26 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

both in Ireland and in England from the vital issues at
stake and for many years the men who never swerved
an inch from the National Policy in which they only
obeyed the mandate of every representative authority
in the country, were merrily hounded down as the
destroyers of National Unity by the very men who had
succeeded in acquiring the control of the Party and of
its leader by impudently trampling that principle
under foot. The columbae were censured as factionists
and traitors, and the corvi received the applause of the
unfortunate nation for their clamourous cawings of
" Unity ! ' and " Majority Rule ! '

The student will find the narrative of the revolt
against the National Policy of Conciliation plus Busi-
ness (comprising the whole period from 1903 to 1910)
and also of the circumstances under which I was
compelled to return to Parliament under the
affectionate coercion of a constituency faithful
beyond any I have ever heard or read of, set forth
in full detail in An Olive-Branch in Ireland and its
History. (Macmillan, 1910).

The truthfulness of the record has never been
impeached in a single particular and may, therefore,
now be regarded as settled history.

Before passing from this part of the narrative, let
us finish with another fiction which has almost become
classic. It is a dogma with all pious believers, Liberal
and Hibernian, that it was the Ulster Orange members,
and not the Irish Party, \\ho drove George Wyndham
out of the Irish Secretaryship. The legend is an
impudent falsification of the facts. The expulsion
of Wyndham from the Irish Office before his benign
work was half completed was the first exploit of the
new masters of the Irish Party, and it was only the
preliminary to their next achievement, which was to
repeal his great Purchase Act of 1903. It was Mr.
Dillon and his friends who alone had the power to
do it, and it was they who did it.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 27

Mr. T. P. O'Connor wept tears of ink over " The
Passing of George Wyndham " — his passing from the
Chief Secretaryship, and into his grave — and sang
canticles over the great things he had done for Ireland
and the greater things he might still have done, were
it not for wicked men. The wicked men were, of
course, the handful of Ulster Orange members, and
to these Mr. T. P. O'Connor, without a wink in his
scandalised eyes, attributed the entire guilt for the
overthrow of Wyndham 's career in Ireland. Never
was hypocritical fable more easily confuted by the
incontestable facts. It is quite true that the Orange
Ulster Party did combine and conspire with Mr.
T. P. O'Connor's Irish Party to harry Wyndham and
to hang upon his flanks, until he was finally chased
from the country — so much the deeper disgrace to
both sets of conspirators. But it is true as well that
the Irish Party, commanding 80 votes to the
Orangemen's 14, and being in a position in addition
to carry the whole Liberal Opposition into the
voting lobbies with them, were incomparably the
most powerful partners in the conspiracy. A brief
summary of what really happened will, it is to be
hoped, dispose once for all of the legend that it was
the Orangemen who killed Cock Robin.

Before the Session of 1904 opened, Mr. Redmond
announced that his Party held the Government of
Wyndham as " prisoners in a condemned cell "
waiting in fear and trembling for the execution of
the sentence, and gave them notice that they would
be " struck at as quickly and as strongly as we can."

He lost no time in keeping his word. On the I5th

March, on a vote of censure moved by the Irish Party
on the Education Vote, the Government was defeated
by 141 votes to 130. Col. Saunderson and the other
Ulster members — Messrs. Lonsdale, Gordon, Moore,
Craig and Sloane — aided on this occasion by abstaining
from voting for the Government. On 22nd March,

28 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the Irish Party moved another vote of censure on
Wyndham (Arterial Drainage) in which they were
joined in the division Lobby by the entire Ulster
Party, Col. Saunderson declaring that " all Irish
members were going to act together and fight what

he called the Battle of the Bann " On March 29th

the Irish Party moved still another vote of censure on
Wyndham (popular control of R.I.C.) but this time

the Ulster Party voted with the Government.

On 3rd August Wyndham speaking on the University
question, said the Government were accused of trifling
with the question, but he pointed out that during the
Session the Irish Party had joined in every attempt
to turn out the Government. He appealed to the
Party to think it out. (A Nationalist Member — " We

want to turn you out ") In the Session of 1905,

Mr. Redmond moved (2Oth February) an Amendment
to the Address censuring the Government and was
joined by Mr. William Moore (of the Orange Party)
in a violent denunciation of Wyndham, which was
followed up by a speech from Mr. Dillon bespattering
Mr. Moore with his praises and reiterating the attacks
upon Wyndham. Mr. C. Craig said they had been
invited by the Nationalists to go into the lobby with
them to show their indignation against the Govern-
ment. As Unionists they could not do that, but they
were so profoundly dissatisfied with the conduct of
Irish affairs that it had been their intention to abstain
from voting. Mr. Flavin (North Kerry) — I will win
my cigars if you are going to vote with us to-night.
Mr. Craig said he sincerely hoped he would win his
cigars and if they could vote he would give the Hon.

Member a few more. A few months afterwards,

Wyndham resigned.

Will anybody be ever again found bold enough to
deny that it was the Irish Party who killed Wyndham
as Chief Secretary in 1905, as surely as it was they who
killed his great Purchase Act of 1903 by their own
Act of 1909 ?

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 29

VI.

To return to the comparison between the two
Policies, if the second can be described as a policy
which was merely the destruction of the first : — We
from the start advocated, as every body advocates now,
a special consideration for the apprehensions, and even
the historic prejudices of our Protestant countrymen in
Ulster, and in the other three provinces as well -
our assailants scoffed at the Ulster Difficulty, and up
to a late period joyously relied upon the weapons of
contempt and ridicule to conjure it down, while the
aid of the Southern Unionists was fiercely repulsed
as though it covered some treacherous intrigue against
the Home Rule Cause. Kindly Irishmen, of Unionist
traditions, of the stamp of Lord Dunraven, Mr.
Lindsay Talbot-Crosbie, Mr. Moreton Frewen, Lord
Rossmore, and Col. (now Sir) W. Hutcheson Poe,
who from cautious Home Rule beginnings advanced
to the acceptance of full Dominion Home Rule, were
vilified more and more savagely the further they
advanced, as" landlord swindlers," as " our hereditary
enemies, " as " blackblooded Cromwellians," and as
crafty " anti-Irish conspirators/' to whom we had,
" in a moment of weakness mortgaged the future of
Ireland."

.

The folly of the anti-Conciliationists went
further. They transformed the National Party
and the National Movement into one from which
not only all Unionists but all Protestants were
excluded. - We proclaimed the first dogma of the
Nationalist faith to be that the Protestant minority
must not only be relieved from any imaginable danger
to their religious or social liberties, but, on the one
condition of their being " Irishmen first of all," must
be welcomed into the high places of honour and

30 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

power in an Irish nation of which the master-builders
were the Protestant Grattans and Davises and Par-
nells. Our critics, on the contrary, proceeded to
add fresh fuel to the flame of Orange fanaticism by
subjecting the National movement to the new
ascendancy of a sham Catholic secret society,
with the result of changing the tepid suspicions of the
most level headed of the Episcopalian and Presbyterian
farmers and shopkeepers into sheer terror for the
future of their children and themselves in an Hibernian-
ridden Ireland.

It happened thus. There had of late years crept
into the North of Ireland a seceding wing (calling
itself " The Board of Erin ") of the great American
Antient Order of Hibernians, a genuine Benefit Society
which had distinguished itself by many works of
charity and benevolence. The seceding Board of
Erin never offered any public explanation of the
objects of their establishment in Ireland. Their work
was carried on in secret, under an obligation equivalent
to an oath, not to reveal their secrets and passwords ;
and nobody was admitted to membership who was
not a Catholic, frequenting the Catholic Sacraments.
Such a body would have been entirely harmless, if
confined to the legitimate sphere of a Friendly Society ;
but suddenly and secretly established in control of
the entire visible National organisation, the effect in
Ulster was that of a brand flourished in a powder-
magazine. The transformation was effected by a
stealthy process without any consultation with or
consent of the Party, the League, or the country,
and indeed passed all but unnoticed until the operation
was complete. The paid Secretary of the United
Irish League (Mr. Joseph Devlin, of Belfast, who now
for the first time came into prominence) became the
National President of the Board of Erin ; x the
Standing Committee of the League was flooded with

1 Better known in popular parlance as " The Mollies."

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 31

young members of Parliament who had taken their
vows of secrecy on initiation into the Hibernian Order ;
the paid organisers of the League were similarly
initiated and were despatched through the country
to turn the Branches into as many occult Hibernian
Divisions at the expense of the United Irish League.
The public organisation gradually ceased to exist save
as a respectable means of collecting funds and passing
resolutions hawked about by their secret masters and
soon fell into contempt under the nickname of " The
Resolutionists."

The Board of Erin Hibernians, who became
thenceforth the real dispensers of all power and
offices and titles, from 1906 to 1916, had every demerit
that could inflame sectarian passion in Ulster : a
secret society without any publicly avowed purpose ;
a body so far from being authentically commissioned
by the Catholic Church, that their initiatory ceremony
was originally so near to blasphemy that it had to be
dropped under threat of excommunication ; but none
the less composed exclusively of Catholics pledged
by a Sacramental Test. Into this sinister fraternity,
now the undisputed masters and wirepullers of the
public movement, no Protestant Irishman, were he
the most illustrious in the history of our nation, was
permitted to enter. The new disability and its Sacra-
mental Test debased the National Ideal from the aim
of Wolfe Tone — which was " to unite the whole people
of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions,
and to substitute the common name of Irishman in
place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and
Dissenter " — to the level of a Catholic Orangeism
in green paint, deformed by the same vices of monopoly
and intolerance which had made Protestant Orangeism
a National scourge. The results were catastrophic.
Those who study the records of the time will not, I
think, be able to escape from the conclusion that the
uprise of the Board of Erin, which became for all

32 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

practical purposes the real Government of the country
behind Mr. Birrell's genial mask, was a more effective
instrument than Sir Edward Carson in organising
the Covenanters of Ulster and in driving them to
desperation and to arms. The ablest historian of the
Sinn Fein movement, Professor Mitchell Henry, of
Belfast, tells us :

" All sections of Sinn Fein as well as the Labour
Party, saw in the Antient Order of Hibernians a
menace to any prospect of an accommodation with
Ulster. This strictly sectarian society, as sectarian
and often as violent in its methods as the Orange
Lodges, evoked their determined hostility."

What the leaders of the Insurrection of Easter
Week thought on the subject is no less emphatic.
Says Mr. Patrick H. Pearse, the most romantic of the
Insurgent Chiefs, who was shot in Kilmainham Jail :

" The narrowing-down of Nationalism, by a job-
getting organisation, to the members of one creed
is the most fatal thing that has taken place in
Ireland since the days of The Pope's Brass-band
[a notorious crew of self-styled Catholic placehunters]
" and is a silent practical riveting of sectarianism on
the nation."

The judgment of Mr. James Connolly, a Labour
leader of remarkable sagacity as well as bravery, who
was also shot as the Commander of the Citizens'
Army, is more unequivocal still :

" Were it not for the existence of the Board of
Erin the Orange Society would long since have ceased
to exist. To Brother Devlin, and not to Brother
Carson, is mainly due the progress of the Covenanter
Movement in Ulster."

This was the power which was henceforth to be
the roguish voice of Jacob, while the hand continued
to be the unwilling hand of Mr. Redmond. In its
new phase of occupation, the Irish Party ceased to
exist as the National Party of Parnell, and became the
sham-Catholic Hibernian Party.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 33

VIII.

Pray let it be borne in mind that until this process
of denaturalising the National Movement from top to
bottom was all but completed, we started no organi-
sation of our own, no Party of our own, no newspaper
organ of our own. Even when at last, in 1910,
the All-f or- Ireland League came into existence, the
sole claim it made was for liberty of speech while we
submitted considerations like the above to the calm
judgment of our countrymen, before it should be too
late to undo the mischief. That modest claim was
ruthlessly rejected by the Board of Erin. At the scene
of infamous rowdyism known as " the Baton Con-
vention, " the protest we attempted to make against
the repeal of the Land Purchase Act was one which
it is certain every thinking man of the race now knows
to have been a wise and patriotic one. That protest
was nevertheless suppressed by means of revolvers
and boxwood batons wielded by batonmen hired at
io/- a day, and by a Press boycott still more foul
because it was more ingenious. " The Baton Con-
vention " marked the death of free speech, as well as
of Land Purchase. The smallest liberty of appeal to
general public opinion, outside the limited area in the
South, where violence durst not present its weapons,
was smothered as truculently as it had been in the
darkest days of English repression. No voice of free
public opinion was allowed to be heard again until
the Insurrection of 1916 suppressed the suppressors.

IX.

Mark this thing, too. The men thus assaulted
and gagged were still members of " the Party," which
the country in its last exercise of liberty had recently
obliged to renew its allegiance to our principles.

34 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

The All-for-Ireland League was not founded until the
Treaty by which the Party was reunited in 1908 on the
old platform of Conciliation had been shamelessly
broken. The Treaty, which was the result of a
Conference between Mr. Redmond and Most Rev.
Dr. O'Donnall, Bishop of Raphoe, who represented
the Party, and Father James Clancy, P.P., Carrigaholt,
and myself who represented the Policy of Conciliation
plus Business, bound the Party " cordially to welcome
the co-operation of all classes and creeds willing to aid
in the attainment ' ' (among other great objects) 4 k of
the complete abolition of Landlordism." The test
came when the Treasury, in order to recoup them-
selves for the losses of the Boer War by a beggarly
economy at the expense of Ireland, proposed virtually
to repeal the Act of 1903, under whose generous terms
hundreds of thousands of tenants were hastening to
purchase. The Treasury might have been and could
only have been baffled by the common action between
landlords and tenants to which the Party had pledged
themselves by the Treaty of Reunion. Quite other-
wise, in his infatuated hatred of the Act of 1903, Mr.
Dillon hailed the Treasury Bill for its repeal with
exultation, and induced the Party by a majority of 45
votes to 15 * to repudiate their pledge to " welcome
the co-operation " of the landlords against the perfidy
of the Treasury and thereby gave the signal to the
Board of Erin to strangle any further opposition by

1 The names of the minority deserve to be recorded to the
honour of their posterity : — Messrs. T. M. Healy (North Louth),
T. C. Harrington (Dublin Harbour Division), Thomas O'Donnell
(West Kerry), Edward Barry (South Cork), Conor O'Kelly (North
Mayo), Eugene Crean (South-East Cork), George Murnaghan
(Mid. Tyrone), James Gilhooly (West Cork), Patrick O'Doherty
(North Donegal), William O'Brien (Cork City), John O'Donnell
(South Mayo), H. Phillips (North Longford), Augustine Roche
(Cork City), T. Smyth (South Leitrim), and D. D. Sheehan
(Mid-Cork). Mr. Redmond did not open his lips on the
occasion.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 35

the incredible blackguardism of ; The Baton Con-
vention." Having thus torn to shreds the Treaty
by which the Party had been reunited, Mr. Birrell
was given a free field for passing the Act of 1909 by
which Land Purchase was brought to a dead stop ;
over a hundred thousand tenants were for thirteen
years and are up to the hour at which these pages are
written, left groaning under the yoke of landlordism ,
and, most execrable trick of all, the Bonus of
£20,000,000 voted by the glad assent of all Parties
in 1903 as a Free Imperial gift, was turned into a
debt due to the Treasury by the Irish Nation. These
occurrences, men of honour will scarcely need to be
told, rendered any further association on our part
impossible with a Party so faithless to their word, and
so guiltily responsible for a course of action which
all the world now knows to have been fatal to the
country's most sacred interests. What Mr. Dillon
once boastingly said of himself : "I have been all
my life a destructive politician," might serve for his
mournful epitaph as a patriot.

X.

The Liberal Party had returned into powrer in
1906 by the aid of the Irish vote, although the Liberal
Leaders had pledged themselves beforehand not to
introduce a Home Rule Bill in the forthcoming Parlia-
ment. Therein "the Party" probably acted wisely,
but their support was a sufficient defence of Sir H.
Campbell-Bannerman, if he found himself helpless
to do anything better than bring in " the Irish Council
Bill." He took care to make the compromise a
bearable one by announcing it as " a measure con-
sistent with and leading up to the larger policy " of
full Home Rule. Furthermore, he was in a position
to guarantee that the Bill would be passed in the

36 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

House of Lords ; that it would respect the integrity

of Ireland ; that it would be subject to revision in

five years, and if it worked harmoniously in the

interim to expansion unlimited in extent. The

effusive acceptance, and, after twenty-four hours,

the ignoble destruction of that Bill by the Party which

was now the Hibernian Party, was a tergiversation the

effects of which upon the unity of Ireland are

disastrously apparent enough to-day. The Freeman

and the other Dublin newspapers which wrecked the

Bill endeavoured to justify themselves by lyingly

calling it " the Irish Councils' Bill," and, in spite of

repeated remonstrances, have ever since persisted

in propagating the falsehood. It is the misdescription

by one letter that makes all the difference. The

prime merit of the Bill was that its true title was

" The Irish Council Bill " and that it would have once

for all fused Ulster with the rest of the country in an

elective National Assembly, one and indivisible. On

that ground I unhesitatingly faced unpopularity even

among influential friends of our own, in supporting

the Bill. So did Mr. Redmond, as long as his own

judgment was unfettered. He and his Party went

even so extravagantly far as to entertain the

supposititious father of the Bill, Mr. Birrell, at dinner

in the House of Commons, the night before they

crossed over to Ireland to secure its adoption by the

National Convention. When Mr. Redmond arrived

in Dublin, it was to find that Mr. Devlin and his

Board of Erin had for the first time shown their teeth

in open revolt against their titular leader, and the

unfortunate gentleman was obliged to submit to the

degrading ordeal of himself moving the rejection of the

Bill he had come over from London to bless. It is

now obvious enough that, had the Irish Council Bill

been allowed to pass, the Partition of Ireland would

never have been heard of.

37

XL

With Mr. Asquith's Home Rule Bill of 1912 came
the final assay of the Liberal Party and of their
Hibernian allies. The Bill was one which would
have offered an irresistible temptation to " faction '
to hold no parley with a measure which proposed to
reduce Ireland to the status of one of the backwoods
Parliaments of the Canadian provinces and would
leave her taxation absolutely at the mercy of the
Westminster Chancellor of the Exchequer. And,
unlike the Irish Council Bill which was to be a
transient measure " consistent with and leading up
to the larger policy," the Asquith Bill was to be
" final " and was so accepted. Here again, perhaps,
we erred by an excess of respect for the decisive,
however uninformed, verdict of the country at the
polls. The fact, at all events, is that the All-for-
Ireland League, both at home and in the House of
Commons, gave a loyal, if sober-minded, support to
Mr. Asquith's Bill so long as it proposed to deal with
an unpartitioned Ireland. But our support was
extended to it as an instalment of Ireland's inalienable
rights, while the Hibernian Party boisterously pledged
themselves to accept it as a final settlement, even
after, by their own consent to the surrender of the
Six Counties, it had been transformed into an avowed
Partition Bill.

In the handling of the Ulster Difficulty, two
errors, from opposite extremes, were committed by
the Liberal " Home Rule Government ' and their
Hibernian advisers. Long before the Covenanters
thought of arming themselves, we proposed certain
definite concessions to Ulster sentiment which will be
found later on in this volume. They were all of
them ignored. They were all of them later on
proffered in a panic, when it was too late, capped by
an additional concession, almost the only one which

38 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

in our eyes was an inadmissible and undiscussable
surrender, viz., the separation of Ireland into two
States. The Liberals and the Board of Erin set their
faces against any concession at all at a stage when few
who read Sir James Craig's recent speeches will
doubt that Ulster might have been won over by a
policy of " compulsory attraction " such as reconciled
the landlords to the extinction of Landlordism. The
wise men undertook to laugh Ulster out of court by
cracking jokes at her spokesmen and making not over
delicate fun of her " wooden guns/'

That was their early manner ; it was the error of
short-sightedness and mere flippancy (as Mr. Lloyd
George and Viscount Grey have since penitently
owned). It was followed by the graver fault of sheer
moral cowardice, as soon as the first mistake became
visible to the world. The Government first truckled
to the Board of Erin, and proceeded next to truckle
to the Orangemen. Our advice, first of all and last
of all, was to make an offer of abundantly and even
superabundantly generous terms such as must reassure
all rational men against any possibility of danger to
their civil or religious liberties from a National Parlia-
ment. But our plea for liberal and ungrudging con-
cessions was accompanied by no less outspoken advice
in the event of all rational compromise being rejected
by Ulster, or rather by the outlander Dublin lawyer
who had by this time shouted himself into her con-
fidence. Our second recommendation was that the
Government, with their hands filled with these plentiful
provisions for the minority, should manfully face the
British electorate at a General Election and demand
their authority to enforce the law of Parliament in the
ordinary way against mere unreason and insane
bigotry, or else challenge them to commission some
other Government to drown in blood the aspirations
of a world-wide Irish race for peace with England.
The Liberal " Home Rule Government," most un-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 39

happily, flew from one extreme of folly to the opposite.
No sooner was the cargo of German rifles from the
Fanny landed at Larne than the Liberals and
Hibernians with equally long faces dropped their
bantering of "the wooden gunmen," met the incipient
mutiny at the Curragh Camp with obsequious
apologies from the War Office to the mutineers, and
shuddered at the thought of arresting and bringing
to trial like common men Sir Edward Carson and the
future Lord Chancellors and Privy Councillors who,
with self-confessed illegality, were preaching armed
resistance to the King's law to regiments of sworn
Covenanters with German rifles in their hands.
Worst of all, the feebleness of the Liberal Cabinet
made the potential rebels irresistible by making no
disguise of the fact that they had no notion of risking
the shortening of their spell of office by challenging
the verdict of a General Election. If Mr. Lloyd
George is only just in now acknowledging us to have
been " fundamentally right " in our way of dealing
with Ulster, it seems to follow that he and his Liberal
colleagues and his Hibernian counsellors were no
less " fundamentally wrong," both in the unbending
and in the shivering phases of their Ulster tactics.
The boot was now on the other foot. It was the men
of the German guns who were laughing, and it was the
Home Rule Prime Minister who was mumbling
" Wait and See ! " Mr. Devlin claims the credit of
having forbidden the Government to prosecute Sir
Edward Carson ; Mr. Asquith puts the blame on Mr.
Redmond, who is dead. But there was no contradic-
tion. Mr. Redmond was only Mr. Devlin in Court
dress.

XII.

Again the same trembling indecision on the out-
break of the War in 1914. Ireland's attitude in this
crisis was misunderstood in England with such

4o THE IRISH REVOLUTION

ludicrous perversity that the Hibernians had little
difficulty in persuading a guileless Parliament and
public that it was certain incivilities of War Office
officials towards Hibernian recruiting-sergeants that
determined the failure of Mr. Redmond's war-policy.
That was absurdly far from being the case. The
true reason was that Mr. Redmond had no war-policy
at all. Our own war programme may deserve praise
or censure ; it was, at all events, unambiguous. We
proposed an Irish contribution — substantial, but con-
ditional— to the armies of the Allies. The proposition
we submitted to Mr. Redmond at the entreaty of his
most influential supporters in Cork was that he should
take the initiative in summoning a Conference of Irish
Unionists and Nationalists for the purpose of jointly
recruiting an Irish Army Corps with its reserves for
service on the Continent, upon a guarantee, which we
were in a position to assure him the Irish Unionists
would gladly give for themselves, and insist upon from
a Coalition Government, for an agreed Home Rule
settlement on the basis of a United Ireland. The
raising of an Irish Army Corps happened to be what was
named by the Prime Minister himself as an adequate
contingent from Ireland and in our judgment, stronger
now than ever, would have been rewarded with ever-
lasting gratitude from England if offered in that hour
of her peril. The proposal was contemptuously
thrown aside by the Hibernian leaders, without (as
we now know) going through the formality of con-
sulting their Party, and without advancing any clear-
cut alternative of their own.

But Mr. Redmond's famous War-speech, over
which England almost wept for joy ? The most
foolish English member of Parliament who went into
raptures over it then has only to read it now to know
how absurdly he was hoaxed. It is not Mr. Redmond's
sincerity that is impugned when he professed and truly
felt fidelity to the Allies : it is that the titular leader

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 41

of the Hibernians was never more than the sub-
conscious instrument of two or three men, whose
judgment he profoundly mistrusted, but to whose
tortuous ways, since (by this time) they represented
" majority rule," he was bound to conform. He met
the war-crisis with that characteristic mixture of high
vision and unfirm purpose which at the same time
exalted and enfeebled his character. His speech in
the House of Commons, delirious as was the effect of
its eloquence upon English nerves, strained at the
moment as they had, perhaps, never been before, in
reality misled England and Ireland alike, wobbling
as it did between what sounded like a vehement
promise of an Irish Army for Flanders, and what it
really was — some cryptic undertaking to " defend the
shores of Ireland ' against what danger he forbore
to specify, but in language which Young Ireland
interpreted as a hint to keep their arms for home
service — for what precise service or against what
foe, they were left to divine for themselves. The
attempt to ride the two horses disastrously broke
down. It only raised the young Republicans, now
dimly showing themselves, in revolt against the double-
dealing of the Hibernians, while in the direction of
aiding the Allies it got no further than a half-hearted
recruiting campaign to raise an " Irish Brigade '
(the absurd misnomer bestowed on the i6th Division)
which, after spending its Irish blood in rivers, without
much thanks either in England or in Ireland, wound
up by being obliged to see its depleted ranks eked out
by English recruits. The sacrifices of at least half-
a-million soldiers of Irish blood, scattered through the
various Allied armies, were allowed to go without
reward or notice — with, indeed, much revilement of
their motherland, — while the hints of a counter-policy
of " defending the shores of Ireland " threw most
young Irishmen worth their salt into the Republican
camps to " wait and see."

42 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

XIII.

The Hibernian Party who, be it remembered, still
held the balance of power in the House of Commons
and could have dismissed the Liberals from office
when they pleased, forfeited their last claim to the
allegiance of Irish Nationalists by, twice over, without
a shred of authority from the country, agreeing to
surrender to Sir E. Carson in the first instance four,
and later (under cover of the War) six of the counties
most famous in her history, in obedience to the
exigencies of a Liberal " Home Rule Government '
who had heretofore jibbed at the mildest suggestion of
concessions to Ulster. The story of the surrender will
be found for the first time fully revealed in this book.

The surrender of the Six Counties changed the
traditions and prospects of the Irish National move-
ment in an all but irreparable degree. Partition
became thenceforward the sharpest dividing line of all
between the Hibernians and the All-for-Irelanders.
Consent to Partition came to be common ground
amongst every other section ot the House of Commons.
A Partition Treaty sealed by the assenting votes of 75
out of 83 Nationalist representatives of Ireland proved
to be Ulster's incontestable Magna Charta for the
future. The final temperate protest of the All-for-
Ireland group in the House of Commons was shouted
down with yells of " Factionists ! " and " Traitors ! '
by the triumphant Hibernian majority, and bonfires
were lighted in Ireland in celebration of what was
really the Partition " Act on the Statute-Book " by a
guileless public who, if they were to construct bonfires
a few years later, would only utilise them to cast
" the Act on the Statute-Book ' into the flames,
where, indeed, it ultimately found its fate amidst the
impartial contempt of all sides. Partition was all that
remained of it. The claim of Sir E. Carson, thus

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 43

endorsed with the consent of the Hibernians, became
so firmly fixed as a basis in all subsequent negotiations
that, even after the Hibernian Party was dead and
gone, the Republican plenipotentiaries who went to
Downing St. in 1921, found themselves coerced to
negotiate upon the recognition of that self-same
separation of the Six Counties, from the responsibility
for which the Hibernians will find no escape before
the judgment-seat of History.

XIV.

Finally, Ireland's last opportunity was lost of
extracting from the World-War emergency any
tolerable Home Rule settlement by constitutional
methods when, without a protesting word, the
Hibernian Party consented to the destruction of the
Liberal Home Rule Cabinet placed in power for the
express purpose of " giving full self-government to
Ireland," and the substitution in its place of a Coalition
Cabinet in which Mr. Bonar Law, Sir E. Carson and
Mr. F. E. Smith, the versatile English lawyer who
trained for the Lord Chancellorship of England as
' Galloper " at the Orange rebel reviews, became by
far the most potent figures.

The inevitable followed, with the surefootedness
of Nemesis. The Irish Republic arose to take up the
power which the Irish Parliamentary Party had shame-
fully misused. The young men of Ireland, long
chafing under the spectacle of incapacity in Parliament
and venality at home, heard their hour of deliverance
from the Hibernian nightmare strike when the World-
War proclaimed new and giddy possibilities of
Self -Determination for " the small nationalities." In
an ecstacy of sacred madness, which makes the best
men mad by their contagion, they rose up in the
Easter Week of 1916 at the gates of Dublin Castle,
and whatever else they failed to do — owing to their

44 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

cargo of German arms being less fortunate than Sir
E. Carson's — brought the degenerate Parliamentary
movement once for all to its ignoble ending. England
also received the meet reward of her politicians'
perfidy. In place of the amiable and ail-too modest
petitions for peace which the Irish race had spent
forty years in tendering, and tendering in vain, to
England, the flag of the Irish Republic was frankly
run up by the new generation, and in a few years
conquered its way to Downing Street.

It was by the stone-blindness of the confederate
Liberal and "Hibernian Parties the policy of an Irish
settlement by consent was baffled throughout the years
from 1903 to 1918, in any one of which, had there only
been statesmanship at the helm, there might have
been achieved a Peace Treaty which would have
secured to Ireland all that the Treaty of 1921 gave her,
and more, for the victory would have been achieved
for an Undivided Ireland, not for a Partitioned Ireland,
and it would have been achieved half a generation
sooner and at less than one-thousandth part bf the
cost in blood and treasure. As the stern justice of
things would have it, the two powerful Parties re-
sponsible for the mischief were, the one and the other,
virtually annihilated at the polls in 1918, and the soul
of Ireland was saved. With their disappearance stops
the special function of this book, which is to elucidate
the real causes of the Irish Revolution, and to restore
events heretofore utterly distorted and falsified to
their true perspective, in the light of waning years.
There will be found in its pages documentary records
of letters and interviews between the writer and Mr.
Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar Law, Sir E. Carson, Sir
Henry Duke, Mr. Arthur Griffith, Mr. De Valera,
Lord Dunraven, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. William
Martin Murphy and others. My communications
with Ministers, it will be observed, took place in-
variably on the initiative of Ministers, and only began

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 45

after the Rising of Easter Week, when Mr. Lloyd
George conceived his first fantastic scheme (never,
until now, I think, publicly heard of) for an Irish
Provisional Government to be immediately established.
His object in inviting, only at that particular stage,
counsels heretofore rejected with the cynicism of the
politician who has to choose between the views of a
Party of Seven, as opposed to those of a Party of
Seventy, was, I am afraid, scarcely to be mistaken.
The Party of Seventy had miserably foundered in
the storm of Easter Week. The Ministerial hope too
obviously was that the respect in which our doctrines
were known to be held by a powerful and unpurchase-
able section of the young men who had not yet quite
gone over to the Republic, and by a considerable
section of those who had,1 might still give me influence
enough to patch up some semblance of peace in a
country subdued, but far from subjugated, by Martial
Law. In this connection, the message from " an
influential member of the Cabinet " intimating —
" I know so much more than O'B. can know of the
North East people. I know how hard and almost
impossible it is for them to confer with R. or he with
them. O'B. has got very near the Northerns. He,
if any one, can bridge the last gap." is, also, not to be
lost sight of.

1 A partly amusing and wholly pathetic piece of evidence in
proof was what happened on the occasion of my last public speech
in Cork, on June 24, 1916, to protest against Partition. A young,
but energetic, minority of my audience succeeded in preventing me
from obtaining a hearing by chorussing " The Soldier's Song," the
newly-composed war-song of the Republicans. They several
times suspended the disorder, while their leaders (one of whom
was afterwards shot dead at Ballykinlar Camp) came on the plat-
form to announce that their refusal of a hearing was not through
any personal disrespect or failure of affection for me, but to express
their dissent from my attitude in the War, and that solely because
I was the only man who had the power of winning honest Nationalists
back to a Parliamentary movement which was otherwise dead and
rotten. They suspended hostilites again, to agree with one voice
to a resolution against Partition, but instantly recommenced " The
Soldier's Song," and would listen to no more.

46 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

This particular scheme had the brilliancy of all
Mr. Lloyd George's improvisations, but it had, too,
the defect that rendered most of his brilliant im-
provisations void — a brilliancy without knowledge.
The awakening of the British politicians came too
late. The suggestion of a Provisional Government,
in which apparently All-for-Irelanders and Ulster
Unionists were to act in concert, might at one time
have done wonders to produce a united Ireland ;
but the mad notion of Mr. Healy and myself joining
Sir E. Carson and Mr. Redmond, on the morrow of
the Insurrection, in a Cabinet founded upon Mr.
Redmond's expression of " horror and detestation '
of the Insurgents, while their lives were trembling in
the balance, and upon Sir E. Carson's offer to co-
operate with him in " putting down these rebels for
evermore " — the rebels in whose glorious unselfishness
we saw the one gleam of hope for the salvation of
Ireland from the politicians — was a conception that
could only have occurred to the inmate of a padded
cell — or to a British Minister addressing himself to
Irish affairs. In my second interview with Mr. Lloyd
George, at which Sir E. Carson was present, he had
already abandoned the March hare he had started ;
the Provisional Government was no longer mentioned,
and my own suggestion of the only emollient policy at
that moment practicable was ignored with the old
self-complacent fatuity. The reader will be able to
study, documents in hand, a good deal of the secret
history of the next Irish project of Mr. Lloyd George's
fertile brain — his " Irish Convention ' of 1917 —
which seemed to catch at the solution we had been all
along advocating, but adopted it only in a form that
made its failure unavoidable. The Convention's only
real achievement was the downfall of Mr. Redmond
and his pathetic death.

So long as there was left the stump of a sword in
our hands, we thought it a duty to struggle on,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 47

endeavouring to reconcile the Coalition Government
to measures of a very different character which, after
years of bloody travail, they were destined to submit
to, without gratitude from Ireland and without
deserving it. Not the least instructive of those
communications was my last correspondence with the
Prime Minister in July, 1919, when he spurned the
all but certain prospect of peace with the most
redoubtable of the Insurgent leaders — one under
whose feet he was happy enough later on to spread his
softest carpets as his visitor in Downing Street. Mr.
De Valera more than three years afterwards told me
" he had been all along in favour of peace with
England, and at one time he could have carried it all
right, if Lloyd George placed him in a position to offer
the young men a measure of National Independence
for the whole country upon some reasonable terms of
External Association." Once more ugly shadows
obscured the bright lights of Mr. Lloyd George's
intellect. The reader will, I am afraid, find it pain-
fully evident that Mr. De Valera's reasonableness at
the zenith of his power was despised because the
assumption had not yet been flogged out of the British
politician mind, that the Irish leader must be already a
beaten and broken man when he began to tolerate the
notion of an accomodation with England.

The truth is that in neither country had Parlia-
mentarianism in any shape a chance any longer.
Once it was made clear that it had become impossible
to obtain an official hearing, on either side of the Irish
Sea, for remedies whose days of efficacy had passed
away, all that remained for us of the All-for-Ireland
League to do was to blot ourselves out, unequivocally
and entirely, from the controversy in order to leave a
freehand to those of a new generation who had resolved
to have done with an outworn and decomposing
Parliamentarianism altogether. They had already
done Ireland three precious services which they
alone had the necessary strength to do. It was they

48 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

who had defeated Conscription ; it was they who had
dethroned the squalid sham-Catholic Ascendancy
which was reducing the National Ideal to something
scarcely distinguishable from Orangeism, except that

the war-whoop : " To h wi' the Pup ! ' was

replaced by the scarcely chaster one of " Up the
Mollies ! " Better than all, it was they who had
delivered Irish public life from conditions in which
the price of Partition had been paid to gratify the greed
for places, emoluments and titles for which an eminent
Irish ecclesiastic and man of letters x could find no
suaver description than " putrefaction." It was the
youth of Ireland, by their purity of purpose, and their
all but superhuman readiness — nay, enthusiasm — for
death in a holy cause, who had the glory, in a three
years' war in which the odds counted a thousand to
one against them, of expelling every vestige of English
rule from Dublin Castle, and from three-fourths of
the country, where the squeezability of Irish politicians
and the faithlessness of British ones had made havoc
of more moderate demands and gentler methods. In
that attitude of unmeddling and uncaptious fairplay
towards those upon whose shoulders the burden of the
nation's fortunes had now fallen, we have persisted
loyally to the last. A history of the romantic war by
which the day was gained against Satanic powers and
barbarities scarcely to be imagined — gained, it must
never be forgotten, with the succour of all that was
noblest in the civilization of Britain — must be the
work of some younger and more fully-informed pen.

The present narrative stops with the Truce of
July n, 1921. All that has occurred since can only
be dispassionately judged whenever the course of the

1 The late Canon Sheehan, Parish Priest of Doneraile, whose
last novel, The Graves at Kilmorna, predicted the ruin of the
Parliamentary movement with the dread certainty of a Biblical
Prophet.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 49

secret negotiations which ended in the signing of the
Treaty of Downing Street on the night of December
5-6, 1921, comes to be revealed. But to those who
can find nothing but Irish incorrigibility in the
tragedies that followed while the merits or demerits
of the Treaty were debated in a murderous Civil
War between the comrades who had come off
victorious over the militarism of aliens, certain
observations have to be made, if the lessons taught
by this book are not to be neglected anew in the
coming time.

The first is : the sins of the Irish Revolution are
primarily the sins of those who, in Ireland and in
Westminster, made the Revolution a necessity. If
bloodshed and chaos lurk in the train of all armed
uprisings for Liberty, however nobly planned, of
such are the pangs and travail of which nations are
born or re-born. The aid of Revolution, once
invoked, almost everywhere exacts its penalties in
similar, and often incomparably worse, scenes of
agony and shame. The United States themselves
— the soberest of Revolutionists — did not think four
years of a devastating Civil War and the sacrifice of
a million of lives an excessive price to pay for their
National Unity in what was really a war against
Partition. And it may put some check on England's
propensity to sermonize her neighbours if she will
only remember that her sympathies were with the
Partitionist rebels in the American Civil War, as they
were, and, I am afraid, are, with the Partitionist
rebels of Ulster. She must really not be over-
scandalized if the process of casting her out from
Ireland has produced agonies in the half-delivered
country more acute than when the evil spirit of
English rule wholly possessed our nation.

Those of us who have lived long enough to
realize that the Absolute of the Idealist can have no
existence in this perverse world, will not grudge a

So THE IRISH REVOLUTION

large indulgence to negotiators who, in circumstances
of cruel difficulty and under pressure of not very
creditable threats, acted on the injunction of Cardinal
de Retz that the function of a statesman is to make
a good choice between grave inconveniences. It
would, however, be foolish of people in England,
and still more foolish of people in Ireland, to blind
their eyes to the fact that there are objections to the
Treaty deeper and more likely to endure than those
of the visionaries. It is simply not true that the
Irish Free State is the embodiment of * Ireland a
Nation." The Irish Free State is not a Free State
of Ireland at all, but a very different thing. It is
only one of two Irish States, and of two States expressly
carved out to be hostile States in race and creed.
The existence of an Irish Papist was not recognized
by law in the Penal Ages. The very name of
Ireland as a unit has ceased to exist in law under
the Statute which deliberately substitutes " Northern
Ireland ' and " Southern Ireland ' as the legal
designations of the two rival States.

We are plied with the consolation that the liberty
accorded to Ireland is Canadian Home Rule. Again,
it is simply not the truth. The Home Rule of the
Irish Free State is what Canadian Home Rule would
be, if the province of Quebec were separated from
the Dominion, and annexed to France or to the
United States, and if, moreover, Canada were sub-
jected to a compulsory Imperial contribution, and
aggressively stripped of the right of Secession.

T^ i j • • • r T^ i- i_ n i

England remains in possession ot an Jbnghsh rale
richer and more populous than she was able to
maintain from the twelfth to the seventeenth century.
And for the much advertised " British evacuation of
Ireland," England retains within the seas of Ireland
an army powerful enough to reoccupy Dublin within
a week. The graves of St. Patrick and St. B rigid,
and of the last of the High Kings of Ireland — the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 51

Deny of St. Colmcille — the Armagh palaces of the
Red Branch Knights of Irish chivalry — the most
glorious battlefields of Ireland's history from Black-
water and Benburb to Antrim Fight — the church of
the Dungannon Convention — the Cave Hill of Wolfe
Tone's United Men — have all become conquered
territory and foreign soil.

Affronts like these to the most cherished sentiment
of a nation older than any in Europe are not to be
got rid of by printing the Northern Ireland and the
Southern Ireland of the British Statute Book within
sarcastic " quotation marks ' in our newspapers.
The Treaty is a compromise, and in one respect an
all but fatal compromise. Where, in our design, the
varied tints of universal Ireland might have been
united, rainbow-wise, to form one arch of peace,
there are left, in place of one dissentient minority,
three new minorities smarting under memories which
it may take many years of healing patriotism to
render supportable. Within the Six Counties, the
Catholic minority already count their martyred dead
by the thousand and their ravaged homes .by tens of
thousands. The Unionist minority in the South,,
who, had they accepted Home Rule as frankly in
1912 as they have done in 1921, might be figuring
by this time amongst the foremost leaders of their
countrymen, have been obliged to put up with
sufferings of their own which, although immeasurably
fewer than those of the Catholics of the North, are
none the less cruel and detestable. Pray Heaven
that certain abominations of the Civil War of 1922,
from the responsibility for which neither side is
free, may not finish by creating and perpetuating a
Republican Minority still more dangerously dis-
contented ! Until some way can be found out of
these complexities it would be wicked to flatter
England into the delusion that she will not still be
pursued and haunted by the disaffection of an
Irlanda Irredenta*

S2 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

For all that, there is no more reassuring proof
of the prodigious advances made by the Irish Cause
than the difficulty of getting the Republican youth
to form a tolerant estimate of the amazing powers
and liberties which the Treaty, with all its limitations,
does indisputably embody. Its one organic vice is
not so much the fault of the Sinn Fein negotiators
as of the Hibernian negotiators who preceded them
and fettered their hands. It cannot be beyond the
compass of an enlightened patriotism to find a
happy solution of these difficulties within the
country and between the two countries, and that not
by the rude hand of armed Revolution, but by
unwearying good humour and by a magnanimity
towards minorities that will take no rebuffs.

But three things seem to my poor vision to be
essential things : (i) The old " loyalist ' minority,
inside and outside the Six Counties, must have their
apprehensions allayed in that spirit of conciliatory
tenderness, allied with quiet firmness of purpose, of
which the nominations to the Free State Senate have
given a substantial guarantee. (2) Love of Ireland
must not be confounded with an insane hatred of
England — the England of actual life. There must
be a generous recognition of the extent to which the
masses of the British people have come to a deep
heart on the subject of their relations with Ireland.
Self-interest, no less than our finer instincts, counsels
us to understand and appreciate the supreme fact
that nothing short of some intolerable aggression on
our own part will henceforth tempt the honest
common people of Britain to undertake the armed
reconquest of Ireland. (3) Before and above every
other consideration whatsoever, I would place the
condition that means must be found of reconciling
and restoring good comradeship among those portions
of the two armies of the Civil War who were
comrades in a nobler war up to the Truce of July

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 53

n, 1921. Nobody is more acutely sensible than I
how trying to their elders often enough are those
Republican youngsters who, in their passionate
devotion to the soul of Ireland, are apt to forget
that there is also a body of Ireland which has some
rights in the partnership. It is Tourgueniefs ever-
lasting incompatibility of " Fathers and Sons " — of
the greyheads who cannot help knowing and the
adolescents who need nothing but faith in their own
bright imaginings. Nevertheless, fortunate is the
nation the worst reproach of whose youth is the
excess of spirituality and self-renunciation which
impelled them, in the face of a terrorism that made
the strong men stagger, to pluck up the Irish Cause
out of the pit of corruption and disaster into which
the " Constitutional " politicians, Irish and British,
had sunk it. Unnatural, indeed, would be the
Irishman who would not surfer injuries at their
hands in silence — who would not extend an infinite
indulgence even to their unreason — rather than find
any comfort in seeing the young founders of our
liberties hunted down and put to death, or traduced
as the scum of the earth, by their own ungrateful
countrymen.

It is too soon to say more with any confidence,
excepting this : Amidst the gloom which hangs over
our country as heavily as a funeral pall, while these
pages are written, there shines forth one consolation
of immortal efficacy — we can never permanently lose
anything we have won (and we have won many and
marvellous things) ; and whatever remains will of a
certainty be added unto us — it may be through the
mediation of the League of Nations, to whose council
board Ireland will now have free access — not, in any
case, we may pray, through any new recourse to the
barbarities of armed Revolution, but through the wise
exercise of the powers which the Revolution was
needed in order to place within our reach. For

54 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

which reason, however our hearts are saddened by the
smoking monuments all around us of the existing war of
fratricides, the story of the earlier and united struggle
of the pre-Truce days will for centuries still in the
womb of time kindle in the soul of Ireland a pride
in her young men and an unconquerable faith that
what they did highly and holily then, they will be
found capable of doing again at need, so long as the
ocean breaks against our irremovable landmarks as a
Nation.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 55

CHAPTER I

HOW THE ALL-FOR-IRELAND LEAGUE BECAME A NECESSITY

THE All-f or- Ireland League was founded on March
31, 1910. For seven years after the revolt of Mr.
Dillon and the Freeman against the authorized
National Policy in 1903 we had struggled on as best
we might without any separate national organization
of our own and in the face of a hostile Press which
prevented the greater part of the country from
reading anything except monstrous misrepresentations
of our arguments, so far as our words were not
suppressed altogether. We did so in the hope that
the incapacity of the revolters to produce any
practical policy of their own and the amazing
progress of the abolition of landlordism in those
counties where our advice had been followed would
gradually influence " The Party ' to return to the
Policy of appeasement to which they had, with a
single exception, pledged themselves in 1903. Public
opinion did, in fact, compel " The Party " to accept,
with a few verbal alterations, the conditions which
I suggested in a speech in Wexford in 1907 as those
on which the Party might be reunited, and these
conditions, embodied in a formal Treaty at the
Mansion House Conference at which Mr. Redmond
and Bishop O'Donnell acted on the one part and
Father James Clancy and myself on the other,
beyond all question re-pledged the Party " cordially
to welcome that co-operation of Irishmen of all
classes and creeds " which was the essence of the
National Policy of 1903. Had that reunion been

56 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

followed up in true democratic fashion, by referring
the Treaty to a National Convention, for endorsement
or otherwise, nobody was in less doubt than Mr.
Dillon that the reunion would have become a genuine
one from which no factionist would henceforth dare
to break away.

His successful opposition to the holding of a
National Convention was the first symptom of how
he regarded the Treaty to which he submitted with-
out one gracious word. He and his followers next
proceeded, at a private meeting of the Party, to
violate the Treaty in its essence, by voting down by
42 votes to 15 a proposal to welcome the co-opera-
tion of the landlord organization in defeating the
Treasury Bill by which the great Act of 1903 was
eventually repealed and Land Purchase killed. Once
more — his necessities, not his will, consenting — Mr.
Redmond sat silent in the chair while the Treaty, to
which his was the first signature, was torn to tatters
under his eyes. Mr. Dillon's next step, in his new
campaign of disruption, was to direct Mr. Asquith
and Mr. Birrell — as the most charitable must con-
clude it was he alone who could have directed them —
to refuse upon an infantile pretext to receive the
most representative deputation who ever went out of
Munster — a deputation representing the united
strength of the landlord and tenant class, of the
members of Parliament and elective Councils of the
South — the very incarnation of that co-operation of
Irishmen of all ranks and religious professions which
the Treaty of Reunion declared to be the best hope
of the nation. Even that elementary constitutional
right of remonstrance with the Government who
were planning the destruction of Land Purchase
must be denied with insult to the representatives of
the people by a Home Rule Prime Minister who
was at the same moment giving an effusive hearing
to a deputation from the Scottish liquor trade on

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 57

the subject of the whiskey duties. Violation number
two of the Treaty of Reunion on which Mr. Healy
and myself and five of our colleagues had been
fraudulently lured back to the Party.

My growing feeling that it was no longer possible
to remain associated with a Party so faithless to the
nation and to their colleagues was decided once for
all by the infamous extinction of free speech at
" The Baton Convention " (February 9, 1909). The
question to be debated was nothing less than whether
the English Treasury was to be relieved from the
most favourable financial bargain ever secured for
Ireland, and relieved by the connivance, and even by
the votes, of Ireland's own representatives. Upon a
question of the first magnitude such as this freedom of
speech was crushed with the strong hand by a band of
Hibernians, armed with revolvers, who were imported
by special train from Belfast, and marched to the
Mansion House in military order, where they took
possession of every approach to the Convention Hall,
while the interior of the Hall was occupied by
another force of batonmen, paid los. a day for their
services, who were armed with boxwood batons of
the type used by the police, attached to the wrists
of the men who wielded them by leathern thongs.
Two-thirds of the assembly even as sifted through
the Hibernian turnstiles were honest agriculturists
eager to hear both sides of a debate on which the
hope of emancipation of hundreds of thousands of
their class was hanging. The others were, to put it
bluntly, armed ruffians, town-bred and knowing no
more of the merits or demerits of the Birrell Re-
pealing Bill under discussion than most of us do of
the laws of relativity. Their job was to prevent
one connected sentence from any opponent of the
Birrell Bill reaching the straining ears of the
assembly in general, and this they did by the yells
of savages, and where the yells did not suffice, by

58 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

swinging their batons and producing their revolvers
and assaulting everybody " with a Cork accent '
who made bold to utter a word of remonstrance.
By enlightened methods such as these, they stifled
almost every syllable of a speech from myself which,
it is quite safe to say, would now be read by all
disinterested Irishmen as an argument of common-
sense so obvious as to be commonplace and as a
forewarning of the national misfortune which has
since slain Land Purchase by Irish hands. My
amendment was : " That any Bill based on the lines
of the Birrell Land Bill of last Session must lead to
the stoppage of Land Purchase for an indefinite
number of years in the interest of the British
Treasury and impose an intolerable yearly penalty
upon those tenant-purchasers whose purchase
money the Treasury has failed to provide. "
I wonder if even the rudest of the disturbers
at the Baton Convention or of their employers
could now read that amendment without a pang of
remorse.

My observations pointing out how easily the
Treasury Bill might even still be defeated by that
" co-operation of Irishmen of all classes and creeds
to complete the abolition of Landlordism," which
the Party had in solemn words pledged themselves
' cordially to welcome J as the condition of the
Reunion, were received with still more ferocity when
seconded by Father James Clancy, my colleague at
the Conference by which the Treaty of Reunion,
now cast to the winds, was subscribed by Mr.
Redmond and his Party under every condition that
could bind men of honour. The arrival of Mr.
Healy on the platform was the final signal for
closuring instantly, and amidst a scene of deafening
confusion a debate in which not a single sentence of
protest was suffered to be heard against the English
Treasury Bill. Its nominal adoption by the Baton

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 59

Convention sentenced over a hundred thousand Irish
tenants from that day to this to servitude in the
toils of landlordism in order to enable the English
Treasury to realise a dishonest economy and to
gratify the spleen of two or three politicians against
the Land Conference and against the Wyndham Act
of 1903 which was its fruit.1 If the Hibernian Party
committed no other evil deed against Ireland,
students of the record of the Baton Convention will,
I think, agree that the foul business was in itself
sufficient to make its organizers worthy politically
to die the death, and will only wonder how the
execution of the sentence could have been so long
delayed.

My withdrawal from the Party and from Parliament
followed the Baton Convention. My dislike — it
might with truth be said aversion — to Parliamentary
life went to unreasonable lengths, but it was
ineradicable. The feeling was deepened to a point
almost beyond bearing by recent contact with
the meannesses which, I suppose, infest the
underworld of politics in every country. But by a
curious turn of destiny, it took me more time and

1 From this censure I desire expressly to exclude Mr. Davitt.
His faith was in nationalization of the land, and his opposition
to the Wyndham Act, or to any other scheme of peasant
proprietary, was consistent and perfectly legitimate. It has always
been a consolation to me to remember that in all those years of
controversy no word personally hurtful to Mr. Davitt has ever
escaped me. His last letter to me upon a private matter shortly
before his death was as full of manly friendship as if nothing
had happened since the period of loyal comradeship he and I spent
together during the hard years when the United Irish League
was being formed out of the rums of the National movement.
Nobody with any intimate knowledge of Mr. Davitt will doubt
that had he been alive at the time of the Baton Convention he
would have forbidden with indignation the preparations for that
orgy of violence or would have separated himself with loathing
from its organizers.

60 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

pains to secure my escape for good from the English
Parliament than it takes (and legitimately takes)
the average British citizen to gain admission to it ;
and this time again the one thing unforeseeable
happened to drag me miserably back. Before retiring
in shattered health to Florence, where I spent the
next nine months without seeing an Irish paper, I
had implored my friends in Cork to put a summary
end to all controversy by accepting in my place any
candidate the Hibernian Party might please to
nominate, and had specially enjoined the fifteen
Parliamentary colleagues who shared my views to
make no further protest that could trouble the
smooth working of the Party. A very little tact, not
to say decent reeling, on the part of the triumphant
Party managers, would have delivered them from
any further anxiety.

Their notion of tact was to press on the people
of Cork the candidate of all others who was most
offensive to the majority of them, and because he
was the most offensive — Mr. George Crosbie, the
owner of the Cork Examiner, who had gone over
with his paper to the Hibernians and turned its
guns with all the renegade 's zeal against the policy
and the men he believed in, so far as genuine
patriotic belief he had any.1 It was too severe a
trial for poor human nature. The people of Cork

1 The true character of Mr. Crosbie 's change of faith may be
judged by the not very delicate cynicism of a remark of his to
myself while the Examiner was still unperverted. " The only
possible objection I can see to your policy," he said, " is that it is
so obviously common sense and common sense never has a chance in
Ireland." The punishment which eventually overtook Mr. Crosbie
was an unwarrantable and tyrannous one in itself, but was only
a rougher form of the foul play and tyranny he had himself
practised against the friends he deserted. During the Civil War
of 1922 he was obliged to kneel daily at the feet of Miss Mary
MacSwiney, T.D., to receive her orders as Military Censor in his
editorial chair. He meekly announced : " The Republican

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 61

insisted on rejecting the renegade and elected Mr.
Maurice Healy, a man remarkable for his sobriety
of judgment and of first-rate intellectual rank, who
had not for years interfered in any public controversy,
and had no objection to taking the pledge to act
faithfully with the Party. With an insolent folly for
which even the Baton Convention had not prepared
the public, the Party Managers refused to admit to
the Party the elected representative of the people of
Cork, and from that day forth addressed themselves
with all their might to undermine in their consti-
tuencies the members of the Conciliationist Minority,
who still remained in the Party, to organize their
expulsion from public life at the approaching General

Election, and in the meantime to starve them out bv

j

authorities wish us to state their censorship is merely for the
purpose of securing impartial reports." After his own perfor-
mances for years in publishing grossly garbled reports of All-for-
Ireland speeches or boycotting them entirely, it was indeed
edifying that he should be brought to realize the virtues of
" impartial reports." However, the " impartial reports " he was
under the penitential necessity of publishing during the Republican
supremacy took the shape of four or five columns every day of
Republican leading articles levelling charges of traitorism and
murder against Mr. Arthur Griffith and General Michael Collins
and trouncing the Bishops and priests in terms that might well
have made the respectable founder of the Cork Examiner shudder
in his grave. Doubtless in his new apostacy the worthy gentleman
found some consolation in another of his favourite apothegms :
1 The most interesting thing I can find to read in the Examiner
13 the agents' books." The circulation must have been
brisk during the Republican interregnum, for the good reason, if
there was no other, that it was the only newspaper left in existence.
The only other local daily, the Constitution, like the fine old Tory
that it was, preferred to die rather than follow the example of its
contemporary. Needless to add, no sooner was Miss Mary
MacSwiney replaced by the Military Censor of the Free State,
than the Examiner, true to its patriotic repute as le domestique de
tous les pouvoirs — the humble servant of everybody who comes out
on top — rushed to the rescue of the conquerors and proceeded to
pour out no less vigorous abuse upon its late editorial contributors
in their retreat.

62 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

cutting off their Parliamentary indemnity from the
National Funds — an indemnity to which the humblest
member of the Party had, according to the terms on
which the Funds had been collected, as just a title
as Mr. Redmond or Mr. Devlin. It was not pre-
tended that any one of these men contemplated
revolt against the sternest discipline of the Party.
They voted steadily with the Hibernian majority for
the Birrell Bill, well though they knew the result must
be the destruction of Land Purchase, but knew also
that it was not they, but the Hibernian majority, who
were the violators of the Treaty of Reunion which
pledged the entire Party to an opposite course. The
Board of Erin used their power without pity, and
their victims, as it seemed, had no friends. It was
not merely against my more intimate friends their
thumbs were turned down ; every member of the
minority who had voted for the observance of the
Treaty of Reunion, even Mr. Tim Harrington, the
Lord Mayor of Dublin — one of the foremost of
nation-builders all his lifetime, now a stricken veteran
in ruined health — was threatened in his own con-
stituency in Dublin, solely because he had declined,
as one of the members of the Land Conference, to
recant principles to which he had, most inoffensively
but steadfastly, held true. The constituencies of all
the rest of the minority were flooded with Hibernian
organizers, the people plied with calumnious
whispers, and with ready-made resolutions of censure,
and every appetite of corruption was set on edge for
the innumerable jobs and dignities, the disposal of
which was the only advantage the Party had been able
to gain for Ireland during the first Parliament of the
Liberal Ministry.

As the General Election approached, it was the
anguish of hearing such news poured into my ears
by faithful and self-sacrificing Irishmen, now
defenceless, without organization or funds against

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 63

their cruel enemies, which forced me and alone
could have forced me to turn my eyes again
to Irish affairs. I pointed out in vain to my corres-
pondents in Ireland that any permanent cure must be a
more radical one. The gradual discovery how the
people had been tricked into the destruction of Land
Purchase — the one sinister legislative achievement of
" The Party " — was changing the public feeling from
trustfulness to indignation, while the dozens of
squalid family quarrels over the seats of the doomed
members were spreading demoralization and decay
by a process which had only to be allowed to proceed
to bring the whole sordid tyranny to its appointed
end. My return to the scene would, as had happened
before, only give the Board of Erin a further respite
by enabling them to turn away the attention of the
country from their own dissensions by raising anew
their odious sham battle-cries of " Unity ! ' ' and
" Majority Rule ! " The answer was that I alone
stood between my friends and annihilation at the
polls. To that appeal there could be but one answer.
Just as I was struggling to my feet after a wearing
illness of many months, my wife and myself left
Florence in a train in which we were the only
passengers on a forlorn night in December, with the
still more forlorn feelings of a pair of escaped slaves
recaptured and going back in chains to the Plantation.
What happened after our arrival in Ireland has
already been related (An Olive Branch in Ireland,
Chapter XXII.), and need not detain us here.
Enough that the fourteen men marked down for
vengeance wrere one and all returned to Parliament
and the cabal overthrown and disgraced. And to
the comic surprise of the statesmen of the Board of
Erin, the spirit they had summoned from the dead
remained to haunt their banquet-tables and to pursue
them to their Dunsinane. All we claimed now, or
had claimed all along, was liberty of the platform

64 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

and of the Press to submit to our countrymen
opinions to which the only marvel of Irishmen of
intelligence nowadays is how their wisdom could
ever have been doubted. But the lesson of the
General Election was the utter defencelessness of public
liberty without some form of organization for mutual
protection. The Hibernian Party thought to avenge
their humiliations at the polls by excluding from
their ranks the representatives of every constituency
which had declined to obey their mandat cTelire and
refusing them the Parliamentary indemnity for the
payment of which the national funds in their custody
had been subscribed. Even unfortunate Mr. Ginned,
who had never failed to follow the Party Whip into
the Division lobbies, was by physical violence ejected
from their meeting-place for suggesting a public
audit of their funds, and a band of stalwarts was
organized to give the same shrift to the rest of us, should
we present ourselves for admission. But they need not
have been perturbed. They had made their company
impossible for men of honour. It was resolved to
form, under the name of the All-f or- Ireland League,
a National organization, broad-based enough to
embrace men of every denomination and school of
Self-Government from the most moderate to the
most advanced, for the cultivation of a National
Unity higher and more sacred than the trade unity
of any Party. The new movement was based upon
those principles of " Conference, Conciliation, and
Consent/* which the Irish Party and the country had
made their own in 1903 by every vow that could
bind them — which had been re-affirmed by the
violated Treaty of Reunion in 1908 — and which the
reaction against a narrow Party tyranny already
beginning to stir the country was bound to restore
ultimately as the programme of a united nation.
The resolution by which the All-f or-Ireland League
was established propounded as its primary aim " the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 65

union and active co-operation in every department of
our national life of all Irishmen and women who
believe in the principle of domestic self-government
for Ireland," and for the accomplishment of its
object declared : " We believe the surest means to
be a combination of all the elements of the Irish
population in a spirit of mutual tolerance and
patriotic good-will such as shall guarantee to the
Protestant minority of our fellow-countrymen in-
violable security for all their rights and liberties,
and win the friendship of the people of Great
Britain, without distinction of Party/*

66 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER II

" A DESPERATE VENTURE '

PERHAPS the greatest of the disadvantages under
which the All-for-Ireland League laboured from its
birth was that the inaugural meeting could not have
been held in Dublin. Here again it was miscon-
ception and not unfriendliness that raised a difficulty
but for which the course of contemporary Irish
history might have taken a different turn and re-
generated the National Movement without the sharp
surgery of the Rising of Easter Week. The Sinn
Fein movement of Mr. Arthur Griffith, in its purely
intellectual and non-military stage, was beginning at
this time to establish a wholesome supremacy in the
Irish capital as the inevitable recoil from the cor-
porate jobbery and venality of the Board of Erin
reign. At my request Captain Shawe-Taylor, the
originator of the Land Conference, and a fanatic in
his passion for conciliation among Irishmen, waited
on Mr. Griffith to invoke the aid of his organization
in arranging an inaugural meeting of the All-for-
Ireland League in Dublin, impressing upon him that
the project would leave Sinn Fein, and all other
schools of national thought, the widest liberty to
develop on their own lines, provided they could see
their way to combine for the formation of a great
National confraternity of Irishmen from which the
best ultimate solution and the most competent men
to think it out would gradually be evolved. I was
in a position to inform him that every section of
Cork Nationalists — the Gaelic League, the Sinn

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 67

Feiners (then only a handful, but an inestimable
handful of diamonds 1), the Gaelic Athletic Associa-
tion, and the Young Ireland Society, as well as the
City Branch of the old United Irish League and the
Land and Labour Association were joining with
passionate eagerness in our preliminary meetings,
and that nothing but a great inaugural rally in Dublin
was wanting to give the movement a firm hold on
the imagination of the country. Nor did I fail to
make it clear that no contest of persons or of
leadership was involved — that Lord Dunraven, Mr.
Healy, and myself, for want of better, were willing
to throw ourselves into the necessary inaugural work,
but that nobody was more sensible than we of the
drawbacks which old controversies had associated
with our names, and that our truest hope was that
out of the bands of ardent young Irishmen of all
types and conditions who would flock to our free
platform there would spring another Parnell with
the youth, the ardour, and the high purpose to lead
the Nation on to a future of nobler inspirations and
achievements.

Resolutions conceived in that spirit were sub-
mitted to Mr. Griffith for approval or emendation.
Captain Shawe-Taylor brought back the message
that with our ideal Mr. Griffith was in cordial
agreement, but that he and his friends could not
consent to stand on the platform of the All-for-
Ireland League unless there was added a resolution
demanding the withdrawal of the representatives of
Ireland from the Westminster Parliament. To do
this, of course, would be to alienate nine-tenths of
our sympathisers, and indeed to swallow our own

1 Including the murdered Lord Mayors Terence MacSwiney
and Tomas MacCurtain, and also Mr. J. J. Walsh, the Post-
master General of the Irish Republican Government of 1916
and of the Provisional Government of 1922.

68 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

deepest convictions, which were that it was not
Parliamentarianism, but only nerveless and corrupt
Parliament arianism, which had broken down. In
the circumstances of that time, the Hungarian
precedent, to which Mr. Griffith clung, would have
left Ireland without defence at the mercy of the
English Parliament, and indeed would have been
flatly rejected by every constituency in the island,
as it had already been at the only Irish election
(Leitrim) where a Sinn Fein candidate had presented
himself. Nothing less than the undreamt-of break-
up of empires caused by the convulsions of the
World-War could have opened the way to a policy,
which, up to the outbreak of the war, seemed to dis-
own the advantages both of an active representation at
Westminster and of armed resistance in Ireland.
Our movement, propounding no dogma of its own
as to the ultimate bounds of Irish liberty, would
have left Mr. Griffith at complete liberty to recom-
mend his own doctrines ; but at the very start to
impose them upon all comers would only have been
to clear our platform of all but a minute intellectual
minority. But without at least the benevolent
neutrality of Sinn Fein, a successful start in Dublin
was out of the question.

Mr. Griffith's decision, in compelling us to
transfer the inaugural meeting to Cork, gave the
All-for-Ireland movement a certain sectional and
provincial aspect, which the implacable foes of " the
Cork accent " were not slow to exploit, and did
much to increase the timidity of that Irish Protestant
minority which a great Metropolitan meeting joyfully
commingling Irishmen of all ranks and creeds
would have dispelled. Mr. Griffith fatally over-
estimated the growing popularity of Sinn Fein in
Dublin. Whether or not he was throwing away his
opportunity for an eventual peaceful triumph of his
own movement, without the horrors, however

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 69

glorious, or the chaos, however unavoidable, of the
ten years that were to follow, it would be now idle
to debate. What there is no disputing is that not
very long after the All-for-Ireland League had been
cut off from Dublin, and the Board of Erin thus
relieved from their principal disquiet, the temporary
success of Sinn Fein in the Dublin wards and in
its Corporation began to waste away, before the
renewed ascendancy of the Hibernians, and the Sirm
Fein movement proper continued to decline year
after year until there was little left of it except its
name, when some English newspaper man hard up
for a name to distinguish the " Irish Volunteers " of
the Rising of 1916 from Mr. Redmond's " National
Volunteers ' transferred the designation of Sinn
Fein to the very different Republican movement
which was presently to overflow the country.

The All-for-Ireland movement, however, res-
ponded to an instinct which no discouragements
could withstand that some great change was a
national necessity, and that it was coming. To such
a depth had Freedom of the Press sunk in Dublin,
that £60 had to be paid for the announcement of
the existence of the League in one " Nationalist "
daily newspaper, and even then the announcement
was only admitted to its advertising columns,
since as " news ' the extent of the new movement
must not be divulged. In the South, where the
Cork Examiner y up to the time of its apostacy, had
honestly reported our speeches, the Nationalists of
Cork and the adjoining counties of every hue and
section were overwhelmingly friendly. The farmers
whom the policy of Conciliation plus Business had
aknost universally established as owners, the labourers
who, thanks to its operations, had come into possession
of many thousands of cosy cottages and allotments, the
young men of vision who if they would go further
than we somehow felt that our ideals could lead to

70 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

nothing base were all ready for the signal — all
except the placemen, actual or expectant. The
Southern Unionists were almost as universally
friendly. Until quite recently, the extent to which
the principles of national fraternity were permeating
the Irish Protestant minority, although confidentially
known to us, was unsuspected by the general public,
for unluckily these men, long withdrawn from active
politics and living with their families often in remote
districts where they were open to Hibernian intimi-
dation, and, above all, disheartened by the vilification
with which the first notable Unionist converts to tht
principle of self-government were pelted by Mr.
Dillon and his newspaper, were not to be got to
declare themselves on the public platforms until it
was too late to make their adhesion duly valued.

This was the difficulty hinted at by Lord
Rossmore — once the Grand Master of the Orange
Order in County Monaghan, and one not to be
daunted by abuse from continuing to be to the day
of his death as genial a Home Ruler as he had been
a militant Ulster Unionist — in a letter enclosing a
subscription of £10 to the new League :

" I wish I was a richer man to put another o to
my cheque. I assure you that my unwillingness is
not the reason I do not do so. If everyone who
really agrees with the A. F. I. League did according
to their means, what I am willingly and openly
doing, the League would not want long for funds.'*

It was the same sense of the lack of moral
courage among his brother Unionists which, as much
as the rabid hostility of the Hibernians, moved Lord
Dunraven, in a personal letter to myself, to this
rather alarming estimate of the magnitude of the
enterprise before the new League :

" Adare Manor.

" February 9.

" MY DEAR MR. O'BRIEN, — You are on a venture

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 71

as desperate as any undertaken by fabled knights of
old for the destruction of dragons and the rescue of
damsels in distress. I am sure you have the well
wishes and sympathy of every honest and common-
sense man in Ireland.

" Yours sincerely,

" DUNRAVEN."

In his public letter to the inaugural meeting,
however, he nailed the green flag to his masthead
and kept it flying there usque ad noctem with the
Intrepidity of the old yachtsman " pleased with the
danger when the waves went high." An extract
from it ought to be preserved as depicting the type
of patriotic Irish Protestant who. for being a patriot,
was traduced by Hibernian speakers and writers with
a virulence never attempted against Sir Edward
Carson :

" These three essentials (self-government, com-
pletion of Land Purchase, and protection against
over-taxation) can be attained only by Irish men
and women working for them patiently, strenuously,
and honestly, so far as they conscientiously can, and
I am very sure that the vast majority can join hand
in hand in working out the salvation of the country,
if only they have the charity and courage to put
aside paltry prejudice and follow the dictates of their
hearts. The opposite policy has been tried now for
years, and with what result ? Land Purchase is
dead, over-taxation has been condoned, and control
of our own affairs is further off than ever. I do not
wish to go into personal matters, but I may say this :
For myself I have honestly tried to help my country
without reference to Party. I supported the Liberal
Party in their land policy so far as it went and I
opposed their Treasury Relief Bill. I opposed the
Conservatives in their efforts to stultify Ireland by
grossly exaggerating crime and disorder, and I

72 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

supported them in their land legislation. I did what
I could in the matter of reinstatement of evicted
tenants, in legislation for labourers and in respect of
University Education, with the result, so far as I
can see, of exasperating those who hate reconciliation
and who spurn the assistance of Irishmen who dis-
approve of their tactics. That may be a matter of
indifference to me, but not to Ireland, for such
methods stifle nationality. A great opportunity was
lost at the time of the Land Conference when the
spirit of reconciliation and its first fruit, the Land
Act of 1903, was denounced. The Act has been
killed. By one man at any rate it has been bravely
upheld. One man had the clear vision to see what
Conciliation might do, one man has stuck manfully
to his guns and has fought a strenuous fight against
tremendous odds, and that man is the senior member
for Cork City. This Cause is a righteous one. It
is the Cause of common sense, of knowledge, of
charity. It appeals to all that is best and truest in
the hearts of the people. It is the cause I will
support as long as I can and to the best of my
ability."

Desperate as was the venture, in face of a still
unshaken Hibernian despotism, the aloofness of Sinn
Fein, and the suspicions of the Protestant minority,
many of the finest spirits among the Irish nobles
and captains of industry associated themselves openly
from the first with the fortunes of the All-for-Ireland
League — Lord Castletown of Upper Ossory, Mr.
Moreton Frewen, Captain H. Sheeny-Keating of the
Irish Guards (killed at Mons), Colonel Hutcheson
Poe, Sir John Keane, of Cappoquin, Mr. Villiers
Stuart, of Dromana, Lord Rossmore, Mr. Richard E.
Longfield, D.L., of Longueville, Sir Timothy O'Brien,
Mr. Lindsay Talbot Crosbie, of Ardfert, Alderman
Richard Beamish (High Sheriff of Cork City), Lord
Monteagle — heads of historic Irish houses breathing

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 73

a patriotism no less sincere, if as yet more subdued
in words than the most fire-tried of the veteran
Nationalists who flocked to our banner — the last of
the grey-haired old Fenians of Rebel Cork or the
venerable National poet, Mr. T. D. Sullivan,
the author of " God Save Ireland," whose last
speech in life was spoken at the inaugural meet-
ing in Cork. There were sympathisers in far
larger numbers who were known to be only
awaiting a propitious hour to declare them-
selves, and at last (although too tardily) have done
so — men like Lord Shaftesbury, who had been thrice
Lord Mayor of Belfast and was Chancellor of the
Belfast University, the Protestant Archbishop of
Dublin (Dr. Bernard), Lord Powerscourt, Sir John
Arnott, Canon Flewett, the Rector of Mallow, Sir
Jocelyn Coghill, Lord Oranmore and Browne, Lord
Kenmare, Lord Bandon, H.M.L., Dean Grierson
(afterwards Bishop of Down and Connor), Professor
Butcher, M.P., Professor Trench, LL.D., and Lord
Barrymore himself, who had been the Samson
Agonistes of Irish landlordism in its last battles,
and whose coming over, one of the achievements of
my life of which I am proudest, was, of course,
imputed to me as the inexpiable sin against the
Holy Ghost. It is certain further that the movement
commanded the secret sympathy of some of the
most potent statesmen of Britain in both Parties —
Lord Loreburn (Lord Chancellor), Mr. Bryce, Lord
Morley,1 Lord Eversley (once Mr. Shaw-Lefevre),

1 " In speaking in the House of Lords, I alluded to the opinion
expressed by Mr. Bonar Law, by the Postmaster General, and by
the Chief Secretary for Ireland, in favour of settlement by
Conference. I said that being the case why on earth don't you
attempt to try to make a settlement through Conference and
consent ? I was interrupted by Lord Morley. He said : * Yes,
a settlement by consent, but on the lines ? ' — * Well, on what
lines ? ' — ' On the lines,' he said, * suggested by Mr. William
O'Brien.' " — Speech by Lord Dunraven, March i, 1913.

74 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Mr. John Burns, Sir Edward Grey, Lord Haldane,
and Mr. Thomas Burt, the first of the Labour
leaders, among the Liberals, and amongst Unionists,
Earl Grey (the Governor-General of Canada), Lord
Carnarvon, son of the Lord Carnarvon, a famous
Tory Viceroy in Ireland, who was a Home Ruler
thirty-seven years before his Party and wasf as
scurvily betrayed by Lord Salisbury as was George
Wyndham twenty-four years after him, Mr. Walter
Long, a man much maligned by " The Party ' as
an anti-Irish Conservative but for all that has been
said to the contrary as romantic a lover of Ireland
as his mother's Irish blood could make him as well
as a straightforward English gentleman, of whom I
think it is no libel to report that from the start he
declared : "I shall have to oppose Home Rule as
it stands, but I will only oppose it from the lips
out " — even it must in justice be recorded Mr.
F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead), who had not
yet been beguiled into his adventures as " Galloper '
in the Covenanting Army of Sir E. Carson. I speak
without personal knowledge, when I add to the list
Lord Lansdowne, in at least a shy tentative way
(his son, the Earl of Kerry, has just accepted a seat
in the Free State Senate) ; and I should not, I
imagine, be very wide of the mark, if I were to use
the most august British name of all.1

1 From the Editor of a London Unionist morning newspaper,
the name of which wculd now sound startlingly (it was not
The Times), I received a letter heavily marked " Secret and
Confidential," under date " April 29th, 1910," in which he wrote :

" My friend, Mr has to-day had a long confidential talk

with me, and as a result I have advised him to see you without
delay. He has a proposal of importance to put before you. I
have no hesitation in asking you to give him an opportunity ^of

discussing it fully with you. Mr. has approached me in

strict confidence in my private capacity, but I have, of course,
assured myself of the bona fides and straightforwardness of his
proposal before giving him this letter to you, though the fact
that the proposal came through him was a guarantee of both.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 75

Lord Midleton and the Irish nobles and country
gentlemen, who were afterwards to follow him into
the Anti-Partition League were not yet heard of.
Sir Horace Plunkett (to my deep disappointment)
could not be induced to discover any genuine
sympathy with Home Rule, of which he ultimately
conceived himself to be the father. The vast
country meetings of magistrates under the presidency
of their respective Lords Lieutenant — the weighty de-
clarations of Chambers of Commerce, professional men
and masters of industry in Dublin, Cork, and Limerick,
which unfortunately waited for Sinn F&n to make in
1920 the professions of faith which would have been
priceless in 1911 — all were secretly in sympathy, but
stood tongue-tied while we were treading the wine-
press all alone. Had these tremendous forces only
boldly shown themselves in 1911, as they did after
the bloody lesson of 1916 — had the occasion produced
some new Irish leader with the magic of command
— and had not King Edward the Peacemaker been
untimely cut off — who will now doubt that Irish
freedom must have been won without the firing of
a shot and with all the unity and multiform strength
that would have been derived from the effacement of
racial and religious antagonisms ? It was not to be.
The response on all sides was secretly friendly, but
it was the response of Felix, the Roman Governor :
" I shall send for you again when I find an opportune
time." We were sent for again, but — the pity of
it ! — it was at the most inopportune of times when

As Editor of the I have no knowledge of the matter,

as a private individual the proposal has my sympathy as an honest

attempt on 's part to assist a cause which he has deeply at

heart." A few days after the receipt of this letter King Edward
the Peacemaker was dead. A week later I received another letter
from the Editor stating that the death of King Edward had made
it useless to carry the matter further and that the mysterious
visitor had given up his mission to Ireland. What the " proposal
of importance " was, I have never heard since.

76 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the mischief had all been done. The Irish people,
uninformed of the truth, pointed to the small number
of Irish Unionists on our platforms as a proof of
the hopelessness of the task of conciliating them ;
and the Irish Unionists, however secretly willing,
recoiled from speaking out, with the example before
their eyes of the ferocious maltreatment accorded to
those of their brethren who had been the first to
burn their boats. In that vicious circle, the country
was forced to revolve until the opportunity was lost.
But it was an enterprise nobly worth " all the cost
and the pain," for to the policy of " Conference,
Conciliation, and Consent ' is traceable the whole
course of events which made Lord Midleton and his
friends in the House of Lords fast friends of Home
Rule, and brought Sir James Craig into friendly
conference with Mr. Michael Collins, and Mr. Lloyd
George into still friendlier conferences with " The
Murder Gang," to whom he proffered the extremest
form of Irish liberty short of a Republicin name
as well as substance.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 77

CHAPTER III

A PSYCHIC ANALYSIS

WE have seen that the Liberal-Hibernian alliance of
the Parliament of 1906 achieved nothing better for
Ireland than the repeal of the great Act of 1903
and the stoppage of Land Purchase in the interest
of the English Treasury. In the Parliament of
1911, we have now to examine a phenomenon more
incomprehensible still — viz., the destruction of Home
Rule and of the Parliamentary movement as the net
result for Ireland of the same ill-fated Liberal-
Hibernian combination. And the wrong to Ireland
is the harder to explain, that, whereas the first
government of Mr. Asquith was pledged not to
introduce a Home Rule Bill, and had still the House
of Lords to quote as an excuse for all its failures,
Mr. Asquith 's Government of 1911 was elected with
the express mandate to give " full self-government to
Ireland," and the House of Lords had been stripped
of its Veto. Sir E. Carson's Covenanting Army of
Ulster was not yet in existence, and it seemed as if
no mismanagement open to human folly could well
stop the course of the victorious Anglo-Irish majority.
Furthermore, Irish pride has to bear the humiliation
of confessing that this series of disasters was due in
a lesser degree to any conscious perfidy on the part
of the Liberal leaders than to the culpable com-
plaisance of Ireland's own representatives.

It may be worth while to essay some explanation
of a helplessness so deeply wounding to our reputa-
tion as a nation. To begin with, the common run
of the people have to be ruled out of calculation

78 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

altogether. For reasons that this book will make
clear, they were deprived of all real knowledge of
what was going on and were lulled into a state of
enchantment in which in the very excess of their
yearning for " Unity " they allowed Party Unity to
be turned into an instrument of immeasurable
misfortune for the nation, and went on pathetically
chanting the litany of " Trust Asquith " and " Trust
Redmond ' until the movement of Parnell had
perished. The bulk of " The Party ' were little
better informed, and were as honest victims of the
hypnosis as they were unfitted for their high office.
The mischief is to be traced to the infatuation of not
more than four or five Irish politicians, and it will
long remain one of the riddles of history how men
who are not to be suspected of conscious personal dis-
honour, nor denied either capacity or patriotic records,
nevertheless allowed themselves to be beguiled into
a series of disservices to Ireland which could not
well have brought more harm in their train if they
had been the work of their nation's worst enemies.
The fault of the titular leader of the Party was a
passive one, but for that very reason was destructive
of his usefulness as a leader. He made no disguise
in private of the fact that the whole course of policy
which he was supposed to direct was one of which
he deeply disapproved, and that the policy which he
consented to anathematise in public as factionism
was one which he would gladly have made his own,
could he have dared. His famous apohthegm —
" Better be united on a short-sighted and foolish
policy than divided on a far-seeing and wise one " —
will live as the explanation of his fated failure as a
leader, and of the suicide, so to say, of his fine
abilities. He preserved the mechanical Party Unity
which enabled the Board of Erin to dominate and ruin
the ' constitutional ' movement, and he sacrificed
the National Unitv to which he knew that sectarian

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 79

secret society to be the insurmountable obstacle. It
is the shrewd religion of Mid-Africa (and elsewhere)
to offer sacrifice to the bad gods on the calculation
that the good ones will do one no harm. Mr.
Redmond was a good deal addicted to that form of
worship in his dealings with the powers of Hiber-
nianism. The bad gods accepted his oblations with
gracious nostrils, until their turn came to be strong
enough to immolate him themselves at the Lloyd
George Convention.

Even of the three men who originated the revolt
against the policy of Conciliation plus Business,
nobody in Ireland said a hurtful word of Mr. Davitt's
scruples as a Land Nationalizer, and long before his
death he was manifesting his bewitching readiness to
acknowledge his mistakes of judgment, while Mr.
Sexton had he stood alone was of a jealous and
uncertain temper, wont to give more uneasiness to
his friends than to his adversaries.1 He was of those
reasoners who baffle Reason, and of those financiers
who bedevil figures by conjuring with them. He
demonstrated with irrefragable logic and perfect
nonsense that the Irish farmers had only to boycott
the Act of 1903 to obtain the land at 13^ years
purchase. No sooner did the country realize that all
his brilliant actuarial calculations in the Freeman had
resulted in the destruction of Land Purchase by means
of the English Treasury Bill glorified in his leading

1 Lord Morley remarked to Sir Algernon West, *' Sexton and
Dillon, good and honest but always feminine and impatient "
(Private Diaries of Sir Algernon West, p. 295). This particular
censuie of Dillon was as much mistaken as Morley 's judgments
of Irish affairs usually were, but of Sexton's little pets and whimsies
nobody who knew him under the surface will question the
accuracy of the description. Sexton himself better hit the blot
in Dillon's make-up as a leader when he once asked: "LHas
Dillon no friend intimate enough to give him a hint that the first
person singular is not the only case of the Personal Pronoun ? "

8o THE IRISH REVOLUTION

articles and thrust upon the country by the Baton
Convention than the circulation of his paper went to
pieces, and he abandoned the falling concern before
it had yet openly invoked the protection of the
Bankruptcy Court, and Mr. Sexton was not heard
of again in public affairs.

Mr. T. P. O'Connor in his fathomless ignorance
of Ireland and honest faith in Mr. Dillon was
another of the " determined campaigners " against
the National Policy, but " T. P." was all his life an
English politician with a genial Connacht accent,
and in Ireland mattered not at all. Mr. Devlin, who
in the early stages of the conspiracy was of little
account outside the dismal theatre of Belfast riots,
had by this time emerged from the shadows of the
secret society he was to make the master of the
country, and had gained possession of the triple
power of paid Secretary of the United Irish League,
National President of the Board of Erin Order of
Hibernians, and Member of Parliament, and was
already wielding the weapons of a pugnacious
demagogue by which he compelled Mr.. Redmond
to repudiate the Irish Council Bill, and which long
afterwards enabled him to inflict upon the same
unhappy leader that defeat at the Lloyd George
Irish Convention of 1917 from which Mr. Redmond
tragically dragged himself away to his death-bed.
But even at the time at which we have arrived, the
baleful power of the Board of Erin had not yet
sufficiently taken possession of the country to supply
more than physical force to give practical effect to
Mr. Dillon's words.

It was Mr Dillon's own personality and the
respect inspired chiefly, it is curious to remember, by
his austere devotion to the highly " unconstitutional '
doctrines of the John Mitchel school, which he once
professed and which he was afterwards to repudiate
with so lofty a constitutional mien — this was the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 81

force which alone could have saved the original
mutiny against the national will from flickering out
in a fit of temper. He had now got hold of the
Party and its leader, and with amazing audacity had
made the cause of " Unity " and " Majority Rule '
his own ; and to his success above all other things
the misfortunes of the succeeding years must be
accounted. Concerning human motives, who shall
make bold enough to lay down dogmas ? It would
be absurd to hold Mr. Dillon immune from the
vanities and jealousies which are never altogether
missing in the character of the best men who are
politicians, or, for that matter, of most men and
women who are not. The chance which excluded
him from the Land Conference, and the fact that,
to the amazement of all men, it succeeded without
him, must unquestionably be credited with a good
deal of the soreness which clouded his judgment,
without at all lessening our indulgence for the
human frailty which is the badge of all our tribe
But any suggestion that it was motives of this
pettiness which really determined the action of an
Irish leader in a crisis of the first magnitude for his
country is one of the last that could occur to one
like the present writer, who from the outset regarded
John Dillon as, next to Parnell, the most romantic
figure in contemporary affairs, who, when Parnell
would gladly have retired in his own favour, insisted
upon Dillon in his stead, and, when Parnell was
gone, never ceased to press Mr. Dillon's claims
upon his countrymen until his more substantial
qualifications for leadership had been exhaustively
tried out and found wanting.

A simpler explanation is at hand — one which,
however little to the credit of his judgment, is a
perfect vindication of his consistency. The ground-
work of Mr. Dillon's political creed was the belief
that the strength of the National Cause depended

82 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

upon the acuteness of the struggle for the land, and
that whatever diminished the agrarian discontent
and turmoil which he regarded as the driving-
force of agitation aimed a mortal blow at Ireland's
independence. " Keep the pot boiling " — the advice
he once addressed to a Roscommon audience — did
truly, if a little coarsely, embody his faith as to the
only means of warfare available. " I have been a
destructive politician all my life," was his boast on
another occasion. There was so much to be des-
troyed before the reconstruction of a happy Irish
nation could be commenced that up to a certain
point this was also the programme of every patriotic
man. His error lay in failing to see that once that
point was passed, and a noble career of constructive
work opened up before the country, his activity as
a " destructive politician ' consisted for the rest of
his life in the destruction of his nation's hopes and
the perpetuation of unrest and turmoil for mere
turmoil-sake. In a word, he read only the half of
the words of the Wise Man : * A time to destroy
and a time to build." Not to allow the land war to
be ended lest prosperity should kill the demand for
freedom — not to give up the parade of the country's
sores as a means of exciting British sympathy or the
weapons of agrarian disturbance as the only means
of making the bed of English rulers a thorny one —
always seemed to me an ignoble doctrine of Irish
patriotism — even a very wicked one if the amount of
human misery it involved to keep the politicians in
ammunition were fully present to the mind that
conceived it, as, of course, it was not. More than
that, it was a fundamentally false doctrine and
proceeded from a deep-down want of faith in Irish
nationality. It may be that in Mr. Dillon's case it
was traceable to his early association with a part of
the country which was every other year smitten with
potato-failures, famines, evictions, and the basest forms

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 83

of oppression from a class of landlords scarcely less
abject than their serfs. It was not perhaps unnatural
if he concluded that a people who lived in a body-
and-soul-destroying poverty such as that in the
hungry fight for the bare life would have little leisure
left for the finer instincts of manhood and national
sentiment to assert themselves. Men with a deeper
knowledge of the Irish nature knew that it was
precisely those counties which were best educated r
most prosperous, and most emancipated from depen-
dence upon the landlords which were chiefly the
recruiting grounds and fortresses in every fight for
Ireland. Mr. Dillon was to live to see the final
confutation of his poor opinion of the hold of
nationality on the Irish peasant when Landlordism,
with its evictions and oppressions, having almost
passed away from every part of the country which
had not followed his advice, it was the sons of the
farmers turned freeholders who were amongst the
most daring of the insurgents who confronted
England from 1916 to 1921 with the most formidable
and stubborn warfare that ever shook her rule in
Ireland. But the sincerity of his conviction that
the success of the National Cause depended upon
keeping the wounds of the land war open is beyond
dispute. At every crisis of the land struggle he took
precisely the same ground. It is only just to his
perverse consistency to recall that Mr. Dillon, at the
head of " The Kilmainham Party," was as sharp a
thorn in Parneirs flesh in 1881 as he was in our
own in 1903. When Gladstone's Land Act of
1 88 1 changed the Irish tenant-at-will into a co-
proprietor, whose share of the property was worth
more than the landlord's — a concession of immeasu-
rable value in those days — Mr. Dillon publicly
declared : "I will recall your attention to the fact
that when the Land Bill was first made public I
immediately adopted an attitude of uncompromising

84 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

hostility towards it and used whatever influence I
had to secure that it should be rejected with
contempt. ... I say here I believe that if this
Bill passes into law, more especially if it passes into
law tolerated or countenanced by the League, it will
in the course of a few months take all the power
out of the arm of the Land League," and he quitted
Ireland for three years rather than attorn to
ParnelPs policy of cautiously testing the Act. As
Forster cried havoc against Parneirs plans for
testing the Act of 1881, Mr. Dillon and the Freeman
had made shipwreck of our own machinery for
testing the Act ol 1903. To Wilfrid Blunt he
avowed that he would dearly have liked to
throw out the Wyndham Bill of 1903 altogether,
although he made a show of speaking in its favour,
giving again the same reason as in 1881 : " The
land trouble is a weapon in Nationalist hands and
to settle it would be to risk Home Rule." On the
day when the Bill passed its Third Reading he told
the famous Irish-American statesman, Bourke
Cockran, in the lobby of the House of Commons
that " if the Bill were allowed to work there would
be an end of the national cause before twelve
months." The prediction was in almost exactly the
same words as his prediction of twenty-three years
before, and his forebodings turned out to be still
more groundless ; but there was the same tenacious
belief from decade to decade that the passion of
Irish Nationality was too feeble to survive any
wholesale improvement in the material condition of
the people.1 Put thus bluntly, the doctrine that you

1 His public avowal of his deliberate design to cut the people
off from the relief afforded by the Act was one of the most
extraordinary ever made by a Parliamentary representative :

" It has been said that we have delayed the reinstatement of
the evicted tenants and obstructed the smooth working of the
Act. I wish to Heaven we had the power to obstruct the smooth
working of the Act more than we have. It has worked too

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 85

must keep millions of men in misery if you want
to make them free would seem almost too fantastic
to be shocking. But that was nevertheless the
underlying meaning of the determination that the
Act of 1903 must not " be allowed to work/' and
that the co-operation of Irish classes and communions
in which it originated must not be allowed to extend
itself. So little was the hostility to Land Purchase
motived by any genuine belief in its financial injustice
that after seven years even of such " working ' as
the Act had received in spite of him, Mr. Dillon
confided to the same Wilfrid Blunt in 1910 that " it

smoothly — far too smoothly, to my mind. . . . Some men have
complained that the Land Act is not working fast enough. For
my part I look upon it as working a great deal too fast. Its pace
has been ruinous to the people. "—{Speech at Swinford, September
12, 1906.)

His character for sincerity is not enhanced by the probability
that this gross misjudgment of the Act was only a cover to conceal
by a show of concern for the people's practical interests his real
grounds for hatred of the Act, but dubious as is the compliment,
there cannot be much doubt that what he was thinking of was
not that the prices were excessive, but that the success of the
Act would be ruinous to the National Cause.

Here is the judgment of an Irish-American publicist of
distinction, Rev. Father Owen B. McGuire, of the Act which
Mr. Dillon wished he had the power of obstructing, and which
he elsewhere described as " mortgaging the future of Ireland to
our hereditary enemies," and as a measure bound to end in
" National Bankruptcy."

" I have always maintained that the Land Act of 1903 was
the greatest victory since the Battle of Clontarf. The Norse
power was finally broken at Clontarf. The Anglo-Norman power
was broken by the victory of 1903. The Irish people as a result
are coming gradually into possession of the land of Ireland. The
foreign garrison is gradually disappearing. Those who remain,
no longer dependent for their position or their property on an
alien power, will be absorbed eventually by the nation and will
become Irish. The Norman invasion in its essence has been
undone by the Act of 1903. It may take some years yet to
complete the work, but complete victory is as certain as
to-morrow's dawn." — (Irish World, September 24, 1921.)

86 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

had changed the whole character of the peasantry,
and instead of being careless, idle, and improvident
had made them like the French peasantry, indus-
trious and economical, even penurious." But all
that, so far from shaking his belief in his own mission
of destruction, only made him frankly lament his
failure to prevent the transformation and confirmed
him in the stern duty not at any cost to allow an
equally happy Home Rule settlement by consent or
by any except " the old methods ' and by " doses
of the old medicine. " No more cruel reproof of
Mr. Dillon could well be devised than that he
should be compelled to re-read his own prophecies
of bankruptcy and ruin from the Act of 1903, and
then read the announcement of Mr. P. J. Hogan,
the Minister of Agriculture of the Irish Provisional
Government (September 20, 1922), after twenty
years' experience of the Land Purchase Act which
was denounced as " a landlord swindle " doomed to
" end in National Insolvency. " :

" There was still a real land trouble and that was
the problem of completing Land Purchase, which
must be solved at the first opportunity."

How little the verdict of time and of judges
prepossessed by every tie of affection in his favour
had shaken the self-satisfaction of the hapless leader
who had killed Land Purchase and Home Rule and
led his Party to its grave, may be judged from his
own calm retrospect of his achievements in a public
letter dated so late as April 29, 1921 :

" I see you fully appreciate the horrible character
of the task I undertook. But looking back on the
whole matter in the light of what has happened
since, I see nothing to regret. If I were faced with
the same circumstances, I should do again as I then
did. There was just one off-chance of saving the
country from all it has suffered during the last three
years. The Government destroyed that chance by

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 87

passing the Conscription Act and by arresting the
Sinn Fein leaders during the Cavan election. And
they did this in the teeth of repeated warnings from
me of what the result of such action would be.

" I also foresaw and warned the Sinn Fein
leaders of what the people would be up against if
they persisted in their campaign to win a Republic
by violence. So that I should have the melancholy
satisfaction of feeling that I am free of any shred of
responsibility for what is now going on in Ireland."

It would be cruel to discuss the " melancholy
satisfaction ' with which he looks back upon his
work of " saving the country by killing Land
Purchase and Home Rule and his Party to boot.

Nevertheless, so perfectly honest was Mr. Dillon's
devotion to la politique du pire — the policy that
making things worse was the only way of making
them better — that in the month following his above
extraordinary confession of faith (that is to say, in
May 1921) he followed it up, on the occasion of a
friendly meeting between President De Valera and
Sir James Craig in which all other men saw reason
for rejoicing and for a conciliatory temper, with a
public manifesto in which Mr. Dillon found nothing
better to contribute to the peace of a distracted
country than an announcement that he " was irre-
concilably opposed to the programme and methods of
the Republican Party, " and that he and his Party
would presently return to resume command of the
situation ! As wrong-headed as you please, but
pathetic in its consistency to the last with the work
of his life.

The lack of imagination broad enough to take in
the vision of a nation reconstructed by the coming
together of all her sons was Mr. Dillon's fatal
drawback as a national leader. That in an all but
miraculous opportunity of realizing such a unity, he
should see nothing but " compromise," treachery,

88 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

foul plotting, and a reason for bitterer divisions than
ever among Irish classes and parties, can only be
accounted for by a habit of suspiciousness which
was his substitute for the higher imaginative powers.
His first conception of any new idea was sure to be
the wrong one. He wholly misconceived the Plan
of Campaign at its first presentation. It was long
before he overcame his first suspicion that the United
Irish League was a conspiracy hatched by Davitt
and myself for the establishment of an Irish Republic
by force of arms. The success of the Land
Conference was so unexpected and the prospect of
still wider national harmony it opened up was so
amazing, he might have been excused for his first
exclamation on landing in Ireland after two months
absence that he found himself in a new country.
Less excusable than his slowness of apprehension
was that in the revolution effected by old colleagues
to whom he owed much and who had given hostages
of their Nationality not less genuine than his own
he should discern nothing but a national catastrophe,
and one organized not by incapables merely, but by
traitors.

That was, nevertheless, the line to which he
ultimately drifted. The first relief to his feelings
came in abuse and misrepresentation of the land-
lords who had led the way to the abdication of their
class and of the Chief Secretary and Under- Secretary
who had made the operation possible. Nobody can
peruse any public speech of his in those years
without coming across passages which the country
had later on bitter reason to lament had ever been
spoken — passages reeking with virulent racial and
class prejudices which can scarcely have been quite
sincerely felt, and directed of all men against those
Irish Unionists who had been foremost in striving to
divest their class of all the ancient causes of division.
These were, unfortunately, the class oi attacks not

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 89

only most devastating in their effect upon the hope
of winning the minority to the new policy, but the
most likely to be popular in a country which was
only the other year locked in mortal combat with
the hated territorial class. As long as it was only
a question of blocking Land Purchase, it was easy
enough to find an audience for invectives the most
lurid against " the wolfish greed of the landlords."
The unthinking might even be gulled into listening
while they were assured that what was really the
highest recommendation of the Land Conference
Agreement covered some black crime against Ireland ;
for the extraordinary grievance of the Land Purchase
killers was that it contented the landlords and the
tenants alike ; that, not only were the tenants' prices
favourable beyond belief, but " the English garrison "
of old were guaranteed a comfortable livelihood in
their native land and consequently placed above any
temptation to act as ' the English garrison ' ever
again. But the malcontents had to take up new
ground when the expropriated landlords justified the
calculations of the Land Conference by manifesting
a desire to join in the movement for Home Rule.
Their declaration for Home Rule, as to which Mr.
Redmond joyfully cabled from America : " It is
quite a wonderful thing ; with these men with us,
Home Rule may come at any moment," threw
Mr. Dillon into a fit of indignation even fiercer than
their consent to the abolition of Landlordism had
done. To counteract the movement which his own
leader received with transports of joy, he fell back
upon new and more desperate allegations and inven-
tions, the wickedness of which, if they were not the
hallucinations of a sick brain, nothing could redeem.
The country, which was already growing cold to
the daily wail of the Freeman that Land Purchase
spelt National Insolvency, had now to be worked up
into a genuine alarm by bloodcurdling revelations that

9o THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the cause of the nation was sold, and that a deep-laid
plot was on foot to betray the Party and the Freeman
and the national movement into the hands of
swindling ex-landlords and Dublin Castle Unionists.
Worst of all, to give the new plot any verisimilitude,
it had to be at first insinuated, and in the long run
brutally proclaimed, that the conspiracy of the
Wyndhams and Dunravens and Sir Antony Mac-
Donnells to supplant the Irish Party, buy up the
Nationalist constituencies, and capture the Freeman's
Journal by a base Stock Exchange " deal," had the
traitorous support of powerful Nationalist accomplices.
It was especially against one of these, who, as it
happened, had been for half a lifetime Mr. Dillon's
most intimate friend, and to whom he was indebted
for his first period of leadership, that " all the guns of
Tipperary had now to be turned against O'Brien '
(to use the Christian language of a Southern minister
of peace of the funny name of Father Innocent Ryan)
in campaign after campaign destined to make any
accommodation between Mr. Redmond and myself
impossible. Each and every one of these atrocious
allegations, of course, turned out to be " a false,
defamatory and malicious libel," and were so declared
by a jury of Mr. Dillon's countrymen. For most of
us onslaughts based on grounds so grotesquely untrue
might only have raised a smile. There was a dinner
party at Dublin Castle at which Wyndham, Lord
Dunraven, Sir Antony MacDonnell, and " a powerful
Nationalist " (as to whose identity there could be no
doubt) plotted the destruction of the Irish Party and
the substitution of a loyalist " Centre Party ' to
which the " powerful Nationalist " undertook to turn
over 1 8 Nationalist constituencies. There was a
still more awful tale of a villainous Stock Exchange
" deal J of Wyndham and his accomplices to buy
over and silence the faithful Freeman. As it
happened, I was able to mention in the witness-box

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT gi

that I had never exchanged a word with Wyndham
unless across the floor of the House of Commons,
and up to that moment had never met Lord Dun-
raven except in Mr. Redmond's company, and that
the guilty dinner was a coinage of Mr. Dillon's brain.
The famous Stock Exchange deal turned out still
more disastrously for the mythomaniacs. It was the
case of the Hen. Charles Russell, the loyallest of
Liberals, proposing to buy some Freeman snares as a
business investment for a client of whom he was the
trustee, and to place the shares in the name of Mr.
Redmond, to which Mr. Sexton, like the faithful
follower that he was of his " trusted leader ' (to
whom he had refused to speak since the Parnell
Split), point blank demurred, unless the shares were
placed in the name of that other loyal Redmondite,
Mr. Dillon, instead ! But even with the verdict,
1 false, defamatory, and malicious libellers/' branded
across their foreheads, the mythomaniacs went gaily
on, and for long years afterwards held a credulous
country in their thrall. But a danger far graver was
that, in a country deprived of all means of hearing
our answer, the reiteration of such charges by a
responsible leader did succeed in arousing among
the uninstructed a genuine National alarm, with the
result that all toleration was refused to the infant
Home Rule movement which was beginning to stir
in the Irish Unionist body. Such were the legends
— which would have been comically if they were
not wickedly false — which for the next ten years
were to deceive Ireland and Britain in their judgment
of what was happening in Ireland, and to deepen
the distrust of the Protestants and Presbyterians
of Ulster into something like a loathing for their
Catholic countrymen.

There is one other aid towards understanding
Mr. Dillon's almost personal resentment of friend-
liness to Ireland so long as it came from the

92 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Unionists. He was an hereditary Liberal of the
Manchester school. His father, who had survived
his dreams of the Young Ireland cycle, fell under
the charm of John Bright 's eloquent courtship of
Ireland — the first accents of affection that had fallen
from English lips since the early speeches of Charles
Fox — and spent his declining years under the re-
frigerating influence of Cardinal Cullen as his
coadjutor in his wars against the Fenian men. The
son was as a child fondled on the knee of the
English Tribune and began life in the cotton trade
in Manchester under his auspices. It is true that
he got his foothold in Irish public life as a member
(the only non-Fenian member) of the band of
grizzled I. R. B. extremists who carried John Mitchel
for Tipperary as the foe of all Parliamentary politics
and the unrelenting hater of the English name.
The fact seems to conflict strangely with his later
boast in the House of Commons that " he never
belonged to the Separatist group," and with his
somewhat exaggerated claim to represent a " consti-
tutional movement ' of the most rigid moderation.
But it is certain that in the wildest of the early
philippics which gained him the reputation of a new
John Mitchel, he never extended his denunciations
of England to the Liberal Party, and always
nourished the same able-bodied hate of the Tories
as Dr. Johnson did of " the Whig dogs." All this
spoiled nothing as long as Ireland's fortunes were
bound up with those of Gladstone and his Party.
Mr. Dillon's duties and tastes alike led him into
the most intimate social relations with distinguished
Liberals and made him the most effective Irish
figure on the Liberal platforms of the " Union of
Hearts ' ' campaign.

But it was a different matter when the vicissitudes
of time made it Ireland's interest no longer to regard
her Cause as the party property of any particular

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 93

set of English politicians — when, whatever was to be
got from the Tories was, on ParnelPs old principle,
to be accepted with impartial good-will — when, in
point of fact, it became more and more evident that
a combination of both British parties was the surest,
if not the only, road to a broad-based Irish settle-
ment, in the highest interest of the Empire itself as
well as of Ireland. This was a wholly new point of
view which for many years simply bewildered and
stupefied Mr. Dillon, and which, indeed, he never
came fully to understand, much less to sympathise
with. The idea of co-operating with the memorable
Irish crusade of Wyndham was to him unorthodox
to the verge of blasphemy. The greater its success
in effacing Landlordism and leading up to Home
Rule, the stronger was the patriotic duty of frustrating
it. In vain he was reminded that the new programme
of a Home Rule settlement by common consultation
between the Liberal and Unionist front benches,
and by preference under the auspices of a Unionist
Government, was in reality first suggested by
Gladstone, who in a letter to Mr. Balfour (December
20, 1885) wrote : "It will be a public calamity if
this great subject should fall into the lines of party
conflict .... and I desire specially on grounds of
public policy that it should be dealt with by the
present (Unionist) Government." Even this cir-
cumstance, as sometimes happens with zealots more
Catholic than the Pope, scarcely reconciled the pupil
who imbibed his Liberalism at the knee of John
Bright, to the notion of collaboration with the Tories,
even though it was for the realization of Gladstone's
far-seeing programme of twenty years before. When
to the suggestion of an understanding with the English
Unionist Party there was added, as a still more vital
element of success for Home Rule, an understanding
with the Irish Unionists — " our hereditary enemies,"
the " Cromwellian spawn," the true-begotten heirs

94

of Ascendancy and of Landlordism, and of every
form of oppression that had harried the native race
for centuries — the proposition was one still harder to
digest. To cap all, when, after a few months' absence
in America, he found that the success of the Land
Conference had effected such a revolution in the
national politics that " he scarcely knew it was the
same country," it is at least comprehensible that a
man of his abnormal slowness in taking in new
developments should pass from a state of bewilder-
ment to a state of sacred rage, and with the facility
with which suspicion breeds credulity, should be
unable to find any explanation of the transformation
scene except some black betrayal of the Irish Cause
by the Nationalist leaders at the helm while his
back was turned.

That is, at all events, the most indulgent apology
I can frame for the infatuation which in the last
two Parliaments made him the prime mover in the
expulsion of Wyndham from Ireland and the stoppage
of Land Purchase and in the Parliament now elected
was to make him the dictator of a policy ending in
the annihilation of the Home Rule movement and
the Partition of the country. The Unionist Party
could do no right and the Liberal Party could do
no wrong.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 95

CHAPTER IV

THE Home Rule Parliament of 1911 had a power
little short of unbounded to make up to Ireland for
the loss of the Home Rule understanding with the
Unionist Government of 1903 and for the wanton
stoppage of Land Purchase, by devising and passing
a statesmanlike Home Rule settlement of their own.
The Irish Party had it in their power to compel
such a settlement, if it were not voluntarily forth-
coming. Theirs was session after session a casting
vote, such as Ireland had never possessed before and
can never possess again in the Imperial Parliament
— a casting vote incomparably more continuous and
decisive than the few momentary flashes of power
which had enabled Parnell in 1885 within six months
to bring both British Parties competing to be first
in the race for a Home Rule entente. What portion
of the blame is to be assigned to the Liberal
Government, and what to Ireland's own plenipo-
tentiaries, for the feebleness, or mismanagement,
which squandered all these treasures of power to
no avail ? How are we to measure the responsibility
of men, who, not content with failing to pass any
measure of national self-government worth Ireland's
acceptance, made their Home Rule Bill, such as it
was, the means of perpetrating the most intolerable
outrage England ever offered to Ireland in the worst
ages of her tyranny, by cutting our venerable island
into two nations, statutably designed and carved up
in order to be hostile ones ? Heavy is the account
which both Irishmen and Liberals have to answer

96 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

for. By a miracle of conjoint bungling they turned
a country brimming over with friendliness to the
English people into an Irish Republic separated from
England in everything beyond the gun-range of her
armies.

None except the very young or the very thought-
less in Ireland are likely to underprize the dignity
imparted to the Irish nation in the world's eyes by
the fervour with which Gladstone devoted the close
of his stately life to her service. But for many years
after his taking off, Gladstone's name was not
mentioned in the House of which he had been the
glory, and his Irish policy was shunned by the
leaders of his party as a topic too ghastly to be
recalled. Lord Rosebery, who had won his premier-
ship over the old man's body and did not deserve
to hold it long, turned his leisure in Opposition to
account by forming his ex-Cabinet into a Liberal
League, the principal object of which was to dis-
encumber the Liberal Party from their Home Rule
commitments. Mr. Asquith, Sir E. Grey, and Mr.
Haldane suffered themselves to be seduced into a
recantation which was scarcely honest under a leader
who, they soon found out, did not deserve to lead.
Mr. Morley, indeed, did not relinquish a certain
forlorn allegiance to the Irish Cause to which he
owed his all in public life. But it was he, as he
reveals in an Autobiography which will leave
posterity puzzled as to whether he is to be classed
as a Stoic or a Cynic — it was he of all men who
made the Parnell Split inevitable. It was he, again
on the same amazing authority, who was one of the
chief actors in the intrigue by which Gladstone's
intrepid resolution to appeal to the country against
the House of Lords' rejection of the Home Rule
Bill of 1893 was overborne, and by a change as
violent as from Augustus to Augustulus, Lord
Rosebery was put in the dismissed statesman's place.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 97

The Secret Diaries of Sir Algernon West reveal
Gladstone's own judgment both ot Rosebery and
of Morley. Of Rosebery 's " predominant partner '
speech, in a passage which is the eternal reproach
of Liberal time-serving and the complete justification
of the Irish Revolution Gladstone made the remark :
" Rosebery 's speech about convincing England in
connection with Home Rule was most unfortunate
and easily answered by Irishmen, who might say
(and here he became earnest and very serious),
* How are we to convince you ? Is it as we did
by the Volunteers, by the Tithe War, when Welling-
ton said it was yielding to Civil War ' (or by some
third thing I forget) * which are the only means
that ever have convinced England ? ' (page 295).
Of Morley we are told that Gladstone " deplored
John Morley *s threat of resignation and want of
consideration " at crucial moments, and added " he
had tried to persuade John Morley not to return to
political life, for which he was not naturally fitted '
(page 334)-1

1 Irish quarrels give the Pharisees much scandal, because they
are apt to come off in public. The quarrels of English politicians
are vastly more venomous, only the backbiting is conducted
confidentially and the victims escape the public eye, as do those
of Turkish palace intrigues by being consigned to the Bosphorus
in sacks. The extraordinary Private Diaries of Sir Algernon West
might well put Irishmen in a more comfortable humour with
themselves when they compare the malice and pettiness of it all
with our own noisier but less malignant wars. While the Grand
Old Man is battling like a hero to the last against old age and
half-hearted colleagues we have Asquith coolly proposing to
abduct him to the House of Lords ; the austere Morley " in one
of his humours " protesting that Harcourt's " invariable insolence
was too dreadful," and vowing he " would never again attend a
Cabinet in which Plarcourt sat ;" Rosebery with his insomnia and
his nerves of a sick school-girl almost starting an international
war, because the French Ambassador, at an evening party, spoke
to Gladstone and not to his Foreign Minister ; members of the

98 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was, judging by
the experience of the present writer, the only Liberal
statesman of the first rank, after Gladstone, who
never flinched from the Home Rule convictions in
which he had " found salvation ' even before
Gladstone. Epithets like " honest/' " straight/'
" single-hearted/' leaped to the lips of all who came
into contact with the breezy personality of the man.
He possessed also an intellectual grasp and breadth
nearer to genius than his unpretending exercise of a
commonsense not disdainful of the commonplace
might sometimes lead the commonplace to suspect.
He had, in addition, that undaunted fighting spirit
of the Borders, which was not to be put down by a
succession of the bleakest rebuffs in Opposition or
of still more disheartening quarrels and calumnies
among his chief lieutenants or rivals. We Irish
often envied him the imperturbable coolness with
which he held his way in the midst of domestic
dissensions, far more rancorous, although better
concealed from the public, than our own, and even
gave them a genial turn out of his abundant stores of
the sly humour of his nation. His strength lay in that
instinct of the people which values character above
intellectual subtlety and in the fidelity to Ireland
and to his leadership of a great mass of Liberals of

Cabinet declining to speak to each other or bargeing each other
on the Treasury Bench under the eyes of the House of Commons ;
the arrogant old Queen Victoria, flying out at Gladstone for giving
her son, the Prince of Wales, any hint of what went on at Cabinet
meetings, and so on to the tragic moment when the smooth-faced
Asquith and the semi-Stoic, semi -Epicurean Morley and the
blustering Harcourt combined to prevent Gladstone from dying
with his Home Rule harness on his back and to put the decadent
Rosebery in his place. Our proneness to " personalizing " politics
— to attending rather to quis dicit than to quid didtur — is an evil
national habit, which it ought to be one of the first tasks of the
future to correct ; but the fallings-out of Irish public men, if they
are more outspoken, are at least less Pharisaic than is the Anglo-
Saxon way.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 99

the finest school — " good grey men ' of the stamp
of Shaw Lefevre, John Ellis, Henry Wilson, William
Pollard Byles, Joshua Rowntree, and Jacob Bright —
whose memory still smells sweet to Irish nostrils,
although the waters of Lethe are already beginning
to close softly over their names. When in the fulness
of time the sorely-battered Liberal leader emerged
victorious from the General Election of 1906, and,
as Lord Shaw with a relish relates to us, was in a
position to tell Mr. Asquith, Sir E. Grey, and Mr.
Haldane to take the offices he assigned to them or
go their ways, he had to put up with a Party in
which the Rosebery influence was still strong enough
to threaten the disruption of the Liberal majority if
the Irish policy of Gladstone were revived. The
Irish Council Bill was the best he could do in the
circumstances of that particular Parliament, but he
never made any concealment of the fact that the
compromise was only to be thought of as one
" consistent with, and leading up to, the larger
policy " which it was the supreme glory of his Prime
Ministry to have led to triumph in South Africa.
Neither did he waver from his profession of faith
made so long ago as 1885 that a true Irish settle-
ment must be had by friendly conference among
leaders on both sides and by " raising the question
out of the arena of party strife." When the
astonishing success of the Land Conference made
such a combination of parties and classes practical
politics, he so far conquered his own aversion to
Treasury subsidies to the landlords as to give his
hearty adhesion to the Unionist Chief Secretary's
proposal to make the Bonus which was of the essence
of the Bill of 1903 a free grant out of the Imperial
Exchequer ; and there can be little risk of wronging
his memory in taking it for granted that, if he had
continued to be Prime Minister, he would never
have been a party to making a Liberal Government

ioo THE IRISH REVOLUTION

responsible for the Act of 1909 which undid the
work of conference and conciliation, and once for
all flung the cause of Ireland back into " the arena
of party strife."

" 10 Downing Street,

"July i, 1907.
1 Private.
" DEAR MR. O'BRIEN,

" I am much obliged for your letter and for the
copy of your article,1 which has not yet come to
hand, but which I shall read with much interest.

" I have shown your letter to Mr. Birrell, who
desires me to say that he has the pleasantest recol-
lections of you in the House, and that he will always
be glad to receive any suggestions and communica-
tions you have to make. We fully share your view
that it would be foolish and disastrous to do anything
that would injuriously interfere with the progress of
Land Purchase and the working of the Act. His
views will be fully explained when the expected
discussion takes place.

" Believe me,

" Yours very truly,

" H CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN."

As much may be affirmed with only less confidence
of Mr. Bryce if he had remained Chief Secretary,
what with his contempt for partisan intolerance, and
his native-born knowledge how much the agrarian
settlement had done to mollify Ulster. On this
point Mr. Morley, too, had the far-sightedness to
go even further than Wyndham, and argued that it
would be a cheap bargain for England to be rid of
the Land War by all but doubling the amount of
the Bonus proposed by the Unionists as a free gift

1 In The Nineteenth Century, dealing with the collapse of the
Irish Council Bill.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 101

from the Imperial Treasury. He had not far-
sightedness sufficient to anticipate that he would be
himself a member of a Liberal Government which
in the Home Rule Bill of 1912 was to be guilty of
the unspeakable meanness of saddling the " free
Imperial gift ' of the Bonus (which Mr. Morley
chivalrously doubled) upon the shoulders of Ireland
as an Irish debt to be reckoned against Ireland in
the Home Rule Act of 1914. Sir E. Grey and
Mr. Haldane, likewise, had already so far emanci-
pated themselves from the Rosebeery control as to
give their cordial support to the new entente cordiale
in Ireland in the debate which pledged the Liberal
Party to support Wyndham in passing the Purchase
Act of 1903 by consent.

From that debate Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd
George, the two most powerful men in the Ministry
which followed Campbell-Bannerman's death, were
conspicuous absentees, et pour cause. They, like all
healthy Radicals, always found a peculiar virtue in
railing against extending public aid to landlordism
in any circumstances, even in the case of Ireland,
where the aid was in reality given not for the
support of landlordism, but in order to rid Ireland
of a feudal tyranny set up by England for her
own selfish purposes. They, however, obeyed
Campbell-Bannerman's lead in, more or less surlily,
letting the Act of 1903 reach the Statute-book
as an agreed measure. In the new Parliament
of 1911, where the Irish vote was paramount,
no Radical in his senses would have dreamed of
upsetting that settlement — the happiest in the history
of English rule, and happy above all because it was
of Irish, not of English, inspiration — if the repre-
sentatives of Ireland had forbidden the perfidy.
When, however, the Liberals found the real leaders
of the Irish Party hating the Act of 1903 more
ferociously than themselves, and even discovering a

102 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

perverted patriotism in huding the Treasury Com-
mittee's plans for its destruction, the Asquiths and
Lloyd Georges would have been beings of super-
politician clay, if they had not gratified at the same
time Irish grudges and a penurious Treasury by
bidding a practically united Liberal Party cut up the
last roots of the settlement of 1903 by their ill-starred
Birrell Act of 1909.

And now came the -question whether the Asquith
Cabinet, having done Ireland the wrong of killing
Land Purchase to please the Radical economists and
Irish enemies of peace would at least repair the
disaster by a courageous measure of Home Rule in
which not more than three of their immense party
majority had any desire to cross them ? The tem-
perament of the new Prime Minister was to be the
deciding — or rather indecisive — factor. My first
meeting with Mr. Asquith was at the headquarters of
the National League in Dublin in 1886, when he sought
the aid of Harrington and myself in the investigations
by which he was to make up his mind on which side
of the fence he was to get down in the Coercion
struggle then impending. A sharp-featured, close-
shaven lawyer man with the English habit of self-
suppression, cultivated to the point of showing no
visible trace of human emotion of any kind — an
advocate, not an enthusiast, who put his questions
and jotted down his facts, not with any pretence of
a lyric passion for Irish nationality, but as the
materials for a brief which was to decide the side
he was to take in the great assize of life. My first
impression was all astray. Mr. Asquith seemed
to be a harder man, but also a more resolute one,
than he subsequently turned out to be. Mr.
Haldane, who accompanied him and introduced
him, seemed to me then, if he does not seem to me
still, the greater man of the two ; possibly the
favourable first impression was to some extent in-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 103

fluenced by the combination of a round chubby face
less churlish of presenting its sympathetic side, a
voice with something of the fat unction of a Free
Church divine, and the intellectual calm of a German
philosopher on his dreamy heights. Mr. Haldane
himself, whether it be to the credit of his modesty
or of his penetration, was quite content to play the
second fiddle of the party, and left Harrington and
myself in no doubt that he regarded Mr. Asquith
as the first figure in the Liberalism of the coming
time. Mr. Asquith Js researches in Dublin were so
little finally conclusive that he still wandered for a
good many years in the barren places of Lord
Rosebery's Liberal League and out of them like a
gentleman in search of his political religion, and had
not dogmatically settled his creed even when a by
no means enamoured Liberal Party called him to
the Prime Ministership. All that was known was
that his was a debating sword fit to measure itself
on even terms with Chamberlain's own on the rare
occasions when his foot was stoutly planted and his
fighting blood was up. My first distrust of his icy
lawyer ways proved to be quite a mistaken one.
He never harboured a thought of betraying Ireland.
He came to have a genuine affection for the country
and an ever-widening appreciation of her aspirations.
That his term of office did end in colossal failure
and futility was due not to his want of a warm
heart, but to his want of a firm will ; to a lack of
first-hand knowledge of Ireland which really never
until too late went beyond his first experimental
trial-trip to the headquarters of the League ; above
all, to his deficiency of that power of framing a great
scheme of policy and standing by it through thick
and thin, in which Campbell- Bannerman, vastly his
inferior in intellectual equipment, was as decidedly
his superior, and these are the things of statesman-
ship that matter. I am absolutely convinced that
H

104 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Mr. Asquith never really knew what he did, when
he destroyed the Policy of Conciliation by the
Act of 1909, or when for Home Rule for Ireland he
substituted Partition. By a singular stroke of fate,
the genial development of character which only
success revealed in him, turned out to be rather a
decadence than a virtue. The roses of Egypt ener-
vated the resolves even of a Mark Antony hardened
in the tragedy of the Roman Forum, and the iron
wars that followed. The Mr. Asquith in whom
even his own followers dreaded a certain Noncon-
formist austerity and aloofness ended as a supremely
good fellow, whose weakness was to be an only too
indolent good nature, and whose worst fault was to
be an easy indecision. The day when he called in
Mr. Lloyd George to relieve him of the burden of
seeking an Irish solution he sealed the fate of Home
Rule and his own as well.

It is, perhaps, a melancholy compliment to the
politician profession to say so, but if Mr. Lloyd
George had been Prime Minister instead of Mr.
Asquith with all Mr. Asquith's advantages in the
Parliament of 1911, he would have carried Home
Rule without flinching and Partition would never
have been heard of. It was not that he was as
great a statesman, but that he was a more painstaking
and fearless one. It is not easy to do justice as
between Mr. Lloyd George's imagination in con-
ceiving great designs and his unscrupulousness in
realizing them. Were he in the saddle as Prime
Minister, with a confident majority at his back and
the House of Lords under his feet, or, better still,
squared, and an Irish Party resourceful to suggest
and resolute to have its way, he would have wheedled
hrough or guillotined through a Home Rule Act
worth battling for ; he would have bad the imagi-
nation to understand there was a side of the
Protestant minority resistance not to be laughed

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 105

down as the bluff of " wooden gun-men, " or to be
disposed of by Mr. Devlin's undertaking to clear
the Covenanters out of his path if the police and
military would only make a ring and stand aside ;
but having offered " Ulster " the peace and honour
in their own country which Mr. De Valera and
Mr. Collins tendered with as lavish a hand in 1921
as we did in 1911, he would have bidden Sir E.
Carson, if he still talked of armed resistance, to obey
the law like the common citizen of commerce, and
we should never have heard of his latter-day u two
nations ' theory with which he has since lashed a
world-wide Irish race into rebellion.

But as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Rule
was not Mr. Lloyd George's job ; and he was never
the man to leave the little wares of his own Department
unadvertised — no matter how the market ruled. His
first daring coup was to cut off for his own share a
year out of the new Parliament's five, and that the
first year, when energies are freshest. This appro-
priation for his National Insurance Bill was an
impudent injustice to Ireland, to secure ' ' full self-
government " for which was the first task for which
the Liberals were elected — a purpose which was only
to be effected by passing a Home Rule Bill without
alteration through three successive sessions of the
five available. His feat could never have been
attempted without the complaisance of an indolent
Prime Minister and a criminally inefficient Irish
Party. As we have seen, he had already hitched
their waggon to his fortunes by " the great and good
Budget " of 1910. The alliance between them was
strengthened when he saw his Irish enthusiasts come
back from the General Election in undiminished
numbers, in spite of the proofs that his and their
engagements that Ireland's burden under the Budget
would not exceed £400,000 a year had been already
falsified and our own estimate of £2,000,000 sub-

106 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

stantially realized. It was Ireland's unhappy destiny
that the fame of Mr. Lloyd George which was to
be the means of subjecting her to many bitter years
of betrayal and civil war was mainly of Irish
manufacture. The Hibernian stalwarts who raised his
" great and good Budget ' to the stars, and yelled
their delight at every taunt and gibe of his at those
of us who strove for the humblest hearing for
Ireland's financial claims, now came back to the new
Parliament fired with a wilder enthusiasm for Mr.
Lloyd George than for any other member of the
Home Rule Ministry. Not a protesting voice was
raised while the first year of * the Home Rule
Parliament " was snatcned from Home Rule and
devoted to a National Insurance Bill, which Ireland
had never demanded — which she even repudiated,
through the unanimous voice of the Irish Bishops,
as a measure harassing and entirely unsuited to the
country. It was Mr. Lloyd George's second playful
wrestle with the Irish Party, the Budget of 1910
having been the first. It was also his first trial of
strength with his Prime Minister. The result must
have been to give him a foretaste of the easy
ascendancy over his happy-go-lucky chief, as well as
over the Hibernian politicians, which was subse-
quently to bring the one and the other to their
ignominious collapse. The extent of his success can
only be measured by imagining his coolly proposing
to Gladstone and Parnell to adjourn Home Rule
over the first year of a Home Rule Parliament in the
interest of a third-rate Departmental Bill !

But the Insurance Bill contained one proviso but
for which it is probable the acquiescence of the Irish
leaders in Mr. Lloyd George's audacious deal would
not have been so tame : it endowed the Board of
Erin Hibernians out of public funds with an enor-
mous mass of patronage under a separate Department
of their naming, and an organized financial power

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 107

extending to every parish in the country. The Bill
thenceforth made the Lodges of the Order the
official source of emolument and honour in the eyes
of the whole prolific family of placehunters and
toadies. Mr. Lloyd George's next measure struck
much more deeply at the independence of the Irish
Party. The secret of the strength of Parneirs Party
was its direct contact with and dependence on Irish
opinion. Being for the most part poor men, its
members found no shame in being aided by the
subscriptions of their own countrymen to do the
country's business. So long as that business was
efficiently done, the country gladly contributed their
modest allowances and considered themselves the
debtors of their representatives rather than their
paymasters in the transaction. The essential point
was that the people at home were the fly-wheel
which kept the Parliamentary machinery in motion,
and were in a position instantly to correct any slack-
ness on the part of their delegates at Westminster.
All this was now to be suddenly and stealthily
changed. By a simple entry on his Estimates, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed to turn the
House of Commons into a salaried body enjoying a
Treasury subsidy of £400 a year, so long as the
Chancellor for the time being chose to renew the
estimate. However much may be said (and I think
all may be said) for the payment of members by a
self-governed State, the proposal to make Irish
representatives the stipendiaries of a foreign Govern-
ment, to wrest Self-Government from whom was
their first business in Westminster, was to Irish
Nationalists a hateful one, and would have been
rejected without hesitation by the country, had it
been honestly submitted for their judgment at the
General Election. So obviously would this have
been the verdict of Irish opinion that the Hibernian
Party received the first announcement of Mr. Lloyd

io8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

George's estimate with a self-denying resolution
which seemed firmly to wave aside the bribe, and
reaffirmed the old sound principle that an Irish
Party must be content to depend upon the voluntary
contributions of their own countrymen. However,
having lulled any uneasiness in Ireland to rest by
their virtuous protestation, they proceeded, without
any further consultation of Irish opinion, to give a
unanimous Party vote — and by their vote alone a
majority was secured — for the Chancellor of the
Exchequer's estimate, on the pitiful plea that in
voting themselves their Treasury salaries, they were
only voting like sound democrats in the interest of
a poor English Labour Party.

The transaction was hustled out of notice in the
Hibernian newspapers as ingeniously as through the
House of Commons. Probably not one Irishman
in a thousand realized that, by a single vote in
Committee, the fundamental principle on which the
Irish Party was built up of direct accountability to
the Irish people, was once for all demolished. But
few will now dispute that from the night they voted
themselves into Treasury salaries, and thus deprived
their constituents of the power of the purse, as the
Hibernian organization had already stripped the
people of any real voice in their election, may be
dated the decadence which was fated to bring the
Parliamentary movement from one stage of deterio-
ration to another to its final extinguishment by the
consenting voice of a whole race. It would be
unjust to suppose that any outside a very scurvy but
very small inner ring of that Party were influenced
by any sordid personal interest in their Parliamentary
subsidies, still less that they foresaw the door they
were opening to more painful fallings-away which
were to follow, when swearing that they'd ne'er
consent, they consented to eat the Lloyd George
forbidden fruit. But it was that very inability to

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 109

foresee the ultimate — sometimes even the immediate
— consequences of their action which stamped the
leadership of the National movement in those
momentous years with an irredeemable taint of
incapacity, and made the Party easy tools of Mr.
Lloyd George, in whatever uses he chose to put
them to from his first Budget wizardries to his final
Partition Act.

The alliance formed between Mr. Lloyd George
and Sir Edward Carson completed the supremacy of
Mr. Lloyd George and the bedevilment of Home
Rule. The event was due to Mr. Asquith's incon-
ceivable weakness in admitting to one of the highest
posts in his Cabinet a man whose preparations for
civil war in Ulster notoriously incited the Kaiser to
precipitate the conflagration that covered the world.
More amazingly still, this transformation of the
potential rebel into a chief ruler of the Empire
passed without a protesting word from the Irish
Party, who, without exacting any conditions for the
future of Home Rule, either from the Coalition
Government or from Sir E. Carson, permitted the
Ministry of the Home Rule majority to be dissolved
and its place taken by a Coalition Cabinet of which
(Mr. Lloyd George being still a dark horse) the
two most potent members were the two most potent
enemies of Ireland — Sir E. Carson and Mr. Bonar
Law. The offer to Mr. Redmond of an insignificant
Postmaster- Generalship by way of counterpoise was
an almost contemptuous aggravation of the wrong
with which the friendliness of Ireland at the outset
of the war was repaid, with the connivance of her
own representatives. In his new character as
Minister of Munitions, Mr. Lloyd George was not
long in recognizing in the Ulster and Unionist
leaders his most valuable coadjutors in the Coalition
Government, and the inevitable result of the com-
bination is told in Col. Repington's Diary, revealing

no THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the means and the men by which Mr. Asquith was
overthrown in the Cabinet of his own making :

" Sunday. Deer. 3, 1916. — Last Friday began a
great internal crisis when L. G. wrote to the P(rime)
M(inister) that he could not go on unless our methods
of waging war were speeded up. He proposed a
War Council of Three, including himself, Bonar
Law, and Carson. The two latter are with him,
which means the Unionists, too." — (The First World
War, Vol. i, p. 403.)

Mr. Lloyd George came out on top, and he was
neither sufficiently stupid, nor sufficiently ungrateful,
ever to forget the two men who were the pillars of
his greatness. From the new Triple Alliance (once
more established in power with the uncomplaining
assent of an invertebrate Irish Party) * may be dated
not merely Sir E. Carson's triumphant escape from
his responsibilities for the war in the eyes of the
British people, but his henceforth unquestioned
mastery of the Irish policy of the Coalition. In the
early stages of the Home Rule Bill, so far as Mr.
Lloyd George had discovered Ulster at all, it was
rather to play up to the delicate Hibernian facetiae
at the expense of her wooden guns and her game
of bluff and bluster. We may be sure that when
the Bill was introduced in 1912, he would as soon
have anticipated the day when he would commit
the Mabinogion to the flames or denounce Llewellyn
as an historic imposture as that he would presently
be found denying the very existence of an Irisn
Nation more bitterly than Sir Edward Carson. Like

1 The All-for-Ireland members found all parties combined in
ruling out the smallest mention of the matter in the House.
Nothing could have prevented the Irish Party any night they
chose from moving the Adjournment in order to discuss it ; but
they sat dumb. They would only have recorered their voices
for a roar of exultant derision, if we had tried to get the necessary
40 members to rise and failed.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT in

Lord Randolph Churchill, he only discovered Ulster
when it served his politician's purpose, and he not
unnaturally placed pretty high Sir Edward Carson's
price as an ally in matters that more concerned him.
It was Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law who
had raised him to his dizzy height of power, and it
was the cheapest of exchanges to be thenceforth
their obedient servant in the affairs of Ireland.

As unscrupulous as you please — although doubt-
less softened to his conscience by the thought that
he was saving the Empire in a great emergency as
well as carrying his own ambitions to the stars —
but if from that time forth it became certain that a
Partition scheme dictated by Sir Edward Carson and
Mr. Bonar Law was the only possible settlement to
be offered to Ireland — if for years after the Irish
Parliamentary Party had passed away, no acceptable
terms of truce could be offered to Sinn Fein, until
the two countries had been shocked with all the
horrors of civil war — it must never be left out of
sight that it was only because the indulgent bonhomie
of Mr. Asquith had' enabled Sir Edward Carson to
meet his co-conspirators on an equal footing in his
Cabinet, and because the triumph of the conspiracy
received the mute assent of an Irish Party, who had
already accepted the very Partition scheme which
Sir Edward Carson eventually carried into law.

112

CHAPTER V

HOW " ULSTER " BECAME THE DIFFICULTY

EVEN instructed Irishmen are to this day without
any clue to the riddle why Ireland, described
(a little extravagantly) by Sir E. Grey at the outbreak
of the World-War as " the one bright spot on the
horizon," should, before many months were over,
break out in rebellion and abandon Parliamentary
methods altogether. The change was far from being
as sudden or as fickle as it seemed. The discredit
long undermining the Parliamentary movement did,
to an amazing degree, escape public observation, but
it was because the Press of the two countries, for
opposite reasons which will be found disclosed in
these pages, combined to keep the British public in
entire ignorance, and the mass of the Irish people
in an ignorance scarcely less tragic, of the deep
stirrings of opinion that were all the time at work
under the surface.

For example, it was the consent of the Hibernian
leaders to the first suggestions of Partition which was
the root-cause of Sir Edward Carson's ascendancy
in the counsels of British Cabinets : that was, also,
the secret of the disgust with the Parliamentary
politicians, long fermenting in the bosoms of the
young generation, which found its first wild ex-
plosion in the insurrection of Easter Week. But of
this either the public never heard, or only preserve
a memory slipshod beyond all the usual freaks of
that treacherous medium. Many are under the
impression that the exclusion of " Ulster " was only
submitted to bv Mr. Redmond and his friends under

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 113

the pressure of the World-War, and of a Coalition
Government ; it was, in truth, accepted in principle
many months before a war with Germany was in
the thoughts of any of the parties concerned, and
while a Home Rule Government, expressly elected
to " give full self-government to Ireland " — all
Ireland — was still in possession of its majority of
more than 90 in the House of Commons, and of an
irresistible means of silencing the House of Lords.
Many more allowed themselves to be persuaded that
the exclusion was only offered because it was known
that " Ulster ' would reject it, and that it was, in
any case, to be only a temporary arrangement for
six years. Two other gross impositions on public
credulity ; for the exclusion was from the first
moment grasped at by Sir E. Carson and Mr. Bonar
Law, if only as the least of two evils, and so little
was it to be " temporary J> in its operation that the
Hibernian leaders fully closed with it after the Home
Rule Prime Minister had in their presence avowed
that it was an exclusion never to be repealed without
a fresh Act of the Imperial Parliament. Nay, there
is a sleepy public which has managed to forget
altogether that Partition was ever sanctioned by
seven-eighths of the Nationalist representatives of
Ireland, and would be horrified to be awakened to
the fact that they agreed to surrender to Sir Edward
Carson precisely the same Six Counties which Mr.
Lloyd George afterwards separated from Ireland in
his Partition Act of 1921, and that the Nationalists
of the Six Counties themselves were forced by the
Hibernian leaders in public Convention to ratify
the bargain, and to be thus [made consenting
parties to their own denationalization, and to
all the horrors that followed it. To these funda-
mental truths and to many others, the general
public was, and is, blind, or what is worse,
purblind.

1 14 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Under these circumstances, it becomes a duty of
supreme historic interest to trace the true genesis of
the Ulster Difficulty and its progress to Partition
under the joint mismanagement of a fumbling Liberal
administration and of its sinister Hibernian bear-
leaders. The narrative will throw a revealing light
upon the whole story of Ireland ever since — the
statutable recognition of the two-nation theory in
substitution for the ideal of Ireland a Nation — the
falling to pieces of the Parliamentary movement of
its own decay and rottenness — and the years of
bitter agony that came after, when the Republican
idealists of a new generation gave unstintedly of
their young blood in the endeavour to redeem the
pitiful errors of their elders.

That mismanagement there was, gross as a
mountain, is placed beyond controversy, by the
confessions of Mr. Lloyd George and Sir E. Grey,
already quoted. What plea has British statesmanship
to offer, why wisdom did not come to them in 1912,
when Mr. Asquith's Home Rule Bill was being
framed, but only nine years afterwards when the
Act was expunged from the Statute-Book without a
protesting voice from any side, to be succeeded by
an Act more disastrous still ? Their most plausible
defence is that they were constitutionally bound to
follow the guidance of the majority of the represen-
tatives of the nation they were enfranchising. All
save eight of these representatives jauntily assured
them there was no longer an Ulster Difficulty, the
alarms of the Protestant minority were imaginary,
the threats of armed resistance were part of a
gigantic game of bluff which could without difficulty
be disposed of by the police, or, for that matter, by
the Hibernian mob in the streets of Belfast, if the
police and military would only stand aside. It is
a defence which has been more than once pleaded
by Mr. Lloyd George. However pedantically

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 115

defensible from the constitutional point of view, this
repudiation of responsibility is more worthy of
Party Whips than of statesmen charged with an
international task of the first moment. Let the
blame be bandied about as it may between the three
Hibernian leaders and their Liberal entertainers at
the famous breakfast party in Downing Street, the
fact stands that the Bill which emerged from their
deliberations did not contain in its forty-eight clauses
a single provision to satisfy, or even to recognize
the existence of those deep-lying discontents of more
than a million of the Irish population which were
afterwards to make shipwreck of the Home Rule
Government and of their Bill, and to start a new
and more virulent blood-feud between the two
countries, if not in a very considerable degree to
precipitate the world-wide conflagration from whose
effects civilization is still staggering.

How came it that a body of Irishmen not wanting
in ability, or in a patriotism of their own, could have
displayed a lack of vision so incurable, or an insen-
sibility so callous to the interests and passionate
emotions of one-fourth of their countrymen ? The
puzzle, otherwise incomprehensible, becomes simple
enough when we call to mind the transformation the
Irish Party had been undergoing for the previous
nine years. Ever since the revolt against the Land
Conference settlement of 1903, the Party had been
taught to regard that union of parties and classes
which had peacefully abolished Landlordism, and
might have abolished English rule with still less
difficulty by the same means, as an unmitigated
national misfortune. Every attempt to re-establish
that solidarity of Irishmen of all racial and religious
origins which had already wrought such wonders,
was regarded by the new leaders of the Party with
distrust and aversion as a conspiracy of " rotten
Protestants and rotten Catholics "to displace the

n6 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Party from their hold upon the country and betray
them into the hands of Heaven knows what fantastic
combination in a " Centre Party " of swindling Irish
landlords, English Tory Ministers, and Nationalist
traitors. The moment the propagators of these
libels were brought to book before a Limerick jury,
they either fled the witness-chair altogether, like
Mr. Dillon, or made a piteous breakdown under
cross-examination, like Mr. Sexton. Each and
every one of the six portentous charges they dared
to put in concrete form was declared to be a false
and defamatory libel, and to have been published
with malice. Unashamed by the exposure, they
persisted, although with a more cautious eye to the
law of libel, in re-hinting and re-insinuating every
item in this tissue of ridiculous fables, hunting
down the Irish Unionists of the new school with
all the more malignity the further they advanced
towards Irish National ideals, and the greater
was their success in attracting their brother Pro-
testants to follow in their train, while they
branded as manifest traitors every Nationalist who
did not join in the hunt. The Irish country gentle-
men and city merchants — always a sensitive and
timorous folk on the political stage — were quite
successfully intimidated from taking the plunge of
open conversion to the National side by the coarse
imputations upon their honour, their family history,
and their racial and religious traditions, which had
been the only reward of the first of their class who
had been the pioneers. After which, with a scru-
pulousness all their own, the libellers who had
treated the sympathetic welcome extended by the
All-for-Ireland League to the new school of Irish
Unionists as some unspeakable crime against Ireland,
now made the success of their own intimidation an
audacious argument how completely all the efforts of
the All-for-Ireland League to conciliate the Irish
Unionist minority had been a failure.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 117

Had a different temper prevailed, few will now
doubt that the mass of the Irish Unionists might
have been long ago incorporated in a United Ireland,
and the opposition reduced to a narrow strip of
territory around Belfast. Even N. E. Ulster, a patient
and indulgent tolerance must have irresistibly brought
back to its old allegiance to the principles of
Grattan's Volunteers and of the United Irishmen.
That the anticipation was not a too sanguine one,
is testified by the eagerness with which great county
meetings of magistrates and Deputy Lieutenants and
of the industrialists and captains of commerce in the
cities gave in their adhesion to Home Rule fifteen
years later on the first symptoms that their co-
operation would be genuinely welcomed. Their
adhesion and the genuine welcome unluckily came
too late. I have often heard honest country gentle-
men and Protestant merchants and farmers lament
that their leaders had not the moral courage to rally
manfully to our ranks, before Sir E. Carson had
formed his army of dour Ulster bigots and thrown
the Southern Unionists to the wolves. They hesi-
tated and were lost. Even a number of young Irish
Unionists who had graduated in Lord Dunraven's
school of patriotism, and who were not to be
frightened by intimidation, allowed themselves to
succumb to the subtler temptation of seats in
Parliament to transfer their services to the side of
immediate power and patronage. Young men of
excellent gifts like Mr. Walter MacMurrough
Kavanagh, Mr. Stephen Gwynn, Mr. Hugh Law,
and Mr. Shane Leslie, might have become the
honoured leaders of a re-awakened Protestant
patriotism had they chosen the harder part of
representing the traditions of their own rank and
creed and brought their co-religionists with them to
a higher plane of National ambition. They were
content instead to merge themselves in the little

ii8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

group of tame Protestant Home Rulers maintained
for obvious reasons at Westminster as the nominees
of a Hibernian Party to whose inner rites their
religion forbade their admission.

But a vastly more formidable, and, indeed, an
impassable barrier to the conciliation of the Protestant
minority was raised by the fundamental transfor-
mation of the United Irish movement itself from a
national to a sectarian one. For generations Irish
Protestants, far from accepting the position of aliens
in Ireland's undying fight for liberty, had supplied
the major part of its poetry and eloquence, had been
its leaders and soldiers and martyrs. When the
United Irish League was founded in 1898 to recreate
the country's forces, shattered by the Parnell Split
of 1890, the basis and first article of its Constitution
was copied from that of Wolfe Tone's Society of
United Irishmen, mostly Protestants and Dissenters,
who pledged themselves " to promote a union of
power, friendship, and affection between Irishmen of
every religious persuasion." Men who had no part
in the foundation of the United Irish League — who,
in truth, bitterly resented its intrusion because it put
an end to the impotent rivalries of the Parliamentary
factions into which the Parnell movement had broken
up — had no sooner insinuated themselves into power
in the new organization than they proceeded to
subvert its first principle of the broadest religious
and political equality and paved the way towards its
perversion into a squalid confederacy of Catholic
place-hunters. The Irish world would have quite
certainly risen up in horror against the design had
they known, or even suspected, that the effect would
be to ostracise from the national ranks, unless on
terms of inequality intolerable to men of honour,
the co-religionists of the Grattans, Wolfe Tones,
Emmets, Davises, and Parnells, whose names had
been for a century and a half the most sacred in
their political hagiology.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 119

The change was accomplished in secrecy and
with considerable craft, and, needless to say, only
after the founders of the League had withdrawn or
been driven out. The public organization of the
United Irish League, with its broad maxims of civil
and religious equality and fraternity, was carefully
maintained as the ostensible organ of the movement,
but its offices were filled, its democratic Executives
in every Division overrun, and its funds brought
under the control of a new and secret organization
without the authority of any mandate from the
nation. The pith and vigour of the public League
were gradually absorbed by the occult power, as, in
some tale of mediaeval sorcery, the witch's own
changeling waxed and grew while the legitimate
infant pined and fell away. The National President
of the " Board of Erin ' Hibernians became the
paid Secretary of the United Irish League, and
from an humble employment in Belfast rose to be
a Member of Parliament and the omnipotent " Chief
Secretary for Ireland." The Assistant-Secretaryship
fell to another of the Secret Order, the Standing
Committee, or supreme governing body of the
League, was stuffed with a majority of Hibernians,
its staff of organizers were recruited from the
Hibernian Lodges, but paid out of the United Irish
League's funds, and were despatched all over the
country, with the nominal mission of addressing
decorous Branches of the League, whose irreproach-
able sentiments were duly reported in the newspapers,
but in reality with the object of turning them into
so many obsequious servants of the Board of Erin.
Before very long the United Irish League had
virtually ceased to exist save as an innocuous dead-
wall for posting up resolutions and appealing for
funds ; the resolutions were dictated, and the funds
gathered in by the officials and organizers of the
Board of Erin.

120 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

The new danger to the Irish Cause originated
in Belfast in that stifling atmosphere of religious
rancour which, ever since the destruction of
Grattan's Parliament, dried up the generous current
of Protestant patriotism, and poisoned the life of all
denominations of its people. The obscure history
of the Ancient Order of Hibernians may be traced
back to the secret association of Defenders forced
into existence by the first diabolical schemes for the
extermination of the Catholic peasantry of Armagh
which signalised the foundation of Orangeism by
the plotters of the Union. The new organization
of the Board of Erin had, of course, no relationship
with those ancient blood-feuds between creed and
creed, beyond adopting for themselves the pet-name
of " The Mollies/' invented for some unknown
Ribbon band, who used to make the shebeen-shop
of one Molly Maguire the headquarters of their
midnight operations in the gallant wars of the
Catholic Defenders. The essential vice of the
Board of Erin Hibernians, in fact, was that they
had no comprehensible object which could be
publicly stated, until their real purpose came to be
at last made only too manifest to be that of a
gigantic pseudo-Catholic combination for the dis-
tribution of all offices, power, and emoluments
among its exclusively Catholic partisans.

The genuine Ancient Order of Hibernians in
America, from which the Board of Erin were
seceders, was a perfectly legitimate Friendly Society,
which expended its resources upon noble works of
benevolence — the foundation of a famous Catholic
University, of Catholic Orphanages and Asylums,
and the like — but never put forward any pretension
to control or sectarianise the Irish National
movement. The Board of Erin, too, found it
expedient to assume the guise of an authorised
Friendly Society as a plausible excuse for their

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 121

existence for very different objects, but that was
only after Mr. Lloyd George's Insurance Act of
1911 had placed at the disposal of the Board of
Erin Hibernians a separate Irish Insurance Depart-
ment commanding an enormous mass of patronage
covering Commissioners, Inspectors, Doctors, Law
Agents, and clerks, extending over every parish in
the country.

The pretence that the aggressive Catholicism of
the Board of Erin was necessitated in order to
defend any real interests of religion was without a
shred of justification. They had no more a mandate
from ecclesiastical authority for their Catholicism
than from the democracy of Ireland for their political
domination. As it happened, their first considerable
incursion into Irish public life was Mr. Devlin's
crusade against the Bishop of Down and Connor
(Dr. Henry) on the very ground that the Bishop had
started a Catholic Association for the defence of
purely religious local interests in Belfast. It is one
of life's little ironies that the local Catholic Asso-
ciation for whose foundation Dr. Henry was made
to go down to his grave in sorrow was afterwards
copied by his persecutors on a vaster scale and
without a vestige of his justification, in their own
scheme for sectarianising the national politics of the
entire country. The new champions of Catholicity
were so little to the taste of Rome that Propaganda
issued an instruction to the Irish Bishops that the
new organization of the Board of Erin was to be
" vigilantly watched." It long lay under sentence
of excommunication in its Scottish province, and the
interdict was only raised on the undertaking to drop
for the future the blasphemous form of initiation,
which was to make the postulant repeat his vows of
secrecy, with his hand laid upon a crucifix. The
moral valuation of its membership in the North was
sufficiently appraised in a Visitation Sermon of

122 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Cardinal Logue in Tyrone in which he declared the
Hibernian Order in the parish he was visiting to
have become " a pest, a cruel tyranny, and an
organized system of blackguardism," and threatened
that if his present admonitions had no effect " he
would in the exercise of his duty excommunicate
the Hibernians throughout his Archdiocese." Thus,
the Board of Erin entered upon its career of
devastation under the cloak of Catholicism not only
without a particle of sanction from the Catholic
Church, but on the contrary under the disapproval
and menace of its highest dignitary. The Cardinal's
words, had they been followed up, must soon have
reduced the new " pest ' to powerlessness and
contempt in the North. Unhappily, the suspicions
of the Protestant Minority, so far from being dissi-
pated, were gravely confirmed when they found that
the secret society which on its first coming engaged
the patronage of only one astute and ambitious
Prelate in the island, and was stigmatised as " an
organised system of blackguardism " by the Cardinal,
came eventually to be propagated throughout Ireland
with the blessings of a goodly company of Bishops,
Chaplains, and Spiritual Directors, and that even
many who in their hearts detested it as an organ of
Catholic opinion could not always resist the temp-
tation of blessing its victorious banners with the
easy versatility of the Vicar of Bray.

This, then, was the change in the whole frame-
work and spirit of the National movement which
forced itself upon the minds of Irish Protestants
and filled them with disquiet and alarm. The
movement had passed into the control of a Secret
Order, to which nobody who was not a Catholic
was admissible, and of which partaking of the
Blessed Sacrament of the Catholic Church was
another of the requirements. The voice in public
might still be the voice of the United Irish League,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 123

but the hand was the hand of the mysterious Board
of Erin, who had captured its offices and organizers
and the control of its funds. The axiom of " Union
and Friendship between Irishmen of every religious
persuasion/* emblazoned on the banner of the United
Irish League as the first article of its creed, was
torn down and trampled in the dust. Every Irish
Protestant who manifested National tendencies was
repulsed with coarse insults. Those Nationalists
who pleaded for welcome, or even toleration, for
them within the Nationalist fold were not saved by
life-long devotion to the National Cause from being
themselves ostracised as traitors and " rotten
Catholics," and prevented by physical violence and
bloodshed, whenever necessary, from obtaining a
hearing from their countrymen. " The Party "
itself was not free from the espionage of the Board
of Erin bosses, who held the public opinion of the
country by the throat, Those of them who ventured
even to exchange a furtive greeting with an All-for-
Ireland colleague in the sacred lobbies of the House
of Commons found themselves pricked down for
destruction at the next elections. And the men
who exercised this odious tyranny were not only in
a position to nominate disciples who could exchange
their own grips and passwords as Members of
Parliament, of the Corporations, County Councils,
and District Councils. They were soon all-powerful
enough to turn down their thumbs against every
candidate for office from the highest places in the
judiciary or in Dublin Castle to the humblest rural
sinecure, who failed to attorn to their decrees.
There is expert evidence for the calculation that the
Board of Erin was eventually in possession of
patronage to the amount of three millions sterling
per annum for distribution among their brethren.

It did not lessen the discontents of the Minority
that the Orange leaders were not in a position to
expatiate in public upon the enormities of " The

124 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Mollies," since the spirit and the methods of the
two Orders were substantially the same. The
Orangemen, like " The Mollies," throve upon the
narrowest bigotry, the frankest craving for place-
getting and pelf, with an invincible determination
to restrict the good things to those of their own
kidney ; and it was the Orangemen who first set
the detestable example. But therein lay the deadly
disservice done to the National Cause by those who
established the Board of Erin ascendancy ; for the
Board of Erin Order, without a shadow of honest
justification, created in the twentieth century a new
ascendancy, differing but in colour from the pesti-
lent Orange tyranny established in Ulster in the
eighteenth. As in the foundation of Orangeism, it
was the worst of the Protestant body who prevailed
over the best ; so in the sham-Catholic ascendancy
now substituted for it, it was the most ignorant
elements of the Catholic community who gave the
most ignorant of the Protestants a new lease of
power by throwing the mass of the sober-minded
Protestant and Dissenting population into their
arms for protection. It was of no avail to point
out to fanatical, or even to reasoning Protestants
how monstrous an injustice the cry of * Home
Rule — Rome Rule ' ' did to a Catholic nation whose
whole history breathed the broadest and tenderest
toleration. The Board of Erin put a convenient
reply in the mouths of honest doubters, who feared
for the future of their children in a Hibernian-ridden
Ireland, as well as of those with whom the breeding
of evil party-passions was a profession. The new
ascendancy was in actual operation in the daily life
of the country, and it spared neither those Protestant
Unionists who had ceased to be Unionists, nor
tolerant Catholics who would have welcomed them
to the National fold with gladness. Sir E. Carson
got his chance, and the Ulster Difficulty entered
into the deepest life of the Protestant population.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 125

CHAPTER VI

THE TWO POLICIES IN ACTION

IT must not be supposed that the mistake concerning
the Protestant Minority which " The Home Rule
Cabinet J now mournfully acknowledges was made
for lack of incessant forewarnings and entreaties, or
that those of us who now point the moral of its
unwisdom are, like the Ministers themselves, only
wise after the event. At each successive stage of
the controversy — under a Tory Government, under
a Liberal Government, and under a Coalition
Government alike — we of the All-for-Ireland school
can claim without presumption to have iterated and
reiterated, with moderation and solemnity, but
without wavering, that any true Irish settlement
must be sought by a combination of all Irish and
English parties for an object loftier than party
strategy, and above all that delicate deference must
be paid to the traditional particularities and even
prejudices of Ulster. Two further propositions may
be respectfully postulated as matters of common
agreement by this time : viz. (a) that there is not
one of our detailed suggestions — for years held in
derision and for a parable of reproach to us as
factionist and traitorous — which would not now be
recognised as concessions of such obvious good
sense as to seem commonplace, and (b) that up to
a certain date they would have been closed with by
Ulster as a satisfaction of all the reasonable require-
ments and apprehensions of the Protestant minority.
To make good this claim, it may be convenient
once for all to set out the terms of the Settlement

126 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

by Consent which we proposed in the very words in
which I challenged the verdict of the city of Cork, and
which I was returned without an opposing voice to
press upon the Government. It will be seen that
they cover the three points on which " the appre-
hensions of our Protestant countrymen and not in
Ulster alone " were most sensitive.

" i. (The Ulster terror of parting with the active
authority of the Imperial Parliament) — We propose,
for an experimental term of five years, to give the
Ulster Party which would remain in the Imperial
Parliament (say ten, with the possible addition of
two members, one for Trinity College, and one for
Rathmines, to represent the Southern minority) a
direct suspensory veto upon any Bill of the Irish
Parliament unless and until it shall either be
approved or rejected by a resolution of the Imperial
Parliament, to be passed within one month after the
exercise of the Veto. Further, to give the Ulster
Party the right upon a signed requisition to the
Speaker of discussing on a motion for the adjourn-
ment of the House of Commons, any administrative
Act of the Irish Executive dealing with Education,
Justice, or Police. For the experimental period,
these powers would give the Protestant minority the
direct and active protection of the Imperial Parlia-
ment in a much more effectual way than they
possess it at present. Such a suspensory veto may
seem an unheard-of concession to a minority, and so
it is. It would in my judgment be gladly submitted
to by the best thinking men of our race, in the
belief that it would serve as a wholesome restraint
upon an infant Parliament in its first inexperienced
years, and in the firm conviction that nothing will
be attempted which would either tempt the Ulster
Party to exercise the Veto or the Imperial Parliament
to enforce it. The concession would, of course, be
unendurable unless (failing a fresh Act of the Imperial

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 127

Parliament for its renewal) it were to expire at the
end of the experimental period, by which time a
General Election will have been undergone and the
new Imperial Parliament placed in a position to
judge of the Irish Legislature by its actual record.

"2. (The insignificance of the minority in a Dublin

Parliament.) — As the Bill stands, the Ulster group

will undoubtedly be a somewhat attenuated one, as

it is bound to be by a pedantic adherence to existing

geographical boundaries. Nor would any fancy

property franchise be, to my mind, tolerable in

the popular chamber under modern democratic

conditions. We should propose to deal, unsymmetri-

cally but effectively, with the question of giving the

Protestant minority a representation proportioned to

their numbers and their natural claim for adequate

protection by increasing the proposed representation

in the Schedule to 20 for Belfast, 16 for Antrim,

8 for Armagh, 16 for Down, and 8 for Londonderry,

which with a proportional vote (or, better still, a

cumulative vote) extended to the rest of the country

would yield a Protestant minority vote of at least 60

in the Irish House of Commons. Here you would

have established a body which could not possibly be

put down by oppressive means, and which would

only have to win the adhesion of some 30

Catholic Nationalists at the utmost to form a

governing majority upon a National Peace programme

which would efface all the old distinctions. What

a career of unhoped-for power and noble patriotism

for the present Unionist Minority, whom the Imperial

Parliament has stripped of every vestige of political

power over four-fifths of the country and can never

by any possibility of its own authority restore it !

Sensible Irishmen would make little difficulty about

assenting in addition to such local powers as,

apparently, Sir E. Grey would delegate to Ulster —

appointments, for instance, of County Court judges,

128 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Inspectors of Education and County Inspectors of
Police from competent panels — either by the Ulster
County Councils or some other local authorities, but
these would be quite insufficient inducements in
themselves, and would be happily overshadowed by
the larger concessions which would attract Ulster
centripetally to, instead of repelling her from, the
National Parliament.

" 3. (The fears of a Spoils system worked by a
twopenny -ha1 penny Tammany.) — The Unionist mino-
rity are not the only Irish minority who regard with
repugnance the ascendancy of a Secret Association
confined to men of one particular religious persua-
sion, and using as its most powerful instrument the
disposal of all offices and patronage from the highest
to the lowest, not according to the merits of the
candidates, but according to their proficiency in the
signs and passwords of the Order. The growth of
this sectarian organisation (whose object nobody has
yet ventured publicly to put into words) is indeed
responsible for the creation of three-fourths of the
Ulster Difficulty which now darkens the horizon.
I am confident that most of the far-seeing supporters
of Mr. Redmond must be in their hearts as anxious
as either the Ulster Minority or the Munster Minority
to put an end to any danger from this undemocratic
secret agency by having provision made that all
offices of emolument (save only Ministers, Heads of
Departments, and Judges) should be disposed of by
a carefully chosen body of Irish Civil Service
Commissioners who should throw them open to all
candidates upon equal terms, and put an end to the
scandal of dispensing Government patronage in
partisan newspaper offices by sectarian preferences
and secret intrigues."

These proposals were never made public by the
Hibernian Press, nor by any newspaper in England.
The only version of them circulated in three-fourths

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 129

of Ireland was that I proposed to " hand over
Ireland to the veto of twelve Orangemen " — the only
justification for that atrocious libel being the proposal
for an experimental period of five years, to give a
minority of a million the security of a possible appeal
to the Imperial Parliament, to be decided within
one month, under circumstances which made it all
but certain that, by reason of the very completeness
of the security, the power would never be exercised.
And this moderate price to purchase the confidence
of one-fourth of the Irish population was held up
to execration as " handing over Ireland to the veto
of twelve Orangemen " — that, too, in a Home Rule
Bill which, in the words of Mr. T. P. O'Connor,
" contained as many English vetoes as there were
padlocks in a jail." Who can wonder if a country
debarred from all chance of reading our proposals
for themselves and so infamously led astray as to
their real purport, should have taken half a genera-
tion of suffering to learn that the " factionists and
traitors " were " fundamentally right " all along ? For
ourselves, so little did we claim any special foresight
in discerning the possibilities of an incomparable
National settlement in "an agreement amongst all
sections, creeds, and classes of Irishmen," that the
only clue we could find to the enigma how any sane
body of Irishmen could detect in it any trace of
treason to Ireland was that those who only saw in
the Land Conference settlement " a landlord
swindle ' infallibly bound to " end in national
insolvency ' felt themselves now constrained to
persist in the error at any cost against all evidence
and commonsense.

Stand fast by our proposal, at all events, we
did from start to finish against all the buffets of
unpopularity and of carefully nurtured ignorance in
Ireland and in England. Persons familiar with the
state of feeling in the Ulster Party, and especially

i3o THE IRISH REVOLUTION

among the mass of the Northern population, prior
to the Larne gun-running, will scarcely deny that
" a Bill thus conceived, far from being a grievance
in the sight of embittered Irish Protestants, would
have been hailed by them as an Act of Political
Emancipation such as the Imperial Parliament could
never otherwise secure to them/' But what of its
reception by the Republicans ? They were not then
in existence, and with wiser counsels they might
never have been, in any ponderable numbers. The
opposition came from the self-aggrandising place-
hunters of the Board of Erin ; the clean-souled
adolescents who were to be the rebels of Easter
Week had not yet been made sick with the cajoleries
of the Parliamentary politicians, and would see no
more trace of treason to Ireland in our doctrines
than in Davis's genial version of the Orange war-
song, " The Battle of the Boyne," which they had
been taught to lisp from their cradles :

" Boyne's old water,

Red with slaughter,
Now is as pure as the children at play ;

So, in our souls,

Its history rolls,
Orange and Green will carry the day ! " l

From the poorest standpoint of expediency, there
stood one-fourth of the Irish population who must
either be lived with or exterminated. The latter
course was, happily, as impossible as it would have
been heathenish. It would have expelled from the
service of Ireland a leisured class of soldiers, sports-
men, and genial comrades as ineradicably Irish as a
free admixture of Gaelic blood for centuries could
make them, and an industrial population whose

1 " I would go as far as ever you went to win over Ulster,"
Mr. De Valera told me in 1922.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 131

energy, probity, and solidity of character would
endow an Irish State with some of its most precious
elements of stability. To acknowledge that there
were two unmixable Irelands would be to fly in the
face of some of the most shining truths of our
history. Gaelic Ireland's ethnic genius had never
found any difficulty, even as late as the Williamite
wars, in fascinating and absorbing all the successive
invaders who, in conquering, were themselves
conquered — the Norman Geraldines in Munster and
the Norman Burkes in Connacht, the Danes in
Dublin, the Scotsmen in Dalriada, the Belgians in
Wexford, the Welshmen in Tyrawley, the grim
Cromwellians themselves amidst the bewitching
homes of Tipperary. The beadroll of statutes from
century to century forbidding the adventurers from
England — and forbidding them in vain — to " live
Irishly " and take Irish wives, is one long English
protestation of the homogeneity of the nation. Even
the era of the diabolical Penal Laws, if it raised up
fiends to debase the Catholic Gaels almost out of
human shape into a separate race, " in the English
and Protestant interest/' produced also a dynasty of
Protestant patriots as truly Irish as the eternal
mountains that towered over Henry Grattan's woods
at Tinnahinch. Flood was the only man of genius
in the Irish Parliament who represented anti-Catholic
bigotry at its darkest ; yet even he made atonement
for that one sunspot in his character by the will
in which he left a considerable property for the
encouragement of the study of Gaelic in Trinity
College and the publication of the ancient manu-
script literature of the Gael. With the graces and
accomplishments of a cultured Irish nobleman,
Charlemont strangely mingled in his character a
gloomy Protestant bigotry ; yet he, too, was so
passionate a fanatic for Irish liberty that, as Com-
mander-in-Chief of Grattan's Volunteers, his prepa-

1 32 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

rations for a war against the Parliament of England
were more formidable than Sir E. Carson's more
than a century later, and were authorised by
sounder constitutional warrant. The man whom
the English intellectual world now acclaim as the
most sublime of their philosophers and statesmen
was the Irish Protestant, Edmund Burke, who, for
the inspired eloquence with which he scathed
England's doings in Ireland, went within an ace of
being slain by the Gordon rioters as an Irish papist
adventurer. To tear out from the journals of the
Irish Parliament the splendid pages which record
the Protestant struggle for Irish freedom from
Molyneux' first daring claims to the dying hours
in which it succumbed to the Act of Union — to
disown the romantic chapters added to our story
by the Protestant Wolfe Tone when, after Parlia-
mentary methods had failed, he appealed to the God
of battles, and to disown them because the martyrs
who died at his call on the scaffolds of Belfast and
Carrickfergus and at Antrim Fight were Protestant
Dissenters who had not taken the Catholic Sacrament
— would be to cancel the entire history of Ireland
since the Middle Ages, and has only to be set out
in cold terms of logic to excite the abhorrence of
every Catholic Nationalist with an imcorrupted heart.
Irish Protestant patriotism did not die even
under the scalpel of Castlereagh's Act of Union.
Lecky, whom certain family sufferings during the
Land War unhappily alienated from the Irish Cause
in his declining years, has left us in his books an
immortal monument of the inborn Nationalism of
the Irish Protestant genius. It would be scarcely
possible for prejudice itself to study the unexpur-
gated edition of his Leaders of Public Opinion in
Ireland without being convinced that religious
rancour was steadily disappearing in the generous
sunheat of Grattan's Parliament and was only resus-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 133

citated after the Union when the contagion of the
Evangelical Revival in England spread in a virulent
form to the North of Ireland. Dr. Boulter, the
English Archbishop of Armagh, owns with frank
brutality how truly religious feuds in Ireland are
the product of English policy and not of native
perversity, when, inveighing against every measure
" that tends to unite Protestant with Papist," he
adds, " whenever that happens, good-bye to the
English interest in Ireland for ever." And the Union
gave England the means of fomenting the war of
creeds in Ireland during the bitter generation for
which the Catholic Emancipation, more than half
accomplished by the Irish Parliament during the
Viceroyalty of Lord Fitzwilliam, was obliged to
prolong its hate-engendering debates in the Parlia-
ment of England. Even so, the unquenchable
embers of Protestant patriotism flared up again and
again in Ulster itself. Too little is known of Gavan
Duffy's " League of the North and South" in whose
ranks the mass of the Protestant Dissenters and their
clerical leaders in the Fifties were, beyond question
eager to join hands with their Catholic countrymen,
and which was only crushed by the apostacy of the
ruffians, Keogh and Sadleir, unluckily condoned by
the simplicity of two or three Catholic prelates. So
much an affair of yesterday is the Ulster Protestant
bloc which Sir E. Carson managed to persuade
England was ancient and unbreakable, that within
living recollection the Dissenters, who formed the
weightier half of Sir E. Carson's Covenanters, were
wholly at one with the Catholics on the two questions
— religious disabilities and the land — which were the
staple interest of their lives, and were the active allies of
the Catholics in every electioneering and democratic
campaign against the other half —the EpiscopalianTories .
So late as 1885, it was Presbyterian votes that re-
turned Justin MacCarthy for the City of Deny,

i34 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

and Mr. Tim Healy for South Deny, and myself
for South Tyrone.

For one like myself, who as a boy had followed
Smith O'Brien — the flower of Irish knighthood — to
his grave ; who esteemed it the glory of his youth
to have been asked by John Mitchel to compose his
Election Address to Tipperary ; who had seen Isaac
Butt and Professor Galbraith reconstruct a broad-
based national movement from the ruins of
Fenianism, and later on followed Parnell to the
very Jordan's brink of Irish Independence — it can
easily be imagined how little disposed I was to
disown the co-religionists of men such as these as
a tribe of unmixable aliens and pariahs. To be
accused of some monstrous heresy against Ireland
for the bare proposal to incorporate that million of
religiously-minded, laborious, and stout-hearted men
everlastingly in our nation on terms of equality and
honour, might well seem the prank of some practical
joker, if it were not unhappily the stock-in-trade of
powerful politicians trading upon the boundless
ignorance of the truth in which they were able to
keep the public. It cannot be denied that it was
an experience of grievous personal pain, as well as
of public misfortune, but it can truly be claimed
that, if ever I was in danger of sinking under the
injustice, I had only to re-read the story of the
generous measure in which the Protestant Parliament
parted with their privileges and ascendancy in the
Relief Bill of 1793 to redeem their Catholic brother-
Irishmen from their degradation — of the all but
unanimity of the Protestant Bar for a Catholic
Emancipation which would put an end to their
monopoly — of the glowing words in which the
youth of Trinity College threw open their arms to
the Catholic claims — of the twenty-eight years during
which Grattan and Plunkett pressed their unflinching
battle for Emancipation in a brutalized English

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 135

Parliament, before a Catholic Irishman could pass its
portals ; and, before the page was turned down, the
spirits of the Protestants of genius who had suffered
persecution of their own for their noble constancy
to the friendless Catholic helot, seemed to be suffi-
ciently near to make it a sacred privilege for Irish
Catholics to suffer in the converse sense now, when
there was question of a different ascendancy and of
different victims. Persecution at the hands of our
own household, at all events, never weakened our
determination to resist any counter-ascendancy in
the hour of triumph for the Catholics as stoutly as
the leaders of Grattan's Parliament and of the
United Irishmen met and overthrew the Protestant
Ascendancy in its own days of insolent power.

Such was our way of reconciling the Protestant
minority, in doctrine and in action. To turn to
our critics' plans for aggravating, embittering, and
maddening the opposition of the Minority seems
like laying down the speech of Grattan on the day
of his Declaration of Independence in order to watch
the ignoble wars which make horrid the streets of
Belfast on Anniversary Days, when the mobs of
"The Orange Walk" and "The Green Walk'
come into collision and exchange their volleys of
paving-stones and battle-cries, and beat their drums
in each other's faces until the blood runs from the
wrists of the drummers. Young Mr. Winston
Churchill's raid on Belfast gives us a typical illus-
tration of the plan of campaign in its boldness and
in its unwisdom. It was in February 1912, shortly
before the introduction of Mr. Asquith's Home Rule
Bill, and at a moment when the most elementary
prudence, and even decency, ought to have forbidden
a vulgar challenge to Ulster feeling in the Ulster
capital on the part of the First Lord of the Admi-
ralty of the Home Rule Cabinet. That moment was
chosen for Mr. Devlin's invitation to Mr. Winston

136 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Churchill to attend an Hibernian torchlight proces-
sion in his honour in Belfast. The First Lord of
the Admiralty, in undertaking the raid, gave a first
blazing example of the indiscretions which were
afterwards to run his country dangerously near to
ruin at Ostend and the Dardanelles and Archangel
and Mesopotamia. It is not enough to plead that,
in his own estimation, Mr. Churchill's adventure
was not that of an Hibernian gamin, but of a benign
statesman. There has always been a dash of
greatness in his impetuosities. But even his boyish
self-sufficiency ought not to have blinded him to the
preposterous folly of his mission of peace under the
auspices of the Board of Erin Hibernians to that
very city of Belfast where his father, fresh from his
desertion of his alliance with Parnell, had appealed
to the worst passions of the Orangemen with his
doggerel war-cry : " Ulster will fight and Ulster will
be right." He speedily realized into what a hornets'
nest he had thrust himself. The Devlin torchlight
procession was first given up. Unfortunately, the
torches were not quenched until they had set fire to
a powder magazine. He fell back upon an indoor
meeting in the Ulster Hall. The Ulster Unionist
Council retorted by hiring the Ulster Hall for a
meeting on the previous night, after which the
design was to take and hold armed possession of the
Hall as long as Mr. Churchill remained in Belfast,
and Sir E. Carson came over as a rival angel of
peace to superintend operations.

The Ulster Hall people gladly accepted the hint
and cancelled the letting of the Hall for both
meetings. The triumphant Orangemen flatly
announced that, First Lord of the Admiralty or no,
they would allow him no meeting-place within the
Forbidden City. There was nothing for it but to
take refuge in a marquee erected on the Celtic
Football-field on the outskirts of the city and within

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 137

the sheltering arms of the Nationalist quarter, the
Falls Road. But the First Lord of the Admiralty's
cup of humiliation was not even yet full. Although
" six special trains laden with troops " arrived the
previous day for his protection, and his movements
were conducted with the utmost secrecy, the First
Lord allowed himself to be chivied from post to
pillar by the Orange hooligans, who were waiting for
him at Larne, mobbed him the moment he reached
Belfast, thronged around him at the modest hotel at
which he descended, and ceased not to hoot, and
sting, and threaten him, until he escaped in the
midst of a phalanx of policemen and cavalry to the
faithful Falls Road. There he was safe enough in
the arms of a Catholic and Nationalist population as
valiant and true-hearted as the world could produce
and passed along to the football-ground amidst the
fluttering of green flags and the belabouring of
effigies inscribed " Carson, the King of the Bluffers."
But even there, the luckless Minister was drenched
with torrents of rain, which penetrated the clothes
of his listeners through the frail covering of the
marquee, and when all was over the problem how
to get the First Lord safely out of Belfast, without
returning to his hotel, where an enormous Orange
mob was lying in wait for him, was only solved by
an escape along a circuitous route to Larne, where
he was finally placed in safety on board the Glasgow
boat after a five hours* experience such as rarely
falls to the lot of a great Minister of State. To
complete the picture, his competitor angel of peace,
Sir E. Carson, addressed his triumphant hooligans
and complimented them upon " their magnificent
self-restraint."

Mr. Winston Churchill's escapade in Belfast —
the bounce with which it began, and the tameness
with which he accepted the position that a Cabinet
Minister protected by " six special trains laden with

138 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

troops ' ' must give up the right of free speech the
moment the howls and revolvers of the least en-
lightened section of the Orange populace gave their
orders — had two fatal effects on the course of events
in Ulster. It gave wanton offence to the most
respectable part of the Protestant population, and it
filled the most retrograde of the Orangemen and
their leaders with contempt for a Government whose
poltroonery they took to be even grosser than their
folly. Mr. Churchill's challenge and his flight, it
is scarcely an exaggeration to say, had more to do
with exasperating and crystallising the opposition of
Ulster to Home Rule than " the King of the
Bluffers ' himself, whose incitements up to that
time had been addressed to only half-convinced
and unarmed men.

While Mr. Devlin's torchlights had thus kindled
Ulster into a blaze, on the eve of the introduction
of the Home Rule Bill, his organizers were busy in
the rest of the country rivalling the unreasonableness
of Protestant Orangeism by the terror of a Catholic
Orangeism no less odious to the friends of enlightened
liberty. As soon as the Home Rule Cabinet was
installed in power and their Home Rule Bill
announced, the All-for-Ireland League was so
determined to prepare for it an untroubled atmos-
phere that we freely ran the risk of misconstruction
by an appeal for co-operation among all Nationalists
to secure the largest possible measure of well-
considered public sympathy in its support. Even
after our overtures were scoffed at with the amiable
taunt that Mr. Healy and I " were now of less
importance than the rawest recruit in Mr. Redmond's
Party," we suspended altogether the propaganda of
the All-for-Ireland League, just as it was beginning
to spread from county to county and from province
to province, knowing as we did that our programme
of meetings, no matter how temperately conducted

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 139

on our part, could only be carried out in the teeth
of an organized Hibernian opposition with bludgeons
and revolvers which must disgrace our cause in the
eyes of the world and lead to the inevitable des-
truction of the Bill.1 If our voices were stifled by

1 One sample must suffice of the methods by which every
attempt to enlighten the country as to our aims was stamped out.
On August 27, 1910 (when, be it observed, the Liberal Government
then in power had definitively declined to include Home Rule in
their legislative programme) I went down to Mayo to address
Branches of the All-for-Ireland League, which were spontaneously
springing up there in all directions. In my first speech at Ballina
I proposed to give the country a sure means of judging for itself
where the reproach of " faction " really lay by offering to submit
myself to an unimpeachable Jury of Honour to take evidence in
the full hearing of the public how the dissensions of the past
seven years had arisen. The invitation was, needless to add,
steadily ignored, notwithstanding my promise to accept a friend of
old standing of Mr. Dillon's (Hon. Bourke Cockran) as President
of the Court. The organizers* preparations for breaking up our
meeting at Ballina were frustrated by an overwhelming demonstra-
tion of welcome on the part of the people. All the emissaries of
the Board of Erin were able to compass was that during the
speech of Mr. D. D. Sheehan, M.P., a revolver was discharged
from a dark corner and a bullet was embedded in the framework
of the window from which he was speaking. The next day at
Crossmolina, the organizers (they were no less than four) who
had been specially despatched to the district from headquarters
were more successful. On reaching Crossmolina, Mr. Sheehan
and myself were ambushed by an armed mob headed by three
priests, whose incitements and physical misconduct it would be
too painful to detail. We had to pass through scenes of
blackguardism (culminating in a fusilade of revolver shots fired by
a Board of Erin ringleader who had just been appointed to an
important Government office in the neighbourhood), for a
description of which we may trust to an authority so little suspect
as the Freeman's Journal. Its reporter, in a burst of irrepressible
indignation, thus relates what he observed from his own
standpoint :

" When Crossmolina was reached, it was seen that stormy
times were ahead. A strong force of police were drawn across
the Main Street, and behind them was massed a large crowd,
who, on the appearance of Mr. O'Brien's party, manifested their
hostility in an unmistakeable way, shouting and waving sticks in

140 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

organized violence and by still fouler methods in the
Press, it cannot be doubted it was because the cabal
realized that the Irish people had only to be allowed
the opportunity of hearing for themselves the argu-
ments for and against the two programmes which
divided the country, and they would have recoiled
with horror from the policy of mad sectarianism
of which they were being made the unconscious
instruments. The Home Rule Bill once produced
in the House of Commons, no further public con-
troversy was to be thought of. The people knew
nothing further and understood nothing further until
the mischief had been done beyond repair. This
was how it came to pass that the sinister secret
organization which Cardinal Logue had described as,
in his own archdiocese, " a pest, a cruel tyranny,
and an organized system of blackguardism," spread

a threatening manner. Before reaching this point the horses had
been taken from Mr. O'Brien's carriage and a crowd of his
supporters drew it along at the head of the procession up to the
point where its further progress was impeded by the police
cordon .... Mr. O'Brien crying out : ' Drive right ahead.' . . .
the carriage, drawn at a rapid pace, proceeded to run the
blockade, and then a scene occurred which no thoughtful
Irishman with any pretensions to patriotism could regard with
feelings other than those of regret. Mr. O'Brien was standing
in the carriage, and a fierce fusillade of stones, bottles, and eggs,
thrown with great force, were directed towards him. He did not
flinch, and though the missiles seemed to rain all round him,
happily not one of them struck him. . . . The intervals between
the speeches were interspersed with band-playing and drum-
beating, and a few stones more were thrown at Mr. O'Brien's
party and one revolver shot discharged." And the same scenes
of violence — revolver-shots, stones, and bottles — were repeated on
our departure, one of the chief merchants of Ballina, Mr. Moylett,
having his skull fractured as he sat by my side. A few months
later, in the same county, under the superintendence of another
crop of organizers from Belfast, my wife and myself were fired
on at Lecanvey, and the lamp of our motor-car shattered by a
bullet, and at Achill a few days afterwards our chauffeur was fired
on again and a revolver-bullet lodged in his arm.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 141

its tentacles over every parish in the country — with
the blessings and the " doubled subscriptions," it
must with a pang be owned, of some of His
Eminence's brethren in the Hierarchy — reducing the
wholesome public influence of the United Irish
League to a shadow, feeding its own disciples fat
with governmental and local offices and honours,
enkindling the honest alarms of Protestant Ulster to
a white heat, and making Sir E. Carson's task an
easy one of uniting the most peacefully-minded of
the Protestant and Presbyterian farmers and shop-
keepers with the fiery Orange fanatics of Belfast in
resistance to the new racial and religious exclusiveness.
A blindfolded people, in setting up the " Party
Unity " of the Liberalized Hibernian politicians for
their god, destroyed the last hope of " National
Unity," which was the thing that really mattered,
and destroyed " The Party," and their nation with it.

i42 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER VII

THE HOME RULE BILL OF IQI2

MR. ASQUITH'S Home Rule Bill of 1912 was proclaimed
to be " a final settlement," and was so accepted with
effusion by the Irish Party. All was staked upon the
assurance that it was " a greater measure of Irish
freedom than Grattan's or Gladstone's ' and that, if
it were only accepted by Ireland without debate, its
passage into law was (in a favourite figure of speech)
" as certain as the rising of to-morrow's sun." In
the endeavour to ensure this conspiracy of silence
in Ireland, it may with truth be said that what pur-
ported to be a Bill to establish her legislative
independence, was forced upon Ireland sans phrase
by methods as unconstitutional as had ever been
resorted to for the imposition of some hideous
Coercion Act. The Irish Party itself (which must
henceforth be more truthfully described as the
Hibernian Party) abdicated all right to discuss or to
interfere, even in its private conclaves. So far as
the representatives of Ireland exercised any voice in
the fate of their nation, it was done by three leaders
in a few furtive interviews in Downing St. — not even
(unless rumour lied) with the Prime Minister, but with
some subordinate like the excellent Mr. Birrell, who
was always perfectly accommodating and always
cheerfully ineffectual. Mr. Dillon's plea that the
Bill was " the best we could get," was a sufficient
attestation how poor a part was played in the con-
struction of the Bill by the Irishmen who held the
power of life and death over the great folk in Downing
St. Any real discussion in Ireland was laid under a

stern interdict. The Hibernian National Convention,
summoned nominally to debate the merits or demerits
of the Bill, were, after the manner of the Baton Con-
vention, bidden by an eminent ecclesiastical ring-
leader to " keep their amendments in their pockets '
and did not, as a matter of fact, suggest the smallest
amendment, or perform any other function than that
of re-echoing the hi' falutin panegyrics of the
Parliamentarians. So a silenced country succeeded
a silenced Parliamentary Party. From beginning
to end of the debates upon a Bill involving the " final '
fate of Ireland in all her most tremendous concerns,
her representatives did not suggest a solitary amend-
ment and were not suffered to bear any part in the
debates beyond applauding the two or three " safe '
leaders who were at very rare intervals put up to speak
for them, or savagely resenting any criticism of the
Irish finance of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Herber
Samuel. They were more like slaves kneeling to
kiss hands on their manumission than freemen standing
up for the rights of their nation. A Bill which all
men now know to be as full of faults as a sieve is of
holes passed through Committee without the alteration
of a line at the instance of the country it most vitally
concerned. So complete was the machinery by which
the Irish people were prevented from discussing or
even understanding the provisions of the Bill or the
ignominious misconduct of their representatives
during its passage through Parliament that, when,
after four tongue-tied years of humiliation for the
country, the Bill was nominally transferred to the
Statute Book, an innocent Irish public actually allowed
bonfires to be lighted in their name in celebration of
the event, without the smallest suspicion that what
they were really celebrating was the consent of the
representatives of Ireland to the Partition of the
country thus mocked with a forged title-deed to
freedom. And the Hibernian and Liberal parties to

i44 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the deceit professed to be surprised beyond measure
when the young generation who were all this time
meditating in silence these intolerable affronts to the
honour and even to the intelligence of their nation,
sprang to arms in the Easter Week of 1916, and gave
Parliamentarianism its quietus !

It seems scarcely necessary to insist. It was Mr.
Redmond's fate, however, to be obliged to go on
vociferating that his goose was a swan of the finest
down. Even after three years for reflection, in a
public letter to the Dublin Corporation (July 2oth,
1915), he committed himself to the preposterous
boast that : —

" The Home Rule Act of last year is a better Act
than the Bill of 1886, which Mr. Parnell accepted as
a settlement and is a far better and freer constitution
than Grattan and the Volunteers won in 1782."

It was a claim that could only have been made to a
public kept in blank ignorance of the provisions of
the measure. To the most infatuated of his dupes
it would at this time of day sound like a cruel sarcasm.
One test — that of Finance — will suffice to expose the
absurdity of his representation of a Devolution Bill
which in all other respects was on the same level of
national dignity as the Parliament of Saskatchewan.
Grattan 's Parliament had the uncontested power of
the purse. England could not levy a shilling in
taxation or take a man for her army or navy except
with its consent. Under Asquith Home Rule, the
power of taxation would have remained absolutely
and without limit at Westminster. The unfortunate
Dublin Parliament had no appeal from any levies of
the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, except to
a Joint Exchequer Board of which the British
Chancellor would command a majority of the votes.
Ireland might, indeed, add to the tremendous burdens
laid upon her by the British Budget certain fantastic
taxes of her own, but the power was so silly a play-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 145

thing that Mr. Herbert Samuel could suggest no other
local tax open to the Irish Parliament except a tax
upon bicycles or advertisements.

As for the Bill of 1886 (which it was false to
suggest Parnell " accepted as a settlement ") it was
at least a Bill which to begin with separated the
Parliament of Ireland altogether from that of
Westminster, while the Asquith Act not only
retained the connection and the subjection of
Ireland in its most humiliating form, but reduced her
representation from 103 to 42 in the Parliament where
the power of the purse lay. Nor was that all. Parnell
had obtained an amendment of the Bill of 1886 limiting
for thirty years Ireland's Imperial contribution to
£3,132,000, while if the Asquith Act had been in full
force the Imperial Parliament would have been as
free as it has been without it to raise Ireland's Imperial
contribution to the colossal figure of £25,000,000 per
annum. Had the Bill of 1886 prevailed, the Imperial
Chancellor would have no power to augment Ireland's
contribution by a pound during the first three years
of the World War, and could only have attempted it
even then by calling back Ireland's 103 representatives
to Westminster to have their say, while under the
slippery finance of Mr. Samuel, England was left
free to exact Imperial contributions from Ireland
£20,000,000 a year greater than the maximum
stipulated for by Parnell. Such was the measure
which Mr. Redmond did not hesitate to describe as
' the greatest charter of liberty ever offered to
Ireland," and for its financial flaws Mr. Devlin,
who had perhaps neglected to read the text of the
Bill at all split the ears of the groundlings with the
cry : ' Freedom first, and finance afterwards ! '
Without adverting to the possibility which every-
body now knows to be the truth that the caricature of
* Freedom " might be as sorry an imposture as the
finances were dishonest.

146 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Were my colleagues and myself wise or unwise in
making the best of the Asquith Bill instead of slaying
it if it remained unamended ? God knoweth ! The
drastic course would have been the tempting as well
as the easy one. It is scarcely too much to say that
the unmatched Parliamentary resources of Mr. Tim
Healy alone would have sufficed to bring the Bill to
certain shipwreck. We had no responsibility for the
character of the Bill. One evening at the rising of
the House in November, 1911, while there was still
ample time for deliberation, I called attention to a
forecast of the Bill in the Ministerial organ, the Daily
News, in substance foreshadowing the Bill of the next
Session in its worst weaknesses, and I appealed to
the Government, if the forecast were well founded, to
take Ireland into his confidence in good time and give
her people some opportunity for friendly remonstrance.
My observations were half-drowned by the chorus of
offensive interruptions in which the least reputable of
the Hibernians were now habitually joined by a knot
of newly elected Radicals and Labour men below the
Ministerial gangway on the rare occasions when my
colleagues and inyself sought a hearing, but they were
received in a different spirit by the Prime Minister,
who assured me nothing had yet been decided upon
and made an earnest appeal for the communication
to the Ministry of any suggestions of my own. Mr.
Healy lost no time in marking the contrast between
the grave courtesy of the Prime Minister and the ill-
manners of his followers. The invitation was one
not to be shirked. In consultation with my colleagues,
I drew up a Memorandum, in which we made no
disguise of our own conviction that Dominion Home
Rule, with unfettered Fiscal Autonomy, would be the
safest, as well as boldest, remedy for the quarrel
between the two countries, but should this be dis-
missed, as for the moment impracticable in its fulness,
we did not rule out some farseeing experiment in Federa-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 147

tion which would in practice gradually conquer the
objections to the larger extension of independence.
The Memorandum at the same time laid down as
essentials two requirements which excited the bitter
hostility of the Hibernian Party at the time, but the
absence of which from the Bill when it was produced
it is evident enough to all men now was the secret of the
calamitous breakdown of Asquithian Home Rule —
viz., generous concessions such as would have disarmed
all rational opposition in Ulster to a National Parlia-
ment, and the removal of the last great social stumbling
block in the way of an Irish Parliament by the com-
pletion of Land Purchase as an Imperial transaction.
The following was the reply of the Prime Minister : —

" Confidential.

10, Downing St., Whitehall S.W.,

7th Nov., 1911.
DEAR MR. O'BRIEN,

I am greatly obliged by your letter of the 4th and
my colleagues and I will give most careful attention
to its contents.

Yours very faithfully,

H. H. ASQUITH."
"W. O'Brien, Esq., M.P."

This was the only communication vouchsafed to
the representatives of at least 500,000 hereditary
Nationalists who had been foremost in the fight when
fight was the word of order — whose temper of con-
ciliation when conciliation was the truest patriotism
English statesmanship would now give freely of its
treasures to restore — representatives, moreover, who,
it has since been made plain, spoke the secret thoughts
of the Irish Unionists of the South and in a surprising
degree of the North as well. The explanation is, of
course, simple enough. The Memorandum after
receiving " the most careful attention " of Mr. Asquith
and his colleagues had to be passed along to their

148 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Hibernian advisers and was never heard of more.
When I had to make up my mind what to say on the
First Reading of the Bill, it was under the cruel dis-
advantage of never having received the smallest hint,
oral or written, of what its contents were to be until
I heard them disclosed by the lips of the Prime
Minister.

Nevertheless, disappointing as was the revelation
when it came, I took up without hesitation on that
night the attitude of cordial friendliness and help-
fulness towards the Bill which my friends and myself
never relaxed until, two vears afterwards, the Bill was

*j

turned into a hideous compact for the Partition of the
country. It was impossible to hear the Prime
Minister without realizing and saying — " Let there
be no mistake about it — the Home Rule of this Bill
is not Grattan's Parliament, it is not Repeal of the
Union, it is not Colonial Home Rule any more than
it is an Irish Republic " — without deploring that the
Cabinet had rejected the recommendation of their
own Committee of Experts that " the Irish Parliament
should be equipped with fiscal independence fully
and at once in the raising of their own revenue '
without asking " fair-minded opponents of this Bill
to remember that however much we are ready to
renounce in our eagerness for a genuine and enduring
peace with the people of England and with those who
were once called the English Garrison in Ireland, it
is a solemn thing for the representatives of an ancient
cause to make up their minds to sacrifice so much that
entered into the dreams that came as naturally to some
of us as the blood in our veins in order to purchase
peace between the two countries " ; but first and 'last,
I made it clear that : " whatever the ultimate fate of
this Bill may be, I cannot conceive of any Nationalist
of any type or school who will not approach its con-
sideration with the deepest respect and with an anxious
desire to put the most favourable construction upon

it," declaring finally my own deep conviction that
* the success of an Irish Parliament must depend to a
large degree upon its being won by the consent rather
than by the compulsion of the Protestant minority
and I for one would be prepared to go to any reasonable
length, or even to some unreasonable lengths, to
secure that co-operation and good-will."

To the attitude thus promptly taken up and
never departed from, the reply was the chorus of
" factionist ' and 4< traitor ' from that moment
shouted incessantly into the ears of a people who
were denied every chance of reading my words : with
how much justice may be inferred from the judgment
of two men from opposite standpoints. John Burns,
then in the summer of his democratic power, came
over to say to me : " That is a speech that does credit
to your head and to your heart." The observations
of William Moore, afterwards a Justice of the High
Court, and then the most characteristic leader of the
Orange Party in Ulster were these :

* I believe myself that the hon. member for Cork
is perfectly right in the policy he has again and again
announced to Ireland ; that it is no use talking about
Home Rule for all Ireland unless you get the
Protestants of Ireland to consent to it. That is
absolutely true. If our consent were won, as I said
the other day, there would be very little difficulty
about the matter. But since the hon. gentleman, the
member for Cork, has thrown out a Policy of Con-
ciliation, which means the right hand of fellowship for
Protestants, the mere fact of his doing so has brought
upon him attacks from the Ancient Order of Hibernians
and others."

My first impression without an hour for deliberation
proved to be the sound one, as soon as the Bill was in
print. The National Conference of the All-for-
Ireland League met in Cork on May 25th, 1912, to
determine our action on the Second Reading. Nobody

ISO THE IRISH REVOLUTION

who analyses the seven and a half closely printed pages
of names will dispute that the assembly contained an
overwhelming number of the representative men of
the South, with not a few of the men of power from the
most distant parts of the country as well.1 Had such
an assembly pronounced against the Bill, or even given
an ambiguous verdict, nothing could have saved the
Government measure in a country already raging
against its insignificance as a national settlement.
There was neither a wavering note nor one of false
lyricism. The first Clause of the Bill ran : " On
and after the appointed day there shall be in Ireland
an Irish Parliament consisting of His Majesty the
King and twro Houses, namely, the Irish Senate and
the Irish House of Commons." It was the solemn
compact for a United Ireland, ruled by an Irish
Parliament, one and indivisible — a compact destined
to be afterwards shamefully repudiated and annulled.
It was the only Clause savouring of National Inde-
pendence in the 48 Clauses, but it was enough for
those of us who could have forgiven even the Irish
Council Bill everything for its being based on an
undivided Ireland, and the present compromise,
beggarly though it was, was nevertheless like the
other " consistent with and leading up to the larger

1 With the exception of one potent element. By a technical
ecclesiastical ordinance the clergy were forbidden to be present.
Mr. Healy, a Catholic in every fibre of body and soul, made a
thrilling allusion to an incident as the Conference were assembling
when a famous parish priest from Tipperary — Father Matt Ryan —
" who had been with us in all the stirring times of sacrifice in the
past, and now, when we are on the verge of victory, found himself
turned back and forbidden to partake of our triumph " — adding
with prophetic vision : " I do think that hereafter it will not be
forgotten, should division arise between laity and clergy, that it
was on the important occasion of an Irish Parliament Bill that
Irish priests were refused the liberty of rallying round us.'*
Father Matt Ryan was, a few years later, one of the foremost
figures in the Sinn Fein reaction which overthrew a Parliamentar-
anism rendered hateful by such methods.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 151

policy." The National Conference not only refused
to follow the Hibernian precedent in the case of the
Irish Council Bill of first blessing and then rejecting
the Bill with a war-whoop, but promised it a whole-
hearted support subject to three amendments which
our critics have since spent bitter years in endeavouring
to resuscitate when too late : — viz., a reconstruction
of what Mr. Healy compendiously described as the
" putrid ' finances of the Bill ; the completion of
the Abolition of Landlordism by Imperial credit ;
and such concessions to the apprehensions (however
imaginary) of " Ulster " as would have delivered the
country from any peril of Partition.

One other particularity has to be noted. The
pretext for the malignity with which Lord Dun raven
and the Irish Unionists who followed him were
pursued was that they were really engaged in a con-
spiracy to make Home Rule impossible. To
calumnies like this the pronouncements of the
Unionists at the National Conference gave a noble
answer. They were all for amending, none for
wrecking, and amending in the direction of uniting
and enlarging the powers of the Irish Nation. Lord
Dunraven, in a letter to myself, touched with a sure
hand what might have been and what still easily might
be : —

" I pray you to use your best endeavours to secure
for our Parliament fairplay and a fair chance and I
pray you never cease from striving to make us a nation.
Had your National and patriotic policy been carried
on during these wasted years since the Land Con-
ference, this outburst of irreconcileable opinion in
the North could never have taken place. Differences
of opinion there always will be and ought to be, but
they ought to be subordinated to a sense of unity — a
sense of Nationality, a determination to work together
in friendship for our country's good."

Mr. Moreton Frewen, whose brain and winning

152 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

personality wanted nothing but a dose of the politician's
guile to give him a high place among the world's states-
men— who had parted with his estate to his tenants at
a most equitable price — who had surrendered his Irish
seat in Parliament rather than support a Parliament
Bill which, in his eyes, in antagonising a mutilated
House of Lords would destroy an unequalled means
of reassuring and conciliating Ulster, and was more
vilely abused for his chivalry in still indomitably
sticking to the All-f or- Ireland Cause than he would
have been if he had justified his ungenerous assailants
by betraying it — Mr. Moreton Frewen made a speech
in which he foreshadowed the disaster of Partition
as clearsightedly as all the world is discussing it
to-day :

" Do let us be careful — I know Mr. O'Brien is as
careful as possible — about the susceptibilities of Ulster.
We do not want Ireland to be partitioned. We have
lost the opportunity of generations. Two years ago
the Home Rule atmosphere was clear. We should
have gone forward two years ago and got a settlement.
The Land Purchase scheme which we owe to Mr.
O'Brien and Lord Dunraven was going on magically —
so admirably that all the difficulties in this country
and in England were enormously relieved. Lord
Grey at Ottawa told me we were within arms' length
of the settlement of the Irish question by consent.
Lord Milner had come into our camp full of anxiety
and determination to settle the Home Rule question
on Federal lines. Lord Minto and Lord Dudley
were of the same mind. Had these four men gone
North to the chiefs of Ulster and asked for a con-
ciliatory and friendly settlement of the question, I
believe we should have got the whole difficulty well
in hand before this time. It is not too late for this
yet. These things are still all ahead of us. But
if you are going to allow the situation to be controlled
by Mr. John Redmond or rather by Dillon and by

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 153

Devlin, I am quite convinced the danger which sticks
out of our present troubles is probably the partition
of Ireland. ... I sympathise with Mr. O'Brien
in the stand he is making, and am anxious not to say
one word that by any possibility would make his task
more difficult than it is. There is nothing any man
can do that in my humble way I will not do to assist
the cause of the All-for-Ireland League."

And to the last hour, while even the smallest strength
was left in the arm of the All-for-Ireland League, Mr.
Moreton Frew en was true to his word. Every
succeeding Unionist speaker — Sir John Keane of
Cappoquin, Mr. Villiers Stuart of Dromana, Dr.
Thompson of Omagh — showed the same delicate
sense of the difficulties, the same eager determination
to turn the Bill with all its flaws to the best account
as the most fervid of the veteran Nationalists who
thronged the platform and whose sons while these
pages are being written (1921) are on the hills as
soldiers of the Irish Republican Army. The Con-
ference offered one more opportunity for that co-
operation of all Irish Parties by which the Bill in
Committee might still have been built up into a great
measure of national appeasement. It was not on my
part, either then or at any critical moment before or
after, the first tender of a fraternal hand was missing :

" Every speech that Mr. Redmond now makes in
the House of Commons is a glowing tribute to our
principles and a crushing condemnation of those of
Mr. Dillon and Mr. Devlin. . . . But it is never too
late to bury the hatchet. We are quite willing to
forgive and forget all past differences, if even now it
be made possible for us. We are perfectly willing
to suspend all controversy amongst Irish Nationalists
until the fate of this Bill is decided one way or the
other. If the majority of the representatives of
Ireland will even now unite with us in inducing the
Government — in forcing the Government as beyond

154 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

all doubt they have the power to do — in forcing the
Government to give the Irish people satisfaction in
these three particulars (freedom of taxation, com-
pletion of Land Purchase and friendly negotiation to
secure the good-will of our Protestant countrymen),
I am in my heart convinced that even on the lines
of this present Bill and much as we may have to re-
nounce, Ireland may still win a future or solid happi-
ness, prosperity and peace. We for our part will do
all that men can do to carry it, and we shall gladly
leave it to our countrymen hereafter to say whether
it was an unpardonable crime on our part to insist
that the national settlement should be won upon
conditions that will banish for ever from the face of
Ireland the horrors and animosities of agrarian war
and that will incorporate once and for all in the blood
and bone of our Irish nation a million of the hardy
Protestant breed of the Grattans, and the Emmets
and the Parnells."

Here was a bid for that joint action in Committee
which must in the nature of things have resulted in
vast modifications of the Bill, and all of them in
directions now recognised to have been vital ameliora-
tions in the interest of Irish freedom. It was the
occasion of all others for giving effect to the condition
to which the Irish Party had pledged itself in the
reunion of 1908 of " cordially welcoming the co-
operation of Irishmen of all classes and creeds willing
to aid in the attainment of the complete abolition of
Landlordism' (among other objects). As a matter
of fact, no Irish newspaper except the Cork Free Press
gave a serious report of the proceedings of the National
Conference — its composition, or its arguments or its
proposals. They were never heard of at all in England,
where the newspapers derived their Irish information
from correspondents in the offices of the Hibernian
organs. The Hibernian leaders contemptuously
spurned the last chance of establishing an under-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 155

standing with Ulster or of obtaining the alleviation
or even consideration of the Finance Clauses, and
went on their way towards Partition with an uproarious
optimism that never deserted them until they toppled
over into the abyss and dragged " Constitutional '
Home Rule with them. 1

1 The following reply of the Freeman! 3 Journal to my offer of
co-operation throws a flood of light upon the spirit then rampant
in the Hibernian camp :

" It is to be feared that ' AH Ireland J will not take very
seriously the proceedings at Cork. Mr. William O'Brien and
Mr. Timothy Healy were once persons of importance in Irish
politics. Now it is not too much to assert that their views upon
any serious Irish question are of less importance than those of
the rawest recruit to the Irish ranks. It really does not matter
what they say about the Home Rule Bill. Mr. O'Brien knew
that he dare not lay a little finger upon the Bill to prevent its
passage, and that if he did he and his ' party ' would disappear
from Parliament at the next election. . . . There were only two
speeches of interest at Cork ; they were delivered by Mr. O'Brien's
converts, Sir John Keane and Mr. Moreton Frewen. From the
reports to hand, it is not possible to gather exactly the views of
the brace about the Home Rule Bill ; but there is no mistake as
to what the converts want. * Give us Land Purchase and the
devil take Home Rule J would be no unfair representation of
their view."

156 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER VIII

MISMANAGEMENT AND DECEIT
(1912)

WE have seen that the first year of " the Home Rule
Parliament " was sold away to Mr. Lloyd George for
his Insurance Act. The most precious part of the
second year was still more curiously wasted. After
the formality of the Second Reading of the Home
Rule Bill and the first Clause of a Bill consisting of
48 Clauses and four Schedules disposed of, the sub-
stantial work in Committee was postponed over the
summer months and was only approached in the
languor of an Autumn Session. There was no over-
pressure of other work to excuse this second encroach-
ment upon the time of what was to be known as ' The
Home Rule Session." Two days of every week
during the wasted months were given up to the
academic Motions and Bills of private Members,
which are unceremoniously bundled out of the way
by any Government intent on real business. When
the business of Committee was really tackled it was
prefaced by a Closure-by-Compartment Motion,
the object of which too plainly was to guillotine any
attempt to amend the Bill from the Nationalist stand-
point, and which had the no less mischievous result
in Britain of creating a suspicion that a constitutional
revolution of so much consequence was to be hustled
through without giving England time to discuss, or
even understand it. The dilapidation of the second
year of " the Home Rule Parliament," like the
surrender of the first, could not, of course, have
occurred without the complicity of the Hibernian

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 157

Party. The Bill must go through without amendment
or discussion in the shape fixed by that super-Parlia-
ment at the Downing St. breakfast table. My friends
and myself (we never formed ourselves into a Party
nor elected a leader) were so determined to put any
imputation of wasting time out of the question that
we only proposed to persevere with two amendments,
of which no man will now be found to dispute the
necessity. The closure-by-compartment time-table,
as will be seen presently, managed to strangle even
the few hours' discussion that would have sufficed
for these two amendments, and did so by tricks which
reflected discredit, and indeed dishonour upon the
Ministers who had recourse to them. We made our
protest against methods which we feared " might be
peculiarly dangerous to the ultimate fate of the Bill,"
and which would have been quite unnecessary had
not progress in Committee during the most valuable
months of the Session been unaccountably blocked.
Nevertheless, we added : " If the Government and
their Irish advisers, who are responsible for the
management of business, tell us that there is nothing
else for it, if the Bill is to have any chance of going
through this Session, we acquiesce." Let us now
see how our appeal to the Prime Minister, " whom
I had always found to be a man to his word," for
" a fair and square discussion " of the two amend-
ments that remained was answered.

i. A Bill of 48 Clauses contained only a single
line referring to the tremendous subject of completing
the abolition of Landlordism, and this so peculiarly
worded as seemingly to rule any discussion of the
subject out of order. The result would have been to
confront the infant Irish Parliament with more than
one hundred thousand farmers whom the Act of 1909
had disabled from purchasing, and either to transfer
to Ireland the Imperial task of financing the operation,
or to replunge the country into stark anarchy. This,

158 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

indeed, it was too obvious, was the very design of the
equivocal line of reference to Land Purchase, for Mr.
Dillon in his crazy quarrel with the landlords and the
Land Conference settlement, thought he was serving
the cause of Home Rule by publicly bragging at this
juncture that the Bill would leave the landlords at the
mercy of the Irish Parliament, and that the Imperial
Parliament would no longer be there to protect them.
Parnell had foreseen the difficulty of leaving an Irish
Parliament loaded with so intolerable a responsibility.
One of the two stipulations as to the future of Home
Rule upon which he insisted during our Boulogne
negotiations of 1891, and which were formally accepted
by Gladstone and Morley, was that any Home Rule
Bill must provide for the whole land settlement being
undertaken by the Imperial Parliament simultaneously
or all but simultaneously under a penalty which no
Imperial Parliament was likely to incur of leaving
' the English Garrison " to their fate as the passions
or the financial necessities of an Irish legislature might
decide it. Our Land Purchase Amendment was
simply a paraphrase of the words and figures of the
compact between Gladstone and Parnell :

' It would be obviously inconsistent with the
concession of Home Rule to Ireland that the power
to deal with the laws relating to land in Ireland should
be permanently confined to the Imperial Parliament.
It will have to be exercised simultaneously with the
establishment of Home Rule or within a limited period
thereafter to be specified in the Home Rule Bill or the
power to deal with it must be committed to the local
legislature. "

When I questioned the Prime Minister whether
he would give effect to the undertaking of Gladstone
by accepting our amendment, he first denied any
knowledge of such an undertaking. Pressed to make
inquiries, he made a shambling acknowledgment that
the undertaking had been given as the condition for

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 159

Parnell 's retirement from the leadership, but Parnell
not having retired the Boulogne compact fell to the
ground and nothing further came of it. This
amazingly deceitful reply must have been supplied
by Mr. Morley, who was himself the medium for
Gladstone's acceptance of the Boulogne stipulations.
In assuring the House of Commons that Gladstone's
undertaking on the land went no further, he was the
victim of a lapse of memory so egregious as to lay
himself open to the suspicion of misleading the House
of Commons in a vital matter of good faith between
the two countries. Mr. Healy's memory — an
encyclopaedia of the Parliamentary affairs of the
previous quarter of a century — enabled me to meet
the Prime Minister with a staggering exposure of the
untruth. Not only was it untrue to represent that
nothing further was heard of the Boulogne stipulation,
but I was able to read out for him the clause of the
Home Rule Bill of 1893— framed by the Government
of which Mr. Asquith and Mr. Morley were mem-
bers— by which Gladstone honourably acquitted
himself of his promise to Parnell in almost the very
words of the Boulogne Compact. Clause 35 read as
follows :

" 35 — During three years from the
passing of this Act, and if Parlia-
ment is then sitting until the end
of that Session of Parliament, the
Irish Legislature shall not pass
an Act respecting the relations of
landlord and tenant, orgthe sale,
purchase, or letting of land
generally."

The Prime Minister admitted the House of
Commons had been led astray as to a capital fact in
the history of the Gladstone Cabinet, of which he was
himself a member, but he took no steps to make
amends by honestly incorporating in his own Bill the

160 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Clause which Gladstone had conceived himself bound
in honour to insert in the Bill of 1893. Once more
no doubt it was his Hibernian advisers who carried
the day. Mr. Redmond who first came into pro-
minence as Parneirs chief supporter in the Split of
1890 and who, with Parnell and myself, had negotiated
the Boulogne compact with Gladstone and Mr.
Morley, opened not his lips to compel this act of
justice to be done to his dead chief. The leader
felt himself compelled as usual to follow his followers,
and they celebrated as if it were in some curious way
a triumph for Ireland our failure to get the Prime
Minister to reincorporate in his Home Rule Bill the
clause which Gladstone had felt bound to add to the
Bill of 1893, to Parnell's honour and to his own. In
a measure purporting to take thought for Ireland's
future peace and concord the unsettled portion of the
Land Problem was deliberately left unsettled as a
standing provocation to chaos and bad blood.

The way in which our amendment was shelved by
a new and equally delusive promise was characteristic.
By a coincidence which was now becoming chronic,
the Prime Minister was indisposed when the debate
came on, but he commissioned Mr. Birrell to give a
pledge ' ' given with such solemnity on a subject of
so much seriousness, given on the word of a British
Minister across the floor of the House," that Mr.
Healy generously accepted it as " a pledge as good for
us as if it were the law of the land." Mr. Birrell
promised with almost passionate eagerness on behalf
of the Prime Minister that, if our amendment were
withdrawn, " this Government absolutely recognises
its full and complete responsibility quite apart from the
fate or fortunes of the Bill new in Committee," and
that " we are absolutely committed to the completion
of Land Purchase at the earliest possible day." He
even protested that he himself, whose Act of 1909
had repealed the great measure of 1903, was so

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 161

fanatically devoted to Land Purchase that in his
judgment " the completion of Land Purchase is more
important than Home Rule itself. " Nothing could
be sweeter nor more deceptive. Parnell's design for
forcing the Imperial Parliament to action was to
compel them by a clause in the Statute to hand over
the whole subject to the Irish Parliament if the
Imperial Parliament should prove dilatory. That
security was now gone. The subject was to be
wholly reserved to the Imperial Parliament with,
indeed, the Government's all too vehement pledge to
settle it " at the earliest possible moment whatever
the fate of the Home Rule Bill." The promise thus
solemnly sworn in order to evade our amendment,
was, like all the rest, shamelessly broken. Mr.
Asquith during the years of his Premiership at the
head of the Home Rule Government and of the First
Coalition never budged an inch to complete Land
Purchase. Mr. Lloyd George's Second Coalition
Government later undertook to pass simultaneously
with their latest " Home Rule ' performance (the
disastrous Partition Act of 1920) an Act for the
completion of Land Purchase on Imperial credit. As
these pages are written, nine years after the rejection
of our amendment, Irish deputations are ghosting the
British Ministers and the Treasury with vain lamenta-
tions that their promises to Ireland have been once
more cynically broken, and the promised Land
Purchase Bill stands adjourned to the Greek Kalends.1
But an amendment, which might have aided power-
fully in disarming the opposition of Ulster to Home

1 LATER NOTE (1922). — Now that the Irish Provisional Govern-
ment is in operation one of its most cruel difficulties is the outcry
of " the unpurchased tenants " (left " unpurchased " wholly
through the unwisdom of Mr. Dillon) for the completion of Land
Purchase by an Irish State without the necessary credit to finance
it, and as a consequence the reopening of the agrarian difficulty
in a more ruinous form than ever.

162 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Rule, as well as healed the last running sore of social
disturbance in the country, was successfully got out
of the way, and in the words of old Caspar, on the
field of Blenheim : "It was a famous victory ! '

2. Our interference on the question of Finance
was limited to a single appeal for the modification of
a scheme for which no responsible man will now offer
a word of defence. Our case was one to which nothing
short of sheer Parliamentary bullying could have
denied a fair hearing. I pointed out to Mr. Lloyd
George, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
that the freedom profferred to Ireland point-blank
refused her freedom of taxation — the first postulate
of all true liberty. Ireland would be left at the mercy
of an Imperial taxmaster in the Westminster Parlia-
ment— a Parliament too in which Ireland's representa-
tion was to be cut down by two-thirds. The derisory
powers of taxation nominally given to the Dublin
Parliament could only be exercised after the Imperial
Chancellor had first exacted his last pound of flesh.
The refusal of fiscal independence was the more
flagrant a wrong that its concession was recommended
by the Primrose Committee of experts called in by the
Cabinet themselves to advise them — a Committee
of whose seven members only one was an Irishman.
There was little difficulty in showing that the Budget
actually worked out under the Bill as it stood was a
mass of contradictions and injustices. It was founded
upon the repudiation of Ireland's historic claim —
endorsed by the Childers' Royal Commission of 1806
and by the Cabinet's own financial advisers, the
Primrose Committee, that Ireland had been wronged
by the English Treasury every year since the Union
in over-taxation estimated by so competent an
authority as Lord MacDonnell to amount to
£315*000,000 in all. For this balance-sheet between
the two countries was now substituted without a
word of protest except our own from the representa-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 163

tives of Ireland the new and impudent claim on which
Mr. Herbert Samuel based the finances of the Bill,
namely that, contrary to all the Childers' Commission
and the Primrose Committee had placed on record,
Ireland had really been shirking her fair share of
Imperial taxation and was at this moment indebted
to the English Treasury to the tune of £2,300,000 a
year for the luxury of being governed by her bountiful
masters.

The fraud of the Samuel profit and loss account
was an audacious one. He strove to give plausibility
to his invention of an Irish " Deficit " by two tricks
more worthy of the book-keeping of a fraudulent
company than of the financial honour of a great
Empire. The first was to repudiate Gladstone's
recognition in his Bill of 1886 of her " collected '
revenue as an asset to the credit of Ireland and to
substitute for it a "true* revenue as depleted and
doctored by the Treasury, thus at a stroke appro-
priating to the Treasury £2,000,000 a year which
Gladstone made open confession to be Ireland's
property. His second device was to charge against
Ireland as though for her own private joy and luxury
huge sums of Imperial expenditure — e.g., £1,300,000
for the Royal Irish Constabulary which were incurred
wholly for Imperial purposes as the means of main-
taining an alien military rule. I reminded the
Chancellor that the Gladstone Bill of 1886 made a
contribution of £500,000 a year to the Constabulary
charges, as a force in its essence as Imperial as the
army and navy and that Sir E. Hamilton, the Under
Secretary, told the Childers' Commission that two-
thirds of the Constabulary vote was properly Imperial.
But to eke out the Samuel-made " Deficit," a fraud
was to follow of such a character that it almost passes
belief how the financial conscience of a great nation
could ever have stained itself by practising it upon
Ireland in a measure purporting to endow her with

164 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

her freedom. The great Purchase Act of 1903 — the
first shining success of England in all her dealings
with Ireland for seven centuries — could only have
been passed by providing an " Aid Fund " or Bonus
as an Imperial Free Gift to cover the difference
between the price the tenant could afford to pay
and that which the landlord could afford to accept.
That the Bonus should be a free Imperial gift for the
highest of Imperial achievements was the only con-
dition on which any party in Ireland could have
consented to pass the Act. Mr. Samuel impudently
proposed (and again without protest from the
Hibernian benches) to repudiate this Bonus of
£16,000,000 to £20,000,000 as an Imperial debt
and to transfer it to the shoulders of Ireland, together
with the whole expense of the Irish Land Commission
then amounting to £616,000 a year, in order to bring
out the required " Deficit ' in his honest balance-
sheet between the two nations. Finally, while the
Gladstone Bill of 1886 fixed Ireland's nett Imperial
contribution from her " collected ' revenue at
£1,132,000 for thirty years, the Treasury under
the Asquith Bill, was to retain £5,000,000 of the
cooked "true* revenue of Ireland of £11,000,000
for the " Home Rule " year, with the certainty of an
unlimited increase, as the British Chancellor of the
Exchequer dictated. (Since the world-war Ireland's
Imperial contribution has actually mounted to
£18,000,000 per annum).

Here was a case, however imperfectly expounded,
which was at least worth weighing well. My single
speech on the subject as the spokesman of half a
million of Nationalists, was not, it might be supposed,
an unpardonable offence. Not so in the opinion of
Mr. Lloyd George and his Hibernian advisers. He
leaped into the fray not to reason with his adversary
but to butcher him, with a tomahawk for his weapon,
and in the temper of the tomahawk's original patentees.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 165

For him it was the getting of a scalp, and not the
future of a nation that was at stake. He made no
pretence of understanding, much less of answering
the arguments for Ireland's claim, but with the delicate
taste which makes the joy of a country Petty Sessions
Court, set himself to ridicule my qualifications as a
financial expert, which truly were no deeper than
his own ; but he overlooked the circumstance that the
facts and figures he was deriding were those of a
British Royal Commission and of the Committee of
Experts called in by his own Cabinet. Any personal
wound to myself was healed easily enough by the
spectacle of a British Minister on a great occasion
floundering along from one tipsy blunder to another
as to which any Irish schoolboy of intelligence might
have set him right. It was not so easy to pardon the
indecency of Ireland's own representatives. They
went wild with exultation while Mr. Lloyd George
slashed and danced and whooped as he tore to shreds
the financial claims which every great Irishman for
generations had declared to be the first elements of
justice to their country. Not even one's deep con-
tempt could lessen the pain of listening to the re-
sounding Hibernian chorus, which greeted the defence
of every fraudulent device of the Financial Clauses by
the man whom they had egged on in the days of his
4 great and good Budget," and of his Home Rule-
blocking Insurance Bill, and between whose knees
they were yet to yield their consent to the Partition
of Ireland.

One hope remained, if not of modifying in the
smallest degree the finances of the Bill, at least of
laying them open to reconsideration. Our amend-
ment proposed that at least the financial relations
between the two countries should be revised after
an experimental period of five years. But once more
the Home Rule Cabinet was adamant, and their
Hibernian followers turned down their thumbs. The

166 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

amendment must not even be discussed. The
expedient by which this noble result was achieved
was a singularly dirty, as well as dishonest, one.
According to the Government time table, Clause 14
on which alone any alteration in the general financial
scheme would be in order was put down at the end
of the sitting after the debates on a Report stage of
other matters which was certain to occupy the time
up to 10.30 o'clock, when the guillotine fell ; so of
course it happened automatically and Clause 14 was
added to the Bill without a word of debate. The
design was all the more impudently revealed by the
time-table arrangement that the two next days were
given up to other Financial Clauses (15 and 16) which
immediately followed, but on which the discussion
of our amendment would have been ruled out of
order. The discussion, even for a minute, of the
future finances of Ireland was effectually stamped
out. Once again the Hibernian Party saw it was good
and roared with joy over our discomfiture. And so
perfect was the apparatus for smothering public
opinion, no whisper of the above transaction was
suffered to reach, or could ever till now reach ninety
nine out of a hundred men in Jreland, or even the
remaining one per centum in Britain.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 167

NEITHER FORESIGHT NOR BACKBONE

" ULSTER " proved the rock on which Liberal Home
Rule went to pieces. The first cause of the ship-
wreck was that the Liberal " Home Rule Govern-
ment " — doubtless by the ill-advice of the Hibernians
— began by ignoring the existence of " Ulster " ; the
next was that they met the first preparations of
" Ulster," not with the concessions which every-
body (and nobody more generously than the Irish
Republicans) now recognize to be the obvious wisdom
of the case, but with inconceivably silly taunts and
jeers ; and the worst of all was that when they came
to realize that Ulster had got arms in her hand. , their
ridicule was given up in a panic, and Sir E. Carson's
right to arm for rebellion against the law of the Imperial
Parliament was abjectly conceded by the nerveless
custodians of " Law and Order." The ignoble
Odyssey began with sorry jokes and ended with
Partition.

Mr. Redmond's hard necessity for following the
Hibernian lead at any price, on the plea that his com-
pliance meant Unity, cannot altogether be accepted
as an excuse for the astounding indiscretion of the
boast with which he commenced his campaign for
the Home Rule Bill : " There is no longer an Ulster
Difficulty." He might well have been warned by
the fate of a similar oracle of his in 1898, when he
balmily proclaimed : " There is no longer an Irish
Land Question," on the eve of the long and bitter
struggle which forced a Unionist Coercion Govern-

M

168 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

ment to abolish landlordism root and branch. His
inacquaintance with the deeper realities of Irish
feeling and opinion was one of the principal sources
of his weakness as an Irish leader. It is quite certain
that, if he could give rein to his own secret convictions,
nobody understood better than he the permanent
value to the Irish Nation of conciliating the Protestant
minority, or would be less likely to give practical
effect to the threat of putting down the opposition
of Ulster " with the strong hand " into which he was
betrayed in another incautious moment.

It is to be remarked that during the first twelve
months' debates on the Home Rule Bill, nobody —
not even the most fanatical of the Ulster Party — had
any thought of Partition in its subsequent sense.
The first Clause " On and after the appointed day
there shall be in Ireland an Irish Parliament consisting
of His Majesty the King and two houses, namely, the
Irish Senate and the Irish House of Commons " —
affirmed once for all the integrity of Ireland, and was
the only Clause on which Partition could have been
suggested in Committee. Neither Sir E. Carson nor
any member of the Ulster Party put down any amend-
ment with that object. The sole amendment on the
subject debated was raised by one of the only two
anti-Home Rulers in the Liberal Party, Mr. Agar-
Robartes, and it only proposed " the exclusion from
the provisions of this Act of the four counties of
Antrim, Armagh, Down and Londonderry." Sir
E. Carson's own speech made no disguise of the fact
that he only supported the Amendment as a means
of wrecking the Bill. The separation of Ulster, he
declared, in his opening sentence, was one as to which
" I may say at the outset that, so far as I know, there
is no difference at all as between the Irish members."
Ulster had never asked for a separate Parliament and
would never consent " to anything that would be in
the nature of desertion of any of the Southern pro-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 169

vinces." He frankly owned the only attraction of the
amendment for him was that " if Ulster succeeds,
Home Rule is dead."

One passage of the Ulster leader's speech is of
lasting interest as disclosing the anything but irre-
concileable temper, even then, of the Protestant
minority, and the temper on the Hibernian side which
convinced them that any genuine overtures of con-
ciliation from the Nationalists were not to be looked
for :

" I know that the Prime Minister believes that
when this Bill is passed and when the controversy is
out of the way that Ulster will get a fair share of the
Government of Ireland. . . . Where have we, even
in the last twenty years since this Home Rule question
has been before the country, any single instance in
the whole conduct of the majority in Ireland of
encouragement to believe that we can expect fair
play at their hands ? Not one in twenty years. There
has been an attempt, and I admit it freely and frankly,
by some few of the Irish Members, led, I believe by
the hon. Member for Cork (laughter). See how it is
laughed at. The hon. Member for Cork is a Home
Ruler. I differ from him just as much as I differ
from any other, but let me say that movement was a
movement of conciliation. It ended, or, at least, it
commenced to a large extent in the Land Act that was
passed by my right hon. Friend the Member for
Dover (Mr. Wyndham). The hon. Member for
Cork, seeing the benefits of that Act as they resulted
to Ireland, has rigidly adhered to it, and to every
word and every promise he made at that time, and
largely because of that he is now driven outside the
Irish party. When the hon. Gentleman and some others
proceeded to what they called trying to reconcile Ulster
and the Protestants from Ulster and Ireland generally,
they made speeches which, if they had been made by the
majority of them for the last twenty years might, I admit,

170 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

possibly have had some effect on some of the Unionists
in Ireland. Their idea was certainly a worthy idea,
nobody can deny that, of bringing about reconciliation
and better feeling, and the moment they do that they are
denounced, and they are boycotted, and they are perse-
cuted, and they can hardly hold an election in Ireland.
The hon. Member for Cork "

At this critical point the Liberal Chairman of
Committees (Mr. Whitley) brusquely interfered to
call Sir E. Carson to order, amidst the taunting cheers
of the Hibernians, and no more was heard of the
Ulster leader's reasons for believing that if the All-
for-Ireland policy had been supported, instead of
thwarted by the majority of the Irish Party, the objec-
tions of Ulster might have been overcome.

Sir E. Carson in dropping the subject on com-
pulsion from the Chair was onfy able to add : ' I can
only say with great respect that I am surprised if I
am not entitled to show why these counties in Ulster
cannot trust the majority and give that as a reason
why they should be excluded from the Bill . ' ' (Hansard ,
June, 1912, p. 1070).

In my own brief speech on the amendment will
be found at that early date, what no other section of
the House, British or Irish, are likely to claim for
themselves, a precise exposition of the attitude of my
colleagues and myself towards Ulster which we never
had reason to alter in the smallest degree and which,

o

it is not too much to claim, the bulk of men of all
parties have since got reason to deplore was not their
own attitude all along. An extract or two may be
forgiven :

" There are very few compromises indeed to
which I, for one, would not gladly assent if the effect
was to conciliate the Protestant minority. The
Amendment under consideration is almost the sole
exception. This is the one compromise which to
Irishmen is intolerable and impossible. Some of us,

at all events, would prefer to the end of our days to
be ruled by this Parliament or by the Grand Turk for
that matter, rather than be assenting parties to the
mutilation of a country which the hand of God and
the whole course of history have made one. That
is one of the things on which all Irish Protestants,
as well as all Irish Catholics, think alike. That is
I venture to say if the hon. Gentleman, the Member
for Walton (Mr. F. E. Smith) who is not an Irishman
himself, will give me leave to say so, one of the common
instincts, one of the common ties of unity, one of
the facts of our common mentality, which no human
law can override, and which, no matter what any man
may say, do constitute us one nation and not two
nations. Whatever other differences we may have,
we are, I think, all proud of being Irishmen ; Irishmen
not merely of the North or North East, or South, or
South West, but Irishmen all round the compass. ."

And again —

" The Right Hon. Member for Dublin Univer-
sity (Sir E. Carson) in his most candid speech, has
made it as clear as crystal that every Irishman for
whom he speaks, as well as those we can speak for,
thinks that any proposal to cut Ireland up into
Protestant or Catholic concentration camps is un-
thinkable and impossible. ... So far as the
Nationalists are concerned, there is no possibility of
our entertaining for one moment such a proposal as
is contained in this Amendment. ... I repeat this
amendment is an impossible and hateful one both to
Protestants and Catholics. It is almost the only
compromise I can conceive to which those who think
as I do would object if the result were to allay the
suspicions and win the co-operation of our Protestant
fellow-countrymen. I daresay you would rule
me out of order if I were on this particular
occasion to go into the nature of the com-
promises we believe to be practical ones ; but
Irish Nationalists would as soon cut off their hands

172 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

as cut off from Ireland the province which is sacred
ground to all of us, from the earliest dawn of our
history by thousands of our most cherished national
traditions. It was the home of long dynasties of the
most heroic Gaelic princes, men like Shan O'Neil,
Hugh O'Neil and Owen Roe ; it was the home of
those Anglo-Irish Protestant patriots of the Dun-
gannon Convention and ot the United Irishmen's
days, whose names are worshipped to-day in every
Catholic cabin in the South just as ardently as that of
any Irish Catholic of whom our history tells us. We
cannot and will not for any consideration part with
our historical inheritance — we cannot part with a
single Irishman within the shores of the island. On
the other hand, within those shores, we respectfully
invite and welcome our Protestant fellow countrymen
to seek and find every form of power and honour in
their own country, short of actual ascendancy. I go
further — no matter how my words may be mis-
represented in Ireland — and I say I should look forward
to an Irish Parliament with very mixed feelings if I
did not feel sure that upon the day when our Protestant
fellow-countrymen can see their way to join us in
organising a great National Peace Party in Ireland,
exempt from all the old party trammels and passions
of the past, they will find themselves in a position not
merely to defend themselves against persecution, but
to defend themselves far better than this House can
ever defend them — nay, that in future years by their
own qualities and by the natural bias of the Irish
character, they will find themselves amongst the most
effective and powerful elements in the governing
majority of the Irish Parliament and the Irish
Ministry. ... I end as I began by saying that when-
ever they make up their minds to put forward proposals
intended not to kill this Bill, but to make it acceptable
to every reasonable Unionist in Ireland, I for one will
be with them to the death and aid them in holding

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 173

their ground in honour and in power in the land which
is their native land as well as it is mine."

Not a stir was made from the Ministerial side,
save to scoff at every reference to the seriousness of
the Ulster problem.

Thus proceeded the debates to the Third Reading
on January 15, 1913, without the offer of the smallest
concession to the special mentality and historical
environment of Ulster ; Mr. Redmond intervening
on rare occasions with ceremonious speeches " faultily
faultless, icily regular, splendidly null " ; Mr. Dillon
and Mr. Devlin deserving honourable mention only
for their silence ; the Hibernian Party in general
ranged on their benches like so many automata
mechanically wound up on the touching of a spring
to vote, to roar out their Hallelujah choruses at the
right moments in the speeches of their demi-gods on
the Treasury Bench, or to supply more offensive
music when it was a question of worrying or coughing
down all who differed with them — a spectacle of
intellectual feebleness and insignificance not easily
to be forgiven to the representatives of a nation, who
for the first time and for the last, might have been
the masters of the situation.

While the programme of the Downing St.
breakfast-party was being thus hustled through the
House of Commons " according to plan," Sir E.
Carson and the Unionist leader, Mr. Bonar Law (now
his sworn confederate in contingent treason) had been
more formidably engaged in rousing Ulster to armed
resistance, More unhappily still, the eloquence
of the Hibernian leaders had been diverted to platform
work in Ireland which was even more effective than
Sir E. Carson himself in setting ablaze the passions
of the most furibund of his Orange partisans. We
have already seen the disastrous consequences of the
adventure— beginning in insolence and ending in
pusillanimity — into which they tempted Mr.

174 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Winston Churchill in Belfast. Those consequences
were every day exercising a more grievous influence
on the temper of the North. The most moderate as
well as the most fanatical could scarcely fail to see they
were dealing with a Government from whom they had
neither conciliation to hope for nor firmness to dread.

We have now to tell a story of open and advised
illegality by the highest officers of the law for which
history, or indeed romance furnishes no equal in a
civilized State, unless it be the five years' war which
the Irish Republican Army was afterwards enabled
to carry on by copying and improving upon the
methods taught them by Sir E. Carson's Provisional
Government and his army equipped from Germany.

On September 24th, 1913, the conspiracy to resist
Home Rule " by all means in their power, including
force," took definite shape in the proclamation in
Belfast of a " Central Authority for the Provisional
Government of Ulster," under the presidency of Sir
E. Carson. A Military Council of 84 members,
together with the Officers Commanding, for the time
being, the divisions and regiments of the Ulster
Volunteer Force, was appointed. An Indemnity Fund
of £1,000,000 was set on foot for the grim purpose
of " assisting the widows and orphans, the wounded
and disabled " who might suffer in the course of active
service. What the active service was to be was not
disguised, was indeed noisily proclaimed. It was to
resist the law of the King and the Imperial Parlia-
ment — naked treason, blood-boultered rebellion.
What the means were to be was made no less clear
by the signing, four days afterwards, of " The Solemn
League and Covenant " by which (as it was claimed)
250,000 men pledged their oaths to " stand by one
another in using all means which may be found
necessary." The means that were at once " found
necessary " were to brigade this enormous army
of Covenanters into divisions and regiments, to drill

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 175

them and manoeuvre them in the public sight under
officers in the King's pay, and to arm them to the
teeth — first indeed with " the wooden guns " which
excited Mr. Devlin's hilarity, but presently with
Mauser rifles and machine-guns " made in Germany. "
These preparations for civil war were carried on and
instigated for many months by ex-Cabinet Ministers,
Privy Councillors and army officers in innumerable
speeches, for any one of which the Sinn Fein rebels
of a later day would have been hanged or shot without
ceremony.

Sir E. Carson, the ex-Solicitor-General, was fore-
most in bidding defiance to the King and his Parlia-
ment. His recklessness makes one suspect he was
taking a leaf out of our own book, for we always
calculated that the best means of avoiding prosecution
was to seem to court it. Here are but a few pearls
from the interminable string of his treasons :

" We will shortly challenge the Government to
interfere with us if they dare. We will do this regard-
less of all consequences. They may tell us, if they
like, that that is treason. We are prepared to take
the consequences. (Blenheim, 27th July, 1912).

1 I do not care twopence whether it is treason or
not ; it is what we are going to do." (Coleraine,
2ist September, 1912).

; The Covenant was a challenge to the Govern*
ment and they dare not take it up. ... It was signed
by soldiers in uniform and policemen in uniform and
men in the pay of the Government, and they dare
not touch one of them." (Belfast, May i9th, 1913).

1 I know a great deal of that will involve statutory
illegality, but it will also involve moral righteous-
ness. . . . We have the repeated pledges of our great
leader, Mr. Bonar Law, that . . . whatever steps we
may feel compelled to take, whether they be con-
stitutional or whether in the long run they be un-
constitutional, we will have the whole of the Unionist

176 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Party under his leadership behind us. ... The
Government know perfectly well that they could not
to-morrow rely on the Army to shoot down the people
of Ulster/' (Belfast, July 12th, 1913).

" I hope we (the Provisional Government) shall
go on sitting there from day to day until we have
absolutely completed our arrangements for taking
over the Government ourselves. ... It might be,
probably it will be, an illegal procedure. Well, if
it is, we give the challenge to the Government to
interfere with us if they dare. . . , But the Govern-
ment won't interfere. They have not the courage. "
(Belfast, July 26th, 1913).

" I see by an announcement that his Majesty's
Government are reported to have issued a warrant
for my arrest. I know nothing about it and I care
less. One thing I feel certain of is that the Govern-
ment will never produce it, and will never execute
it." (Portrush, 4th August, 1913).

" I don't hesitate to tell you that you ought to
set yourselves against the constituted authority in
the land. . . . We will set up a Government of our
own. ... I am told that it will be illegal. Of course
it will. Drilling is illegal ; I was reading an Act of
Parliament forbidding it. The Volunteers are illegal
and the Government know they are illegal and the
Government dare not interfere with them." (Newry,
September yth, 1913).

" I see it has created something of a commotion
that they have at length ascertained that we have this
great General (Sir George Richardson) amongst
us. ... I tell the Government more than that. I
tell them we have pledges and promises from some of
the greatest generals in the Army that when the time
comes and if it is necessary they will come over and
help us." (Antrim, September 26th, 1913).

No Law Officer of the Crown, if consulted, could
advise otherwise than that such speeches (and they

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 177

were repeated in hundreds before reviews of many
thousands of drilled rebels) must have led to the
Ulster leader's conviction for treason felony if he were
indicted for levying war against the King and seducing
the Army from their allegiance. Sir E. Carson
avowed and gloried in the statutable illegality of his
words and of his preparations for civil war. Any
sensational punishment, when things had been allowed
to go so far, might have only stimulated a reaction in
his favour. On the other hand, imbecile inaction
while a province was being openly organised for
rebellion against the law of the King and Parliament
was the abdication of the first duty of Government,
and could only convince Sir E. Carson's followers
that he was right when he boasted that the feeble
folk in command at Dublin Castle were cowed by his
blood-thirsty threats that " if they dare to come to
attack us the red blood will flow." For many months
there was no real danger of " the red blood flowing '
if the Government had only availed themselves of
the Perpetual Coercion Act which Sir E. Carson
and his friends had themselves placed at their
disposal, and which the Hibernian Party had failed
to use their omnipotent power to repeal. When
the Ulster Provisional Government was appointed >
Dublin Castle had only to publish a notice in the
Gazette proclaiming the Provisional Government and
its army as "an illegal association," and to summon
Sir E. Carson under the Act of Edward III. to give
securities for his good behaviour, according to the
procedure he had himself made so familiar against
his political opponents, and the prosaic ignominy
of his fate as a warrior chief would have done more
to give an amused satisfaction to all sensible citizens-
than to excite any commotion which the local police
could not deal with. Whenever the archives of
Dublin Castle yield up their secrets, it will be found
that Mr. Birrell's Resident Magistrates and Police

178 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Officers in the North assured him that at any date
up to the landing of the " Fanny's " cargo of German
arms, the dissolution of the Volunteers could have
been effected without firing a shot, but warned him
that it might soon be too late. They were chaffed
for their pains and sent home with intimations that
their warnings were unwelcome. Shouts of " Carson,
King of the Bluffers " — the inscription on the breast
of the effigy burned on the Falls Road — continued to
represent the wisdom of the Hibernians and their
happy-hearted Chief Secretary.

The time came when even Mr. Birrell found it
necessary to do something that seemed serious. It
was really something so little serious as a way of
grappling with a great crisis, that it would rather
have been taken for one of his jokes only that it
was a sorry joke. In the December of 1913 he
published a proclamation forbidding the importation
of arms. Tardy, but excellent, if he had proceeded
to give effect to it by vigilant preparations at the
ports, and by seizing the arms already stored in
dumps where his Resident Magistrates and Police
Officers knew perfectly well to find them. As a
matter of fact, neither then nor ever afterwards did
the police lay hold of a single one of Sir E. Carson's
rifles. Worse still, the Government made warlike
faces at the Ulster rebels, and uttered threats from
which they promptly ran away. Mr. Winston
Churchill, as before, distinguished himself by
announcing that the time had come " when these
grave matters would have to be put to the test,"
and retorted from his own side if there should be
any resistance Sir E. Carson's menace that " the
red blood would flow." Nay, as First Lord of
the Admiralty, he began business by ordering the
Channel Fleet to Lamlash, within a few hours'
steam of Belfast, and the air was full of prepara-
tions for a military expedition from the South as

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 179

though it were no longer possible peacefully to move
a regiment or a policeman in Ulster without the
leave of Sir E. Carson's Provisional Government.

This fit of governmental hysteria spread to the
Army. On March 20, 1914, Gen. Hubert Gough,
commanding a Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, was
sent for by the Commander-in-Chief, Sir A. Paget,
with the news that his Brigade was to be utilized
for " active measures ' in Ulster, and was timidly
sounded as to whether he and his officers could be
relied on to obey. The mutiny thus fatally invited
did not fail to come off. Gough got two hours to
consult his officers as to whether or not they would
disobey their rudimentary duty as soldiers. The
General, generous-hearted and hot-headed Irishman
as he was, opted to send in his papers rather than
march. His officers almost to a man resolved to
follow their commander and telephoned their decision
to the Marlborough Barracks, where the officers of
a regiment of Lancers joined in the revolt, seventy
out of the seventy-six officers pledging themselves
to hand in their resignations. It was a serious
manifestation directly provoked by irresolution at
headquarters, and now to be crowned with triumph
by further irresolution. General Gough has since
made it clear that when he was summoned to
London by the Secretary for War (Col. Seely) he
would not have hesitated to obey orders like a
soldier, if these orders were plainly given. He was,
on the contrary, left under the impression that he
was to be left free to judge for himself whether the
expedition to the North was one he could approve
of, and he returned to his command at the Curragh
completely justified and glorified in the eyes of his
brother mutineers, claiming that he had " got a
signed guarantee that in no circumstances shall we
be used to force Home Rule on the Ulster people."
The effect upon the moral of the Army is accurately

180 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

enough described by the story, if not true, assuredly
ben trovatOj told at the time of the reply of the
Commander-in-Chief, Sir A. Paget, to the inquiry
what his army would do if ordered to the North :
<l All would go well until we met the first of Carson's
men somewhere north of the Boyne, when my
fellows would go over to them to a man, and I
should be sent as prisoner to Mount Stewart '
(Lord Londonderry's place) " and have the time of
my life." With a Secretary for War so apologetic,
and a Commander-in-Chief so philosophic, there
was no more to be said. The fit of active govern-
mental hysterics died down. The Army was never
ordered to the North, the Fleet was ingloriously
ordered home from Lamlash, and Sir E. Carson
might well boast louder than ever that the Army
was at his beck when a campaign for the seduction
of the Army, for which he might have been shot,
went unpunished, and the officers who responded to
his incitements were lionized for their indiscipline,
in full sight of the German Emperor, who was at
that moment making up his mind whether an
English Army thus demoralized was worth counting
in his impending World-war.

The famous proclamation for disarming Ulster
was about to receive a still more contemptuous
commentary even than the Curragh Mutiny, which
it followed fast. On April 24, 1914 (according to
the official organ of the Covenanters, the Northern
Whig), " notwithstanding the Proclamation of the
Government and the vigilance of the Customs
Officers a cargo of over 35,000 magazine rifles and
2,500,000 rounds of ammunition purchased on the
Continent was landed at Larne, Bangor, and
Donaghadee." For days beforehand the affair was
the talk of the province and the " many hundred
private motor-cars ' engaged in the slow work of
discharging the cargo of the " Fanny " did not, of

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 181

course escape the eye of the police, many of whom
were actual lookers-on without daring to raise a
hand. They were overawed, not by the gentlemen
law-breakers of the private motor-cars, but by the
fear how their zeal would be regarded by their
superiors in Dublin Castle. Most of the hiding-
places where this vast store of firearms were stowed
away were also perfectly well-known to the police
authorities, and were duly reported to headquarters,
but not a single search for arms was ordered any-
where in the province, nor a single rifle of the
35,000 ever taken out of the hands of the victorious
gun-runners. Well might Sir E. Carson, Privy
Councillor and ex- Solicitor General, not only identify
himself with the illegality, but publicly incite his
men to offer a bloody resistance to any officer of the
law who should try to disarm them. " And now,
men," he cried to the West Belfast Regiment (June
6, 1914, two months before the outbreak of the
World-war), " keep your arms no matter what happens.
I rely upon every man to fight for his arms to the
end. Let no man take them from you. I do not
care who they be, or under what authority they
come, I tell you, ' Stick to your arms.'

When such a speech following such an act
of open war was left unchallenged, the Government
of the King surrendered at discretion. As they and
their Hibernian confederates had hitherto sinned by
withholding the smallest concession from Ulster in
the wise belief that to laugh at " The King of the
Bluffers ' and his " wooden guns ' was the com-
plete art of statesmanship, so, from the day the
wooden guns were exchanged for Mauser rifles,
they sinned by a cowardice which History will find
as contemptible as their lack of foresight had been
unpardonable.

182 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER X

THE FIRST SHADOW OF PARTITION

THE first emergence in the Home Rule debates of
Partition — or " Exclusion," as the gods called it in
those days — as an alternative policy was made on
January i, 1913, when Sir E. Carson moved as an
amendment on the Report stage that the province
of Ulster be excluded from the operation of the Bill.
The Hibernian Party and the more unreflecting of
their Radical and Labour allies were still in the
heyday of their confidence that the opposition in
Ulster was matter for laughter rather than for
graver treatment. They had just been spending
the last days in Committee in boisterous merriment
at the expense of " the bluffers " and " the wooden
gunmen." It was about as statesmanlike a pro-
ceeding as Mr. Winston Churchill's abortive torch-
light procession in Belfast. When the Ulster leader
rose to move his amendment, they were ready with
a new outburst ot somewhat rowdy ish horseplay.
Sir E. Carson began his speech with a remarkable
success in putting their merriment to shame. " I
hope," he said, " we may dispense with the holiday
hilarity with which our proceedings have been
carried on. I have no wish to offend these
gentlemen, but I really think they do not yet
understand the seriousness with which Ulster
Unionists regard these matters. If they stood in
my place they would resent as much and a great
deal more the kind of treatment my friends and
myself have been receiving for the last two days
from gentlemen who think they can turn these dis-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 183

cussions into a joke." Things had not yet reached
the stage at which he could commit himself to the
precise form the resistance of the Covenanters
would take, or even pledge himself very definitely
to take part in it in person. The omission gave
point to his complaint that " no attempt had been
made to conciliate them or to avert the greatest
constitutional disaster that ever threatened this
House." In other words, the time for some
rational compromise was not even yet overpassed,
and it was remarked that his speech contained
scarcely a reference to the exclusion of the province
of Ulster as his last word in the way of accommo-
dation. But, with the cold solemnity with which
he might pronounce a sentence of death, he left no
doubt as to his own conviction that the Ulster
Unionists would be right in their resistance, and
that in that resistance " they would have the Unionists
of Great Britain at their back." From the Unionist
benches there came an underswell of deep assent
more impressive than if they had got on their feet
to yell, and the rest of the House was quelled into
a hush in which the most thoughtless recognized
almost with awe that a solemn thing had been
spoken. There was no longer a mouse stirring on
the Hibernian or Radical benches. Sir E. Carson
in his blunt-headed way improved the impression
by challenging the Chief Secretary from his own
sources of information to deny the magnitude of the
preparations that were being made for resistance.
The blameless Birrell, like Brer Rabbit (in those
days much quoted), " lay low and said nuffin."
Then he tackled the Prime Minister with a
question which again had an awful ring in the
hushed House " whether he and his colleagues
would go out through England and explain this
Bill and would announce that if Ulster refused to
accept it and claimed to remain as she was her
it

184 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

resistance would be put down by force ? ' The
speaker, whose usual contempt for perorations
equalled that of a pork-butcher for poetry, never-
theless stumbled upon a most dramatic peroration
on this occasion, without seeming to know it. He
wound up with a passage from the American
Declaration of Independence making a last appeal
against their ill-treatment by the Home Government.
He suddenly stopped short where the colonists
announced their decision to take up arms, and with
the words : "I will read no further so long as there
is yet time to avert a similar disaster," he sat down.
Mr. Asquith, always keenly — perhaps too keenly
— responsive to any electric influence in his environ-
ment, and always ready with noble words to voice
the emotions of the House in its finer moods, began
with a tribute of subdued homage to the gravity of
the occasion, which must have wounded the giddy
scoffers and jeerers of an hour before in his own
ranks more deeply than Carson's sharpest stings had
done. He bowed down before " the spirit of
seriousness so admirably exhibited ' by the leader
of the Covenanters, and " neither sought to ignore
nor to minimise the magnitude of the danger '
about which the merriment of the statesmen of the
Board of Erin had hardly died away. Better than
that, he seemed to counter Sir E. Carson's challenge
with one that sounded more boldly still. He
demanded " whether if the Bill was submitted to
the British electorate, and approved, Ulster would
still resist and whether the Unionist Party would
be still behind them ? ' and intimated that he
" would not be afraid to submit that issue to the
British people." But what issue ? If his proposal
was to go to the country on a Bill containing
generous concessions to Ulster — such as afterwards
would have been offered on bended knees — nothing
could .have been wiser statesmanship or even safer

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 185

tactics. But his speech contained no hint of a
single definite satisfaction to Ulster feeling : the
Bill was at its last stage, and unless altered now
must remain unalterable or be lost. Mr. Asquith
was still thinking only of a party issue, and not of
a national settlement by consent. And his weakness
was that, upon the unamended Bill, he knew his
Party managers shrank from appealing to the
British electorate, and had no intention of doing so.
That weakness Mr. Bonar Law was not slow to
fasten upon. He made a clever answer to Mr.
Asquith's challenge, but one vitiated by the fact
that it was no less a party answer. By all means,
let the Government submit the Bill to the country :
he could not speak for Ulster ; but so far as his own
attitude was concerned, as leader of the Opposition,
it would make all the difference. If it were done
and the country approved, the Unionist Party
" would not in any shape or form encourage the
resistance of Ulster." The pledge was a complete
response to the Government's ostensible offer to go
to the country ; for it was the support of the
Unionist Party which was the breath of life of the
Ulster resistance, and, that support once withdrawn,
nobody suggested tha thes threats of armed rebellion
would any longer be persisted in anywhere outside
the least responsible Orange taprooms. The trick
was that he knew the Government were not going
to amend the Bill, and that on a Bill offering no
concessions to Ulster the Government were bound
to be beaten, and would therefore not face the
electorate. A poor party game of shuttlecock on
both sides, and one in which the Government fared
the worst, for the General Election which would
have been expediency as well as statesmanship with
a Bill bravely amended would have spelled sure
defeat with the unamended one, and no more was
heard from the Treasury Bench of Mr. Asquith's

i86 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

incautious challenge. Instead, the irruption of
Mr. Winston Churchill, not yet weaned from the
Belfast torchlight procession spirit as the cure for
Irish ills, brought the debate back from one of grave
reasonableness to the old scenes of disorder,
recriminations and provocations. One momentous
avowal of the Opposition leader, indeed, deserved
the worst that could be said of it, and was destined
to bear a bloodstained responsibility for its share in
screwing up the courage of the German Kaiser to
the World-War.

"It is a fact," coolly observed Mr. Bonar Law,
' which I do not think anyone who knows anything
about Ireland will deny, that these people in the
North-East of Ireland, from old prejudices, perhaps,
more than from anything else, would prefer, I
believe, to accept the government of a foreign
country rather than submit to be governed by hon.
members below the gangway."

Mr. Churchil was justified in noticing, as the
Kaiser, we may be sure, did not fail to notice, this
extraordinary statement of the Unionist leader " that
the loyalists of Ulster would rather be annexed to
a foreign country than continue their allegiance to
the Crown," dotting the i's by adding : " This,
then, is the latest Tory threat, that the loyalists of
Ulster would prefer to be annexed to Germany than
accept the constitution under the British Crown
which this Bill would give them." It was a
palpable hit — so palpable that he was not permitted
to finish another sentence on the subject in the
roar of blind fury that overswept the Opposition
benches. There, however, was the astounding fact,
and it was not explained away, but aggravated, by
Mr. Bonar Law's sorry distinguo that he " had
quoted what he believed to be a fact, without either
approval or disapproval." The honest Tory squires
might bellow till they cracked their cheeks IA the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 187

avowal stood on everlasting record, as a test of the
worth of Ulster's " loyalty," and of the scruples of
Unionist politicians, to be treasured in Baron von
Kuhlman's note-book and laid up in the young
hearts professing no allegiance to any but Ireland,
who were already dreaming of improving upon the
Ulster example in the ranks of the Irish Republican
Army.

It was the last discussion of any practical value
before the Bill received its Third Reading early in
1913 in its unchanged, and consequently unchange-
able, original form. Far from making any advance
towards reconciliation with Ulster, the final debate
made two disclosures of sinister import for the
Irish Cause. Mr. Asquith revealed that a General
Election there would have to be, in any event,
before the Act could be put in operation, thereby
cruelly putting an end to the delusion under whicn
the Hibernian leaders had enabled the Government
to pass the Parliament Act — viz., that its passing
would dispose of the last obstacle to Home Rule.
Also, in the course of his shillelagh practice on the
heads of the Opposition, Mr. Winston Churchill
dropped a hint that there would be no objection
to " the four Orange counties " voting themselves
out of the Bill. It was the first official intimation of the
Home Rule Government's change of front from
National Unity to the " exclusion ' of " the four
Orange counties ' which was to become the basis
of the Buckingham Palace Conference. Although
Mr. Churchill still indulged in the fearful joy of
belabouring the effigy of " Carson, King of the
Bluffers," after the manner of the Falls Road, it was
evident enough that the process of giving up the
Policy of Derision for the Policy of Pusillanimity
was already beginning to work in Ministerial minds.

It was one of the phenomena of those days that
the programme of Conference, Conciliation, and

i88 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Consent, laughed out of court in the democratic
House of Commons, found refuge and a far-sighted
appreciation in the House of Lords. The debates
on the Bill when it reached the Lords will be found
full of the sober statesmanship — of the recognition
that Home Rule in some shape there must ineluc-
tably be, and that the core of the problem was how
to dissipate the forebodings of the Protestant
Minority — which all men now see to be elementary
wisdom, but which was sadly missing amidst the
flippancy and superficiality of the House cf
Commons' treatment of the subject. It was not for
nothing the languid Upper House resolved for once
to throw off its languor and to meet an hour before
its usual custom and prolong its crowded sittings up
to midnight. A strong current of opinion favouring
a settlement by friendly Conference set in from the
start in the memorable speeches of Earl Grey, the
Archbishop of York, the Marquis of Lansdowne,
the Earl of Loreburn, and others. Even Lord
Curzon, who was then supposed to be the mirror
of all that was most supercilious and overbearing in
the " superior person," astonished his peers with a
speech such as might effect miracles of conciliation
at a Round Table. The bulk of the Irish peers,
too, were full of the new spirit. The speech of
Lord Londonderry was the only one that defaced
the debates with any trace of the reckless pugnacity
ot the Orange symposia, and of the House of
Commons. Lord Crewe, the Liberal leader of the
House, was not empowered to answer all these very
genuine yearnings for a Settlement by Consent with
anything more hopeful than the demand of a sweet-
spoken, but unshakeable, Shylock for his pound of
flesh ! The John Morley of old did, indeed, for a
moment flicker up when, Lord Dunraven having
asked why on earth the Government should not
attempt a settlement by consent, he interjected :

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 189

" Yes, a settlement by consent, but on the lines
suggested by Mr. William O'Brien." But Viscount
Morley's own speech was all but inaudible, his spirit
had burnt almost as low as his voice. I

In Ireland, as well, the Hibernian Press, far from
letting the country know that " the last obstacle '
delusion was at an end, and the Partition of the
country not obscurely hinted as the future Liberal
substitute for National Unity, only hailed the
astonishing turn of the tide towards Home Rule in
the House of Lords with a shout of exultation as
proof that the Peers were beaten to the ropes, as
they had predicted. When Lord Dunraven in the
course of a weighty speech at a National Conference
of the All-for-Ireland League on March 3, which
will still repay perusal by every student of history,
proposed a resolution inviting the Government to
take the initiative in summoning a Conference repre-
sentative of all parties and denominations as the
best means of realizing the growing hopes of a
Settlement by Consent, his proposal was received
with howls of " Factionist ! " and " No Compromise ! "
from the Board of Erin mobs and newspapers and
the local All-for-Irelanders for barely tolerating the
idea were held up to execration by one vigorous
Canon of the Church as " a pack of scamps and
scoundrels." Professor Kettle, who combined an
epigrammatic brilliancy with a plentiful lack of
sense, was not to be outdone by his Hibernian
patrons. He laughed any fears of Ulster out of
court. At Skibbereen, he demanded that " the
Imperial forces and the police force of the nation
should be drawn aside and that Ireland should be
left to fight it out with North-East Ulster," and at
Kildare the following Sunday the " Professor of
National Economics ' prescribed without any
appearance of a joke for such of the Orange dogs
as might survive the riot that " they should be shot

i9o THE IRISH REVOLUTION

or hanged or sent to penal servitude." The reign
of unreason was as yet not to be disturbed.

None the less, when on June 10, 1913, the Bill
presented itself for Second Reading in its Second
Session, our small band made a fresh effort to give
concrete effect to the eagerness for a friendly inter-
party consultation before it was too late which was
possessing the best minds in all parties. It was the
day on which the news of George Wyndham's tragic
death had reached the House, and the passing of
that bright spirit brought the whole House into a
hushed accord, while I suggested that " his work in
Ireland would live as an immortal monument," and
might even yet suggest to the rashest of those who
had guiltily marred that work, when it was but half
completed, that the methods by which Wyndham had
victoriously overcome the age-long Agrarian difficulty
offered a no less precious precedent in the present
crisis. Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour lavishly praised,
but did not imitate, and no word of reparation was
heard from the Hibernian benches. The Prime
Minister's courtesy towards Ulster was as faultless as
usual, but he evaded every approach to any definite
concession on the Government's own part by blandly
referring to the " suggestion stage ' at which con-
ciliatory proposals might be sympathetically enter-
tained. There was little difficulty in showing during
my own observations, that this was to put the car
before the horse since, if the Government meant
concessions seriously their first duty ought to be by
a confidential preliminary consultation to enlist the
assent and authority of all sides when they came to
be laid before the House, while if the Government
shirked the duty of taking the initiative, proposals of
irresponsible individuals at " the suggestion stage "
would cast the whole question back into the cauldron
of party politics, and would be foredoomed to failure.
I hurry on from my own arguments and appeals to

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 191

both sides to their effect upon the influential per-
sonages in the debate.

The intoxication of the recent defeats of the
Government at the Newmarket and Altrincham
elections was in Sir E. Carson's blood and he con-
temptuously treated the formal submission of the
Bill for its second session as a farcical way of marking
time until the Government should muster up courage
enough either to come up against the resistance of
Ulster or meet their fate at the hands of the British
electorate. But there was one passage which proved
that his attitude towards any overtures of the Govern-
ment less obviously futile than the suave invitation
for proposals on " the suggestion stage," might even
still have been very different :

' I will frankly admit the speech of the Hon.
Member for Cork was the speech of a man
who wants to bring about peace, but he knows
perfectly well the penalties that have fallen upon
himself because he has tried to win Ulster. . . .
I will say this that if ever you are to bring about a
United Ireland — if ever you are going to bring the
Ulster portion of the community into line, you will
never do it by any means except persuasion."

Mr. Bonar Law, speaking later, made a significant
observation in the same direction : " I say further that if
it was possible that anything on the lines of the speech
of the Member for Cork could be evolved — if he could
succeed in persuading the rest of Ireland in favour of
that course — if he could come to us and say ' what
we propose is not utterly detested by one third of the
people of Ireland, but there is a general consent in its
favour ' — we should all rejoice and welcome any settle-
ment that was arrived at upon such lines." Who will
say now that declarations like these, before Ulster
was armed and finally estranged, were not worth
solemn attention ?

The attention they received from the Chief

192 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Secretary who wound up the debate was a stream of
sparkling Birrellisms, which kept the Ministerialists
in roars of laughter. Discussing the religious diffi-
culty— the sorest of all difficulties — in Ulster, he
revelled and rolled over in badinage of this kind :

" He had his own views of ecclesiastics of all kinds
(laughter). He had curious experiences of them at
the Board of Education and in Ireland (laughter).
He had enjoyed personal contact — he would not say
collision — with Cardinals and Archbishops and he
commended them generally to God. (Prolonged
laughter)."

Magnificent perhaps as fooling, but not the wisest
way of soothing lacerated feelings, and not much
improved by his following it up with the assurance
that " he quite recognised the grave and serions state
of things in Ulster," for Marc Antony too " quite
recognised " that " Brutus was an honourable man."
But even Mr. Birrell was a bit staggered by the tone
of the Unionist leader's reception of the Conference,
Conciliation and Consent proposal.

* A great many compliments have been paid to
the speech of the Hon. Member for Cork — I don't
quarrel with them," he precipitately added to restrain
the jeers of his Hibernian admirers, who supposed
he had not yet ceased joking. " Let me express my
own willingness to sit in conference with the Hon.
Member for Cork, who is, I hope, a friend of mine and
I can assure him that my breast entertains no sort of
animosity against him and never has done. ... I
quite agree with the Hon. Member that we should
settle this by agreement and that it is our bounden
duty if we can."

" Why did you not try ? " was the dry interrogatory
of the member for Cork. " I am willing to try " was
the best answer the readiest of the wits could devise.
But seeing Mr. Dillon's reproachful eye turned upon
him, the luckless Chief Secretary hastened to appease

that statesman with a suggestion which he was not
slow to appropriate as his own, that however " willing
to try," a Conference there could only be on condition
of Sir E. Carson pinning himself first to an Irish
Parliament and an Irish Executive before being
admitted to the Conference room.

It was the first debate for a long time in which the
tongues of all the men of mark in the Irish Party were
set loose. But with what effect upon the fortunes
of a settlement by consent may be inferred from the
briefest summary of their speeches. Mr. Dillon
added to his laurels as a prophet by the brilliant
prediction that it would turn out the next year that
" all this talk of civil war in Ulster was bluff and would
end in nothing," as truly it did end five years later in
worse than nothing — for the prophet and his true
believers. By one of those rare lapses to which one
of the most genial of Irishmen was subject, Mr. T. P.
O'Connor's contribution to the love-feast was one
which horrified the Unionist orator who followed him
(Mr. Locker Lampson) into a lament over * the
poisonous stream of provocative bitterness which had
emanated from the Hon. Member for the Scotland
Division," and Mr. (afterwards Lord Cave) one of the
calmest of judicial men exclaimed : " If Mr. T. P.
O'Connor represents truly the ferocity of the dominant
party in Ireland, God help the Protestant Party ! '
Mr. Devlin was even more unfortunate in what he
seriously conceived to be a speech of conciliation
than in the most blood-thirsty of his platform vows
to'" stand up to Ulster." " When the Hon. Member
for West Belfast," was the comment of one of Sir E.
Carson's chief lieutenants, Mr. Ronald McNeill,
" talks conciliation to us in this House, his face always
reminds me of some wild animal that is going to bite
somebody." And the biter was apt to get bitten, as
when, to one of his amiable overtures, Sir E. Carson
brutally retorted : " The observation of the Hon.

i94 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Member is an infamous lie and he knows it." Against
coadjutors such as these all Mr. Redmond's mag-
nanimity and urbanity struggled in vain. He did
not suffer his gentlemen gladly, but what was to be
done ? His profession of love for his Protestant
countrymen and of readiness to heap every possible
favour upon them was perfectly genuine ; his secret
judgment as to the best road to Irish peace had never
wavered since the Land Conference ; but his con-
ciliatory generalisations were too notoriously in con-
flict with the dominant doctrines of the Board of Erin
to have any more healing effect upon Ulster than Mr.
Devlin's about-to-bite expression of countenance.
He hazarded not a solitary practical suggestion to
give effect to his swelling periods of tolerant and far-
sighted patriotism, and a speech of glowing eloquence,
once its resounding echoes died away, did little to
remove the point of the sarcasm that " no man ever
talked nonsense more majestically than John Red-
mond." The country was allowed to drift balmily
on to the " next year's " millennium predicted by
the prophet Dillon.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 195

CHAPTER XI

LORD LOREBURN'S INTERVENTION

SIR E. CARSON'S amazing career from a Dublin lawyer
* on the make " to a dictatorship of the Empire passed
through three stages — the first when, if generous
concessions were offered to Ulster, his opposition to
the Home Rule Bill would have been as negligible
as had been his opposition to George Wyndham's
great Purchase Act of 1903 ; the second, while he
was incubating his audacious plans for an Ulster
Rebellion, when a resolute Government might still
have put him down by means of his own Coercion
Act without firing a shot ; the third when, left in
undisputed possession of his German armaments, he
was no longer to be resisted, without an appeal to the
British electorate which the Liberals shrank from
making.

We were now at the third stage, when the Govern-
ment and their Hibernian allies fell into a state of
Eanic as unheroic as their previous mirthful gibes had
een idiotic : when the Ulster leader spouted syste-
matical treason without let or hindrance to what had
now become a really formidable army of Volunteers
panting for the signal for action, in which they counted
upon the refusal of the King's Army to fire upon them.
They counted above all upon the pitiable collapse of
the King's Government, who chose this moment to
evacuate Belfast altogether and withdraw their troops
to a country camp at Hollywood at a respectful distance
from the Ulster Provisional Government. Sir E.
Carson even went the length of specifying the sort of
action for which his preparations were made. Had

196 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the constabulary attempted to seize the old Town
Hall, the headquarters of his Provisional Government :

" Many thousands of Volunteers from the Queen's
Island Shipyards and reinforced by other men, would
have attempted to regain possession. The Central
Office of the Belfast police is in the same block of
buildings and as a high percentage of Belfast's male
population carry revolvers, it is doubtful whether the
police could have held either the Town Hall or their
Office. Long before the troops could have arrived,
the streets would have been running in blood, and by
the time General Macready could have reached the
city from Hollywood, to take over the duties of Military
Governor under Martial Law, a terrible situation
would have arisen." (Interview in Daily Telegraphy
April 20, 1914).

Pray imagine the feelings with which all this was
read by the All Highest War Lord, revolving his own
plans for setting the streets of half Europe " running
with blood " before the General Macreadys of England
could arrive to trouble the good work !

It will always remain the heaviest reproach of a
Liberal Ministry, which wanted neither brains nor
high purpose, that two precious years were allowed
to pass without one genuine effort on their part to
conciliate or even to understand Ulster.

Little boots it now to recall how persistently our
own small group from the start pointed out that a
conciliatory attitude towards Ulster was the rudi-
mentary wisdom of the matter and, regardless of the
scoffs and insults of the worst of the Hibernians and
the most ignorant of their confederates on the Minis-
terial side of the House, pressed precisely those pro-
posals of friendly conference and large local autonomy
which are now as I write on everybody's lips as offering
the only hope of deliverance from a loathsome civil
war.

One supreme opportunity, and the last, offered

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 197

at the end of the Session of 1913 of turning the dead-
lock between the two Houses into a broadminded
settlement by consent, and it will be the wonder and
regret of History that it was not availed of. On the
nth September, 1913, Lord Loreburn published in
The Times a letter appealing for a small friendly
Conference of all Parties, unfettered by any pre-
liminary conditions, to try whether the deadlock
might not be terminated by a settlement by consent.
Lord Loreburn was a life-long Liberal and enthusiast
for Irish Home Rule. He was one of our foremost
Counsel at the Parnell Commission, was Mr. Asquith's
first Lord Chancellor, and enjoyed universal respect
as a man of fine judicial temper and a winning courtesy
to all men. " A document of the first political im-
portance ' ' was the description of his letter by The
Times, which still retained its Unionist bias, but was
already beginning to manifest that large-minded sense
of the realities of the Irish situation which, in the
subsequent years, was to make the old implacable
journalistic foe of Parnell the most powerful influence
in Britain for Irish liberty since the death of Gladstone.
The most thoughtful of the Liberal organs, the Nation,
the Westminster Gazette, the Daily News, the Man-
chester Guardian and so forth gave Lord Loreburn 's
appeal a discriminating, but all the more useful wel-
come. The great Tory papers — the Observer, the
Daily Telegraph, even the Morning Post — were already
won|over to a settlement conditioned by reasonable
guarantees to Ulster, and rebuked the few meaner
Unionist and Hibernian sheets which affected to see
in Lord Loreburn 's appeal a signal of distress on the
part of the Liberal Cabinet. The truth, as it turned
out, was that the only obstacle to its success was the
hesitation of his Liberal colleagues, still reassured by
the optimism of their purblind Hibernian advisers.
On the evening after the appearance of the letter in The
Times I received at my home in Mallow a sheaf of

198 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

telegrams from the Times, the Daily News, the Daily
Telegraph, the Daily Chronicle, and Daily Express
pressing for my views. They were concentrated in
my message to the Times :

" I have as yet seen a summary only of Lord
Loreburn's letter, but it is a pronouncement which
no Party can afford to disregard. Our All-for-Ireland
motto ' Conference, Conciliation and Consent ' is
sufficient intimation how enthusiastically we welcome
Lord Loreburn's plea for friendly consultation before
it is too late. I am absolutely convinced that an
unfettered Conference such as he proposes will not
separate without an agreement."

And to the Daily News, I wired inter alia :

" Nationalist opinion in the South notes with
profound satisfaction the respectful sympathy with
which the Liberal Press is treating Lord Loreburn's
letter. . . Suspend Party warfare for three months
and the thing is done."

It was one of those golden moments when there
was an " atmosphere " of unprecedented friendliness
— at least in Britain — for the attempt to do those very
things which all parties are at this writing only too
eager to do, after years of immeasurable anguish and
bloodshed. It was even announced from Balmoral
that King George — long a genial convert to Home
Rule — " was using his good offices " with two guests
so worthily typical of the two great British parties as
Lord Lansdowne and Sir John Simon, " in the direc-
tion of bringing the political leaders together to discuss
Home Rule." Mr. Redmond alone was dumb. As
at every critical juncture since 1903, he allowed Mr.
Dillon and Mr. Devlin to make up his mind for him,
and as on the Land Purchase Bill of 1903 Mr. Dillon
and Sir Edward Carson were, for destructive purposes,
now again agreed. Mr. Dillon proclaimed that " he
would enter no Conference " unless Sir Edward
Carson would first declare himself a Home Ruler,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 199

which was a characteristically rash oracle, for a few
months afterwards he was glad to enter the Bucking-
ham Palace Conference with Sir E. Carson without
any such condition. He gave the cue to his leader
and followers for the defeat of Lord Loreburn's
proposal by raising the cry that " appeals for a Con-
ference coming from the friends of Home Rule were
regarded as flags of distress and would only encourage
the Orange leaders to fresh extravagance of threats
and violence." Mr. Devlin alluded with lofty scorn
to " some references on the part of certain individuals
to the question of compromise on the Home Rule
Bill " — he who was a little later to accept the one
irreparable " compromise " of Partition and to coerce
his Hibernians into swallowing it — and dismissed
" all this talk about conciliation and Conference-
mongery " as meant to " defeat the Home Rule Bill
and to smash up the Irish movement." He held the
true policy was " to stand up to Ulster ' and he
" stood up to Ulster ' himself by departing for a
distant meeting in Connacht where he undertook
if the police and military would only stand aside to
" wipe Carson and his Covenanters off the face of the
earth." After a week or two of which propaganda,
the Freeman found it safe to announce that the Lore-
burn Conference idea was an " exploded idea " and
that " Lord Loreburn's ballon d'essai was a tangled
mass of wreckage."

The cruel fallacy of all this " no compromise " cry
was that the compromise had already been made and
by the very man who raised the cry. The only reason
why Lord Loreburn had interfered at all was that the
" bluff and threats of the Ulster leaders," to use Mr.
Dillon's words, had already so far " intimidated the
Government and the National Party " that the Prime
Minister had pledged himself to refer the whole
matter to the British electorate before a Home Rule
Act was put in operation — that Mr. Winston Churchill

o

200 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

had openly gone over to the Partitionists with an offer
of " the four Orange Counties " to Sir E. Carson —
and that the " National Party " were so successfully
intimidated that they did not offer a word of protest
against the one surrender or the other.

Sir E. Carson of course declined with bitter sarcasm
Mr. Dillon's preliminary condition, but on the main
point of throwing cold water upon Lord Loreburn's
peace proposal spoke altogether after Mr. Dillon's
own heart. A closer study of his words, however,
made it clear that his objection to the Conference was
based on the shadowy distinction between * Local
Government " and Home Rule, and that he was only
manoeuvring to avoid any suspicion in the minds of
his own braves that he was flying " a flag of distress '
himself, when he fed their fires of indignation by
reminding them : " Is it not strange that all this talk
about the feelings of Ulster never occurred before to
the Liberal Party ? When they took up this Bill and
Mr. Asquith and Mr. Redmond were meeting to-
gether, they framed this measure without any concern
about us because they believed that it was all plain
sailing." While, of course, no man could honestly
propose a Home Rule pledge to Sir E. Carson as the
first condition of a parley, the striking fact is to be
noted that, in the whole of the discussions raised by
Lord Loreburn's letter, neither from him nor from
any speaker or newspaper in the Unionist camp was
there yet a whisper of that Partition of Ireland as a
condition of settlement which was to be the torch of
discord during the eight following years. Had Mr.
Asquith and Mr. Redmond only shown the high
virtue not to be afraid to seem afraid, the Loreburn
Conference must have assembled under every circum-
stance that could favour a noble enterprise of peace.
The Irish leader, and the British Prime Minister stood
tongue-tied until the golden sands ran out, and the
denouncers of "conciliation and Conference-monkery"

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 201

had their victory for nine months more, when they
and their leaders did very truly raise " a flag of dis-
tress " too late to conceal their ignominy ^nd panic.

It was on May 12, 1914, in moving that the Com-
mittee stage of the Home Rule Bill, on its last
appearance in the House of Commons should be
formal and that " all questions should be put from the
Chair without amendment or debate," Mr. Asquith
gave the first public intimation that Home Rule was
about to be given up for Partition. Under cover of
leaving the door open for " an agreed settlement,"
the Prime Minister announced that " while we shall
ask the House to give this Bill a Third Reading before
we separate, we shall make ourselves responsible for
introducing an Amending Bill in such a manner that
the two Bills shall become law practically at the same
time." Mr. Bonar Law promptly, with a certain
exultation but with still more contempt, fastened upon
the admission that the Government " which had been
drifting for the past six months and was drifting
still " had " now made a distinct advance and was now
going to introduce an Amending Bill which would
fundamentally alter the present Bill." He tauntingly
invited the Prime Minister and Mr. Redmond
" between whom the real crux of the question lay "
to take the House into their confidence as to what the
Amending Bill was to be. Obviously the Prime
Minister's announcement must have been concerted
with Mr. Redmond and his Hibernians. If they
objected, it was in their power to put their Govern-
mental betrayers out of office in the division lobby that
evening. No less obviously Mr. Redmond knew
that Partition in some shape was to be the blood and
bone of the Amending Bill. His last doubts, had he
any, were dispelled by Mr. Lloyd George, who on
this occasion for the first time showed his hand as the
villain of the drama and avowed that the " Exclusion "
of any counties that chose to follow Sir E. Carson was

202 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the object of the new departure. Under these cir-
cumstances Mr. Redmond had to go through a per-
formance perhaps the most humiliating that ever fell
to the lot of an Irish leader. He had first to simulate
extreme surprise and indignation at the betrayal in a
burst of reheated passion which bore too evident
traces of being studied by the midnight oil. He
wrathfully pointed to the delight on the Unionist
benches as " another lesson to the Government of
the inevitable effect of making advances to the
Opposition " — forgetful of the fact that the Govern-
ment advance could never have been made without
his own consent, and that this particular " advance '
meant the Partition of his country. He, indeed,
majestically reserved his freedom of action when the
Amending Bill was under discussion, but quite spoiled
an excellent piece of playacting by announcing amidst
a general titter that for the present he and his Party
intended to go into the Division lobby with his be-
trayers. To pass the Bill at any price — even though a
Bill repealing it was to be passed simultaneously —
was the one plank he clung to in the wreckage. He
had to wind up with this sorry piece of rhetoric for
consumption in Ireland : " They had the consolation
of knowing that the vision which had sustained them
through darkness, suffering and oppression in the
past was about to be realized and that in a few weeks
the triumph of their cause would be consummated."

" In a few weeks the triumph of their cause '
was in matter of fact " consummated " when on May
25, the final Third Reading of the Government of
Ireland Bill was passed on the solemn undertaking
of the Prime Minister that an Amending Bill decreeing
Partition would be passed into law " at the same
time." An occasion which a blindfolded Irish public
was led to believe marked the crowning triumph of
their nation marked in reality the most cruel fraud
upon popular credulity by which Irish leaders ever

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 203

disgraced themselves. The Prime Minister, in a few
perfunctory sentences, renewed in the most distinct
terms his pledge that the Amending Bill would be
introduced while the Home Rule Bill was still before
the House of Lords, and left no doubt what the
Amending Bill was to be by announcing that its
object had been " most clearly stated by my right
Hon. friend (Mr. Lloyd George) with my complete
assent in the course of the debate on Wednesday, the
1 2th of this month " — namely, " exclusion " to any
needful extent to appease Sir E. Carson. The first
Clause of the Bill nominally passed established one
Parliament for all Ireland. The Amending Bill to
which the Government and the Irish Party now
pledged themselves gave that First Clause the lie
direct and gave up the last hope of a Parliament for
all Ireland. In presence of this appalling surrender
of all that made Home Rule worth fighting for, Mr.
Redmond and his Party spoke not a word of protest.
Indeed the Irish leader spoke not a word at all. The
deed was too shameful to be defended.

Only one voice was raised by a representative of
Ireland in this supreme hour of her fate. It was
the protest which I was commissioned to make in the
name of my All-for-Ireland colleagues. As it was
the only one from any quarter against the vote which
made Partition an acknowledged article of the creed
of " the Home Rule Government " one or two passages
from my speech may be found of interest even at this
day. Having declared that the Ministerial pretext for not
disclosing the contents of the Amending Bill for fear
of offending the susceptibilities of the House of Lords
in whose House it was to be introduced " was not
straight dealing either with Ireland or with England,"
and remarked that the device " somehow conveyed
to me the impression of a last desperate throw of
ruined gamblers," I proceeded :

" The game was lost for Ireland the day

204 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

when the Hon. Member for Waterford and his
friends consented to the Partition of Ireland. (In-
terruptions). That fact will never be forgotten
for them and will not easily be forgiven to
them in spite of the cheers with which their treason
is received on the Radical benches opposite. All that
has happened since is only a consequence of their
policy of bitterly opposing any genuine concession to
Ulster at the right time, and now consenting to the
concession of all others which will not only fail to
conciliate Ulster, but will rouse millions of the Irish
race against your Bill and indeed against all British
party politicians impartially. We all know the object
of this policy of adjournment to the House of Lords
is to put off for a few weeks more the day of inevitable
disillusion for the Irish people and to enable the
Member for Waterford in the meantime to brag that
some tremendous victory has been gained by the
ghastly farce of this Third Reading to-night. . . •
The Government are determined to pass this Bill —
yes, but they are equally determined not to put it in
force in its most vital particular. The Prime Minister
confessed only a few minutes ago that this Bill is only
a first instalment and that the second instalment is
to nullify the first. . . . Any Bill that purposes to cut
off Ulster permanently or temporarily from the body
of Ireland is to me worse than nothingness, and I
think you will find millions of Irish Nationalists will
be of the same opinion. The Member for Waterford
spoke as if the technical passage of this Bill will be a
joyday for Ireland as a nation. Sir, it will be on the
contrary one of the grossest frauds that ever was
perpetrated on a too confiding Irish people. It will
be little short of a cruel practical joke at the expense
of their intelligence as well as of their freedom. They
will have the cup of liberty presented to their lips*
but only on condition that their lips must not touch
it, ... This Act will be born with a rope around its

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 205

neck. It is not even intended to be enforced. It is
to be repudiated by its own authors in the particular
of all others which will wound Irish Nationalists to
the heart and which will blot out the very name of
Ireland as a nation. Sir, the difference between us
and the Party who sit behind us is that we are ready
for almost any conceivable concession to Ulster that
will have the effect of uniting Ireland, but we will
struggle to our last breath against a proposal which
will divide her and divide her eternally, if once Ire-
land's own representatives are consenting parties. . . .
Of course we all know you have the voting power to
pass this Bill as a sort of mechanical toy to amuse a
people whom you very stupidly suppose to be a nation
of children. But you know that this Bill does not
mean business, and so long as it is clogged, as the
Prime Minister to-night admits it is clogged, by a
Ministerial pledge of a repealing Bill for the mutilation
of Ireland, we regard this Bill as no longer a Home
Rule Bill, but as a Bill for the murder of Home Rule
such as we have understood it all our lives and we can
have no hand, act or part in the operation."

My colleagues and myself abstained from voting.
To vote with the Government would have been to
give our sanction like that of the Hibernian Party, to
the avowed scheme for the mutilation of Ireland.
By declining to vote we at least did something to save
the future by placing it on record that there was one
body of Irish representatives, however small, who
refused to be accomplices in the infamy. We did not
doubt that our action, temperate though it was, would
bring a tempest of misrepresentation about our ears.
Looking back upon the scene now, there seems an
element of diabolical humour about what happened.
For it was the seventy Irish representatives who had
just sentenced their country to Partition who postured
as the patriots and wise men, and it was the seven
Nationalists, who made the only protest in their power

206 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

infthe name of a betrayed nation, who in the face of a
grinning House of Commons were saluted with yells
of " Factionists ! " and " Traitors ! " by the triumphant
Hibernians. The grim irony did not even stop there.
The subsidised Irish Press, with one voice, held us
up to the execration of the country with the cry that
we " had voted against Home Rule," and, under cover
of that villainous falsehood, five or six hundred All-
for-Ireland County Councillors and District Coun-
cillors were, at the Local Government elections at
that moment pending, subjected to ferocious perse-
cution and a considerable number of them expelled
from public life. Personally, we had the ample
revenge of despising our calumniators, but it must
be confessed that there was something heartbreaking
in the thought that the people had no means of
knowing, and indeed have never come to know of what
an abominable untruth they were the victims, and
lighted their bonfires for the passage of Home Rule
without the slightest suspicion that they were all the
time celebrating their own condonation of Partition.

If they lighted bonfires five years later it would
be to burn the famous " Act on the Statute Book '
in its flames with execrations, which was indeed the
fate it received from Mr. Lloyd George, with general
consent, in his Act of 1921.

The Loreburn peace proposal was wrecked and
the first stage of Partition successfully negotiated.
But the victors were so little at ease with their work
that they immediately set themselves to organise a
peace conference on their own account, making it
is true a pompous pretence of effecting Lord Lore-
burn's object, but in reality so devised as quite cer-
tainly to defeat his hopes from an " unfettered con-
ference " and serving only as a further crafty move
in the Partition game.

The Conference which the King was induced to
summon at Buckingham Palace on 2ist July, 1914,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 207

was born only to have its brief life cursed by every
evil gift a malignant fairy god-mother could throw
into its cradle. It came too late. The events of the
previous twelve months — the incidents at the Curragh,
the landing of the German armaments at Larne, the
dazed incompetence of the nominal Government of
the country — had filled the Covenanters with a con-
fidence akin to insolence. The Conference was a
jumble of irreconcileable elements. Only two of its
nine members were Irish Nationalists ; and one of the
two was the man whose hatred of any form of friendyl
settlement by Conference had been an obsession
bordering on monomania ever since 1903 ; and who
shipwrecked Lord Loreburn's proposal by refusing to
enter into any Conference until Sir E. Carson had first
abjured his objection to Home Rule. The immense
body of Conciliationist opinion in Ireland was left
out of consultation altogether. Worst of all, the
object of the Conference, as announced to the House
of Commons by Mr. Asquith, was one destructive of
the first principle of Home Rule, namely — " to con-
sider the possibility of defining the area to be excluded
from the operation of the Government of Ireland
Bill." It was not even to discuss the possibility of
substituting Partition for Home Rule, but only of
' defining the area to be excluded." It was the first
time the separation of Ulster from Ireland was publicly
avowed as a practicable programme by any Party —
even Sir E. Carson's — and now " the" Home Rule
Government ' and the Hibernian Party went to
Buckingham Palace recognising that it was a pro-
gramme not merely possible, but already settled
behind the backs of the Irish people, and that the only
business to be discussed was to define the extent to
which Ireland was to be mutilated. The only question
in debate at Buckingham Palace, it is now certain, was
whether it was six counties, or only four, that were to
be torn from the body of Ireland. It was upon this

208 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

question — one of unimaginable meanness compared
with the principle of the Partition of an ancient nation,
which does not seem to have been under debate at
all — that the Buckingham Palace Conference, in Mr.
Asquith's words, " was unable to agree," and, after
four sittings, " brought its meetings to a conclusion."
The Government sternly refused any opportunity
of even discussing in the House of Commons this
astounding transformation in the fortunes of Home
Rule. The Hibernian Party took good care by their
newspapers and organisers, to prevent the people of
Ireland from understanding, unless in the most misty
way, that their representatives had killed Home Rule
by killing the only thing that made it worth having —
the integrity of Ireland as a sovereign and immemorial
nation. It was many a day before the Irish masses
had any but the faintest conception that the morning
Mr. Redmond and Mr. Dillon entered Buckingham
Palace with such a programme, they committed them-
selves to the Partition of their country with a complete-
ness from which it was never again in their power to
recede.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 209

CHAPTER XII

THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WORLD WAR

WHAT was Sir E. Carson's share in deciding the
German Emperor for his World-War ? is a question
which has hitherto been ignored as an unpleasant
topic, but which History will unquestionably insist
upon investigating. Nobody except Mr. Dillon would
have thought of accusing the Ulster leader and his
Covenanters of being in consciously guilty relations
with a German spy. Sir E. Carson had, of course, as
little prevision of what was coming as he had when
he rivalled Mr. Dillon in his gloomy forebodings of the
repudiation and general bankruptcy that were to follow
the Wyndham policy of 1903. The problem is not
what Sir E. Carson was thinking, but what the Kaiser
was thinking, and how far his knowledge of what was
going on in Ulster affected his meditations whether
Der Tag had arrived. It was an innocent thing
enough for Sir E. Carson to accept the German
Emperor's invitation to lunch on August 29th 1913
(as his Orange organ in Belfast proudly announced at
the time). We may be quite sure they did not discuss
plans for an Ulster Rebellion to cripple the arm of
England whenever His Majesty gave the signal.
But it is a significant bit of evidence that Ulster was
very much in His Majesty's thoughts at the time, and
his notorious partisanship with his fellow Protestants
of the North had assuredly not cooled since he used
to invite the former Ulster leader, Col. Saunderson,
to his board. It was before August 29th, 1913, Sir
E. Carson had made some of his most violent speeches
of defiance, including his announcement at Belfast

THE IRISH REVOLUTION

(July 26) "I hope in September to call together the
whole of the Ulster Council and complete our arrange-
ments for taking over the Government ourselves upon
the day that Home Rule is put on the Statute-Book,"
volunteering the admission that " it will probably be
an illegal procedure : if it is we give the challenge
to the Government to interfere with it, if they dare."
All of which his Imperial host of a few weeks after
might not unreasonably construe as proof that a
widespread rebellion against the authority of the King
.and Parliament was brewing.

Then the despatch to Ireland of Baron Von
Kuhlman was a still more significant portent. He
was not a poor " spy " carrying his life in his hands,
tut a German Minister of the first consequence and
an intimate adviser of his Emperor. And Baron Von
Kuhlman 's visit, be it marked, a few months before
the outbreak of the war, was made not to the Sinn F6in
leaders or to the South, but to Belfast, where he was
lionised by the military Commanders of the Ulster
Volunteer Army and was enabled to inspect " eight
battalions armed with Mauser rifles and accompanied
by two Colt machine guns and a Maxim " ! Who can
doubt what sort of report was carried back to his
Imperial Master by Baron Von Kuhlman, who had
seen nothing but a province teeming with armed
rebels, a King's army honeycombed with mutiny and
a Government paralysed with vacillation and terror ?
Who can fail to understand the effect upon a man
whose consuming speculation at the time must have
been the part England would or could play if he un-
loosed his hordes against France ?

Again, it was little more than a month after a
Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh had with impunity
refused to march North, when the news came that the
Fanny had successfully run her cargo of arms from
Hamburg through the lines of patrolling British war-
ships which refused to see. Is it credible that the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 211

purchase and transport of German arms and munition*
sufficient to equip an army, and their loading and free
departure from His Majesty's principal seaport can
have escaped the vigilance of a War-lord whose thoughts
at the moment turned above all else upon whether
England was or Was not in a position to take part in a
Continental war ? The questions where these arms
came from, who purchased them (if they were really
purchased), how the Fanny succeeded in loading her
cargo and clearing the great port of Hamburg without
interruption, and what became of the cargo after it
was landed, were the first any Government worthy
of the name ought to have cleared up by interrogating,
if necessary under the Star Chamber provisions of
his own Coercion Act persons like SirE. Carson, who
openly identified themselves with the expedition.
But no such questions were asked, and the mystery
would to this day remain a mystery, only for the
publication of the " story," which Sir E. Carson
told Col. Repington " a man who had been on board
the Fanny on its famous gun-running exploit was
writing Jl (of this publication more hereafter). Full
of enlightenment though Mr. Ronald McNeill's
book is1, we will probably have to wait for the com-
pletion of our information for some official revelation
of the transaction from the German side like
Lieutenant Von Spindler's account of his own gun-
running expedition to Kerry later when it was the Sinn
F&ners who were the consignees.

It is notorious that the Orange masses looked to
the sabre-rattling Protestant Kaiser as their deliverer,
as their ancestors had looked to King William of
Orange. Even one of the most sober leaders of the
Ulster Council — Right Hon. Thomas Andrews — did
not hesitate to say, " If we were deserted by Great
Britain, I would rather be governed by Germany

1 Ulster's Stand for the Union. By Mr. Ronald McNeilL.
London. 1922.

212 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

than by Patrick Ford and John Redmond and
Company. " Perhaps the most characteristic of all
the Ulster fighting-men, in the straightforwardness
as well as obstinacy of the breed, was Captain Craig,
M.P. (afterwards to be Sir James Craig, " Premier '
of the Six Counties " Parliament ", and the future
Minister and Chamberlain of the King) candidly
blurted out : " There is a spirit spreading abroad
which I can testify from my personal knowledge
that Germany and the German Emperor would be
preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick
Ford, and the Molly Maguires." Above all, ^what
must have been the conclusion of the German
Emperor when he read that Mr. Bonar Law, speaking
for a Unionist Party composed of a majority of the
representatives of England, had made with quite
evident relish in the House of Commons the following
astounding revelation of the mentality of " Ulster " ?

"It is a fact which I do not think anyone who
knows anything about Ireland will deny, that these
people in the North-East of Ireland, from old preju-
dices, perhaps, more than anything else, from the
whole of their past history would prefer, I believe,
to accept the Government of a foreign country rather
than submit to be governed by the hon. gentlemen
below the gangway."

The Kaiser must have been the last to have any
doubt what was " the foreign country " referred to,
and can have had little less difficulty in making up
his mind when weighing the probabilities of England
standing up to the armies and fleets of Germany,
that the House of Commons was as debauched as
the Army, or as the Ulster emissaries who were nego-
tiating for cargoes of German rifles and machine-
guns from Hamburg, to be employed in rebellion
against the law of Parliament, of which the King
constitutes the first Estate. While the Kaiser's
orders for the mobilisation must have been already

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 213

in type, on July 13, 1914, Sir E. Carson gave his
benediction to a resolution practically announcing
that the Ulster Rebellion would be simultaneous
with the German declaration of war, in words
scarcely less definite than an ultimatum : " That in
view of the imminence of the final struggle against
Home Rule, we call upon our leaders to take what-
ever forward steps they consider necessary, inasmuch
as we, like our forefathers, stand upon our guard,
and do resolve, by the blessing of God, rather to go
out and meet the danger than to await it."

Once more, be it freely conceded, Sir E. Carson
and his foolish friends did not know ; the unfor-
tunate point is that the Kaiser did. When in the
years to come, the favourite outcry against Ireland
was that Sinn Fein " stabbed England in the
back " by importing German arms and courting a
German alliance, those who raised it failed to
remember that, while the Emperor was coming to
his fateful decision, the Irish Republican Army was
not yet in existence, and Sir Roger Casement had
not yet been heard of in Berlin, but the Ulster
Covenanters were talking of going over to Germany,
and looking to Germany for their arms, and openly
telling a shivering Government that the hour for the
Ulster Rebellion had come. When all the evidence
sees the light, posterity — even English posterity —
will perhaps judge more sternly those who " stabbed
England in the back >:> by helping to precipitate the
World-War in the name of loyalty, than those who,
after the mischief was done, faced the might of
England in clean fight and cheerfully gave up their
lives for their ideals, when the contingent rebels
who to the last hour before the war gave aid and
comfort to the Kaiser were kissing King George's
hands for Cabinet Ministerships and Premierships
on the winning side.

THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XIII

THE LAST STRAW FOR YOUNG IRELAND

THE preparations for rebellion which brought Sir E.
Carson to be a Cabinet Minister instead of to the
gallows inflicted two grievous injuries upon England.
They had much to do, as we have seen, with the
German Kaiser's determination to begin the World-
War, and they laid down a precedent for Southern
Rebellion to which is directly to be traced the re-
sponsibility for the succeeding five years' wars for the
Irish Republic.

The official historiographer of the rebellion that
did not come off, Mr. Ronald McNeill, M.P., tells us
the story of the Larne gun-running expedition in the
early part of 1914 on the authority of a manuscript
narrative by its. commander, a brave but feather-
brained ex-apprentice of Messrs. Harland and Wolff's
shipyard, named Crawford1. It is scarcely surprising
that the book had been published for a considerable
time before any newspaper ventured to notice it.
In no Irish newspaper has its publication ever been
announced at all, and in the British press the boycott
has been all but as complete. It is packed with
revelations which, in sterner days, would have con-
signed the author to the Tower and sentenced his
book to be burned by the hands of the common hang-
man. Mr. McNeill makes no disguise of the Ulster
leader's shrewd suspicion that, in importing their
armaments from Germany, four months before the
outbreak of the World-War, they were doing something,
at the least, not unacceptable to the Kaiser :

1 Ulster's Stand for the Union. By Mr. Ronald MacNeill.
London. Murray. 1922.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 215

" It may be doubted," he innocently observes,
" with the knowledge that we now possess, whether
the German Government would have been greatly
incensed at the idea of a cargo of arms finding its way
from Hamburg to Ireland in the spring of that year
without the knowledge of the British Government."

The book, in fact, makes it clear that the cargo
could never have started from Germany without the
connivance of the most highly organised bureaucracy
in the world. Where the armaments actually came
from is no better explained than by the statement
that the seller was an honest Jew broker in Hamburg
" B.S." Who " B.S." may be, and what were his
relations with the port authorities, or with higher
powers, History will doubtless show an affectionate
solicitude to discover. The honest Hebrew offered
Sir E. Carson's agent a choice between cheap Italian
and Russian rifles and a supply of 20,000 new Austrian
and German rifles with bayonets. "The last men-
tioned of these alternatives was much the most costly,
being double the price of the Italian and nearly treble
that of the Russian arms ; but it had great advantages
over the other two. The Austrian and German
patterns were both first-rate ; the rifles were up-to-
date clip-loaders, and what was the most important
consideration, ammunition for them could be easily
procurable in the United Kingdom." The costly
Mausers and Mannlichers accordingly were the choice
of Ulster. How this enormous weight of armaments
(15,000 rifles and bayonets had to be brought from
Austria) could have been assembled and packed in a
single German port, and conveyed through the Kiel
Canal without attracting the eye of a single German
official during the month while the operation lasted,
is a miracle which is only deepened by Mr. McNeill's
ingenuous explanation. A miracle-worker, however,
the mysterious " B.S." turned out to be :

" Whether any suspicion had in fact been aroused

216 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

remains unknown. Anyhow the barges were ready
laden with a tug waiting until the tide should serve
about midnight for making a start down the Elbe and
through the Canal to Kiel. The modest sum of £10
procured an order authorising the tug and barges to
proceed through the Canal zcithout stopping and requiring
other shipping to let them pass. A black flag was the
signal of this privileged position, which suggested
the ' Jolly Roger ' to Crawford's thoughts and gave a
sense of insolent audacity when great liners of ten or
fifteen thousand tons were seen making way for a tug
boat towing a couple of lighters."

There was nothing so daring in the expedition
as the suggestion that the All -Highest War Lord
whose Baron Von Kiihlman had just returned from
Ulster, and who had but a short time previously
entertained Sir E. Carson to luncheon, had not the
remotest notion of the destination of the expedition
which was for a month fitting out in the chief port of
his Empire, and had an army of port officials so in-
fantilely corrupt that " the modest sum of £10 " was
sufficient to bribe them into letting the rebel armaments
pass unchallenged through the Kiel Canal and forcing
" great liners of ten or fifteen thousand tons " to do
homage to the black flag of the Belfast ex-apprentice.
We shall all be delighted to make honest " B.S.'s '
closer acquaintance whenever the Berlin and Hamburg
archives yield up their secrets.

Mr. McNeilPs endeavours to invest the Crawford
expedition with a halo of romance display too much
candour not to bring merciless ridicule upon his hero.
In the matter of daring, it was a mere schoolboy ad-
venture compared with Von Spindler's gun-running
cruise in the And in the following year, with a cargo
of arms consigned to a rebel destination in a different
part of Ireland, for Von Spindler had to pierce his
way through a great British fleet off the Scottish coast,
the least destroyer of which could have sent him to the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 217

bottom at the first alarm. In the case of the Fanny,
dealing with a Government like that of Mr. Asquith,
danger there was none. Nothing could, indeed, be
unkinder than the comic relief imputed by Mr.
McNeill to the adventure from his own side. The
leaders of the Ulster Provisional Government (with
the one exception of Sir E. Carson) the bold Crawford
found to be a pack of incapables and poltroons. To
the Chief he addressed himself in desperation, to know
if the Provisional Government meant business. The
interview is worthy of the best comic business in the
pantomine ot old. " I shall carry out the coup if I
lose my life in the attempt " quoth the bold Crawford.
* Now, Sir Edward, I want to know are you willing
to back me to the finish in this undertaking ? If
you are not, I don't go." What could be more sen-
sible ? Or what finer passage can you produce me
in literature than the response of the Chief? —

' We were alone, Sir Edward was sitting opposite
to me. When I had finished, his face was stern and
grim and there was a glint in his eye. He rose to his
full height, looking me in the eye ; he advanced to
where I was sitting and stared down at me and shook
his clenched fist in my face, and said in a steady
determined voice which thrilled me, and which I
shall never forget : ' Crawford, I'll see you through
this business, if I should have to go to prison for it/
I rose from my chair ; I held out my hand and said :
* Sir Edward, that is all I want, I leave to-night,
good-bye/

Mrs. Micawber was not more sublime in her
most valiant hour of determination never to desert
her excellent husband, than Sir Edward in his covenant
to do a short time in jail, if his myrmidon " should
lose his life in the attempt." And mark the cheerful-
ness with which he took the prospect of " having to go
to prison for it " in the ordinary course of business,
that being his lawyerly matter of fact way of discussing

2x8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

with the confidential Crawford the epoch-making
catastrophe which he had led the trembling Prime
Minister and his Hibernian advisers to believe was to
result if a hair on his sacred head was touched.

What exactly was the danger of anybody " losing
his life," over which there was all this display of
emotion, Mr. McNeill leaves us wondering. True
Mr. Winston Churchill, by a tragic gesture, had
ordered the Fleet to Lamlash, where it was in a position
to patrol the Irish Sea as effectively as a London
suburban resident might survey his back garden.
But the Ruler of the King's Navee was not going to be
beaten in the fun by Mr. Crawford's black flag or by
the protestations of Sir Edward Micawber. From
the beginning of February to the 24th of April, Mr.
Crawford was fooling about the seas with his pirate
craft, the Fanny, with every conceivable precaution
to attract attention — now flying from Hamburg to
Belfast to screw up the courage of his Provisional
Government by threatening to run his cargo ashore,
or throw it overboard, unless they toed the line — now
cruising in Danish waters, in the British Channel,
off the Tuskar — at one moment transhipping his
armaments from one ship to a second and a third one—
at another losing the Fanny altogether and rushing
about from London to Holyhead and besieging tele-
graph-offices with wires to inquire for her — and the
Fleet paid no more heed to his peregrinations than if
Mr. Churchill's dreadnoughts and destroyers were so
many painted ships upon a painted ocean. Nor was
the festive Mr. Birrell — " the Playboy of the Western
World/' as he had now come to be called, after Synge's
hero — to be outdone as soon as the fun came within
his own jurisdiction. " Half the motor-cars of the
province " were collected for the discharge of the
arms without disturbing the sleep of the Chief Secre-
tary or his hosts. The wires of the King's Post
Office were " earthed " by his liege subjects and we
are told :

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 219

" The police and coastguards were peacefully
picketed in their various barracks — they were shut
in and strongly guarded. No conflict took place
anywhere between the authorities and the Volunteers,
and the only casualty of any kind was the unfortunate
death of one coastguardman from heart disease at
Donaghadee."

Whether from excess of indignation or excess of
laughter, Mr. McNeill forbears to specify. A tele-
gram with the single word " Lion " was despatched
to Sir E. Carson and to Lord Londonderry in London,
and the fine old Irish soldier, Lord Roberts, is not
spared the smirch on his memory of recording his
cry of " Magnificent ! ' on learning the success of
this ridiculous exploit at the expense of the King's
Fleet and the King's honour. Doubtless nobody
was thoughtful enough to include the Kaiser among
the recipients of the " Lion ' telegram ; but His
Imperial Majesty had ample means of his own of
learning the " magnificent " news of the demoralisa-
tion of England's Fleet at a moment when he must
have been anxiously making up his mind whether
or not to fight her. The astounding thing is that the
particulars of this characteristic " Ulster Stand for the
Union " are related, not merely without any suspicion
that the author is convicting his heroes and himself
of stark treason for which three months later men
were being shot, but with all a schoolboy's gusto for
their * magnificent ' adventure " at the very time
when Seely and Churchill " (that is to say, the King's
Secretary for War and the King's First Lord of the
Admiralty) " were worrying lest * evil-disposed per-
sons ' should raid and rob the scantily stocked Govern-
ment stores at Omagh and Enniskillen."

Prudence might have taught even the most pur-
blind Government that the example of defiant law-
breaking at Larne would be imitated in the South.
When on July 26th the Sinn Fein " White Yacht "

220 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

landed its cargo of arms at Howth, the Government
were found more irresolute and self-contradictory than
ever. First, they despatched a Resident Magistrate
(Mr. Harrell) to seize the Nationalist arms ; when the
attempt failed and resulted only in the King's Own
Borderers firing without orders and massacring men,
women and children at Bachelor's Walk, Mr. Birrell
tried to appease the Nationalists by dismissing the
unfortunate Resident Magistrate, but only succeeded
in sinking deeper into the contempt with which all
men now regarded an Executive without the pluck to
molest the cargo of the Fanny nor the consistency to
let the cargo of the White Yacht go free.

The cheerful imbecility of the Government was
maintained in the face of an Ulster now alive
with an army regimented, armed to the teeth and
provided with every requisite, from machine-guns to
an Ambulance Corps officered by great ladies, for their
openly proclaimed campaign against the law of their
King and his Parliament. Before many months the
teachings of Sir E. Carson filled the South with a
rival army of Irish Volunteers, drilling, arming and
parading at vast reviews after the Northern model.

The attitude of " The Party ' to the new Irish
Volunteer Movement was at first one of contempt.
As soon as it grew too strong to be ignored, they
abandoned their indifference for an attempt to gain
control of the Volunteers by methods of tyranny
which were eventually to prove " The Party's " o\vn
undoing. Discontent with a degenerate Parliamen-
tarianism had long been fermenting, in secret among
the young men of Ireland. Most of them in the
South still clung to the All-for-Ireland movement,
with its broad doctrines after Thomas Davis' heart,
as a last means of interposing an honest barrier against
the tide of pseudo-nationality and corruption that was
overflowing the country. Another body of young
idealists — principally in Dublin and its neighbour-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 221

hood — were gathering around Mr. Arthur Griffith
who, so long ago as 1906, had laid the foundations of a
Sinn Ftin movement wholly disconnected with the
subsequent uprising for an Irish Republic. By an
odd freak of fate, the English newspaper men who
swarmed over to Dublin after the Easter Rising of
1916, puzzled by the various categories of : Irish
Volunteers/' " National Volunteers ' and " Ulster
Volunteers," heard for the first time of Sinn Ftin,
the name of which was almost the only part of Mr.
Griffith's original organisation which then survived,
and ignorantly pounced upon it as a picturesque
nickname for the Rebels of Easter Week.

Mr. Griffith was a thinker and writer of high
purpose, of a tolerant temper and a dogged disregard
for obstacles, but he lacked the gifts of speech and the
indefinable spell of " personality ' which must be
there in order to inflame millions of men to follow in
the train of a new National prophet. The only
programme he specified with precision was the
withdrawal of the Irish members from Westminster
after the example which Deak set in Hungary. It
was not the Parliamentary manoeuvrings of the Hun-
garian deputies in withdrawing from Vienna in 1861,
it was the military overthrow of Austria at Sadowa
that achieved the independence of Hungary. The
same policy had been anticipated, so far as Ireland was
concerned, in the famous " Repeal Year" and had
defied the combined genius of O'Connell and Davis
to make it practicable. It would have proved equally
visionary now without the World War. The dislike
of Parliamentarianism among thoughtful Irishmen
was growing ever deeper, but the Parliamentarianism
which was moving their repugnance was not the
efficient Parliamentarianism of Parnell, which had all
sorts of rich achievements to its credit, it was the
Parliamentarianism which had parted with the inde-
pendence of Parnell and sunk into a parasite of the

222 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

English Liberal Party. The remedy might still lie
in a reversion to the old model, rather than in throwing
away Ireland's only available weapon of war until at
all events some better one presented itself. Hence
Mr. Griffith's gallant and single-minded efforts were
of no avail, and the Sinn F£in movement proper had
almost disappeared from public notice when the
blunder of the English " War Correspondents " made
its name immortal.

It was Sir E. Carson who first discovered to Irish
Nationalists a new weapon which enabled them to
dispense with debased Parliamentary methods. If in
the North against the law of England, why not in the
South to break the Hibernian despotism under which
every generous aspiration of the Irish soul was
perishing ? The repercussion in the South of the
revolt of the Privy Councillors of the North followed
as quickly as the bullet follows the flash. How
quickly is revealed in the Secret History of the Irish
Volunteers from the pen of The O'Rahilly, who lost
his life in the fighting of Easter Week. Sir E. Carson's
Provisional Government was formed on September
24th, 1913. Little more than a month afterwards a
dozen men meeting in Wynn's Hotel, Dublin, on the
invitation of Professor Eoin MacNeill, took the first
step to establish " the Irish Volunteers " (called after
Grattan's Protestant patriots). So careful were the
founders to avoid any suspicion of sectional or sec-
tarian partisanship that " Arthur Griffith's name was
deliberately not included, and only three of the twelve
were then members of the Sinn Fein Party." " As
we were all in agreement that the movement must
be broadly National, and not confined to, or controlled
by any particular Party," well known supporters of
Mr. Redmond's Party, like the then Lord Mayor of
Dublin (Aid. Sherlock) and Professor Kettle were
among those first approached. But ' refusals were
the order of the day." Lord Mayor Sherlock bluntly

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 223

declined to join the Committee and Professor Kettle
pleaded " indisposition," although later both were

flad to take quite an active part in the movement,
t was even made clear that the new force was not
to be organised in any hostile spirit towards Sir E.
Carson or his Ulster Volunteers, but on the contrary
in the hope of their being both brought to co-operate
in some National rapprochement worthy of the old
Protestant patriots of the North. The Nationalist
youth of the South rather admired Sir E. Carson's
pluck, were indebted to him for his example and
encouraged by his impunity. In his first expedition
to Cork to recruit for the Irish Volunteers Professor
MacNeill even went the length of calling for three
cheers for the Ulster leader for the lesson he had
taught them that what he conceived to be great
principles were worth daring and dying for. So
sublime a doctrine of unselfish patriotism however
was so little to the taste of the Board of Erin Hibernians,
whose narrow sectarian intolerance still held the field,
that a local Molly leader headed a charge to clear the
platform by brute force and fractured the head of the
Chairman, Mr. J. J. Walsh (who was afterwards
member for Cork and Postmaster General under the
Dail Eireann).

But nothing could now quench the longing of the
youth of Ireland for some escape from the corrupt
atmosphere of the Hibernian tyranny to a higher and
more generous plane. The leaders were little known,
the Party Press met them with a remorseless boycott,
the Parliamentary Party were still the recipients of
the vast American and Australian funds without which
no considerable purchase of arms was possible. All
was of no avail against the mysterious instincts that
were beginning to stir in the soul of the nation. Then
came the Parliamentarians' classic resource against
any movement of opinion that did not bear their
imprimatur — their determination either to control it

224 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

or to crush it. We have seen how, as under the
incantations of some mediaeval witch her own brat
waxed and prospered while her foster child pined and
wasted, the Board of Erin Hibernians secretly cast
their spells over the United Irish League until its
Branches, its offices and its funds became their own ;
how they organised and subsidised the disruption of
the Land and Labour Association as soon as it refused
to merge its existence in theirs1; how the modest claim
of the All-for-Ireland League for a bare hearing for
the doctrines which have since become the last hope
of the nation was beaten down with bludgeons and
revolver-shots. The Irish Volunteers were now to be
similarly practised upon. The Parliamentary leaders
developed a sudden enthusiasm for the movement
that could no longer be merely snubbed. \ The
O'Rahilly tells us the Volunteers " discovered that the
Hibernians had received secret instructions to form
themselves into Volunteer Companies, to affiliate with
Headquarters and secure control of the movement
in their districts, with a view to control the coming
Convention and to swamp the original Volunteers."
* All the insidious influences known to the politicians'
art were immediately brought into play inside as well
as outside the original Committee. The primrose
path to place, power and profit was temptingly dis-
played to Eoin MacNeill and his associates, but it

was in vain/

When all else failed, Mr. Redmond was induced
to try a coup d'ttat which was the very definition of
an odious tyranny. He fulminated a ukase, on the
plea that the Provisional Committee " was not suffi-
ciently representative," claiming the right to nominate
twenty-five additional members of his own, and
threatening if his arbitrary demand were disputed
to start a rival Hibernian Committee to disrupt the

1 See Captain D. D. Sheehan's Ireland since Parnett, Chapter
XIV., for an interesting exposure of this transaction.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 225

movement. And inasmuch as the secret Order had
already flooded the Volunteers with bogus Hibernian
Companies and the collapse of " the Home Rule Bill '
was not yet sufficiently apparent to disturb the in-
fatuation with which the country was still pathetically
loyal to the watchword : " Trust Asquith," it was
conceivable that Mr. Redmond might up to that time
have been strong enough to make good his threat.
The Original Committee submitted, and the twenty-
five Hibernian nominees — including three priests of
the Gospel of Peace who were prominent in the
Hibernian Order — were admitted to the governing
body, not, as it was soon evident enough, with any
serious intent to form a military organisation but to
emasculate it or turn it to Hibernian uses. It was a
victory of the kind for which the Parliamentarians were
soon to pay a heavy reckoning.

According to The O'Rahilly, who answered for
his truthfulness with his life, the 25 Hibernian
nominees were no sooner added than they proceeded
to hand over supreme control to a Standing Committee
of which they constituted themselves a majority,
devoted their energies chiefly to keeping the Volunteers
unarmed, and when arms were imported without their
leave coolly ordered those who had paid for them to
" loan ' them to their own Hibernian nominees in
Ulster. At the moment of the Coup d'etat, two ships
laden with arms were on the seas — The White Yacht,
chartered by the Original Committee and UAvenir
of Antwerp, which set out with a cargo of arms pur-
chased by Mr. Redmond. The White Yacht duly
arrived at Howth and safely landed its rifles ; L'Avenir
for some mysterious reason abandoned any attempt
to unload its cargo and put back to Belgium. The
Standing Committee, now manned by the Hibernians,
shut off all proposals to devote the American funds to
the purchase of arms, carried on " a studied and well-
sustained campaign to force the resignation of

226 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

MacNeill and other members of the Original Com-
mittee by attacks, accusations and insults which in
the interests of Irish decency, " The O'Rahilly refrains
from detailing, and crowned their performances by
issuing the audacious order : " Send all guns to
Ulster " — the meaning of which was that the rifles
imported and paid for before the Hibernian nominees
were forced on the Committee were to be handed over
to the Molly Lodges in Belfast at the derisory price of
25/- apiece.

It seems certain that it was these high handed
and unscrupulous attempts to capture and debaucji
the Volunteer movement which finally alienated the
young men of Ireland from the Parliamentary move-
ment and made the Easter Week Rising of 1916
inevitable. Mr. Redmond's double-faced and
vacillating attitude at the outbreak of the World-
War, when he first proposed that the Volunteers
should take armed possession of Ireland and next that
they should recruit for the allied front in Flanders, com-
pleted the indignation aroused even in the worthiest
of his own followers by the conspiracy to convert the
Volunteers into a Party organisation of the Hibernians.
The members of the Original Committee, who had
never formally admitted the Parliamentary nominees
as members, declined to summon them any further
to their meetings, and proceeded frankly to arm and
drill the Irish Volunteers to seize the first opportunity
for an Insurrection. The expelled Parliamentarians
formed a rival organisation of their own calling them-
selves " The National Volunteers. " The country
battalions in preponderating numbers had not yet
relinquished their faith in Parliamentary methods and
might never have relinquished it had Mr. Redmond
only seized the opportunity that, as will be seen here-
after, was afforded to him of rallying Nationalists and
Irish Unionists in a war-policy which would have
been a Freedom of Ireland policy as well. The

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 227

trouble was that he never clearly understood what
was to be his own function in the Volunteer movement,
except to disarm it of any military significance and get
its machinery into his own hands. He was still in a
position to inspect vast reviews of *' National Volun-
teers " with wooden guns and even guns that looked
like genuine ones, but his double-meaning words left
the fighting men cold and derision was added to all
the other evidences of unreality when it was dis-
covered that the arms which he had imported from
Italy to supply his devout Hibernian Volunteers were
ancient weapons of the Garibaldian raids upon the
States of the Church, and that he had forgotten to
order any ammunition for the venerable relics. All
young and generous hearts, even in his own ranks r
were turning from the squalid concerns of the poli-
ticians to the mvstic voices from on high which were
already whispering in the night winds.

228 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XIV

THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR

WHEN England, after more hesitation than is generally
supposed, determined to throw in her fortunes with
France as against Germany in August, 1914, three
courses were open to Ireland, two of which had much
to be said for them and the third which was wholly
unwise. She might have held sternly aloof, in view
of the unsettled condition in which her own affairs
had been left, or she might have cordially joined the
Allies in consideration of sufficient guarantees for the
future of Home Rule, or she might follow the course
which unfortunately Mr. Redmond did follow, of
doing neither the one thing nor the other with firmness.
No apology was necessary to History, or in any
other quarter, if Ireland took up the position that,
having spent many almost humiliating years in peti-
tioning for an honest peace with England, and having
received nothing in return from a " Home Rule Gov-
ernment ' except a miserable half-measure for three-
fourths of the country on condition of the surrender of
the other fourth, she would, in the spirit of" the Sacred
Egoism of Nat ions " which moved every other
party to the war, look to her own interests first of all,
and abide events with the vigilant detachment which
England so warmly admired and so magnificently
rewarded in the case of Tcheko- Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia,
Poland, The Trentino, Roumania and Greece. No
thinking Irishman believed that England declared
for war except under the conviction that it offered an
opportunity which might never return of destroying
the German trade which was beating her out of the

229

market and annihilating the German Fleet which
might soon be more than her match upon the seas.
The touch of sentimentality over Germany's brutality
to little Belgium came in happily enough, but did not
impose upon those who remembered England's no
less coarse brutality to Belgium not many years before
when it was a question of laying hands upon her
African empire on the Congo. As for the sudden
transports of enthusiasm for France, it did not escape
notice that a few days before the declaration of war,
Sir E. Grey had promised the Kaiser to remain neutral,
if he would invade France by any other route except
the Belgian one, and would undertake not to bombard
the Northern ports of France, which were within
cannonshot of Dover. Nor was the pathetic corres-
pondence between President Poincare and King
George likely to be forgotten in which the President
pleaded and pleaded in vain that the war might yet
be averted if the Kaiser was given plainly to under-
stand that he would have England arrayed against him.
Whither or not it was the Ulster Rebellion or general
debility that was to blame, England went on hesitating
to the last minute of the last hour. All this is recalled
to demonstrate the arrant cant of finding it a crime in
Young Ireland not to flame up in a fever of enthusiasm
for the war against the most formidable enemy of
England.

It is nevertheless the truth that, at the outbreak
of the war, the number of passionate pro-Germans,
even among the young men, was inconceivably small.
There was yet a chance — indeed the assurance of
success — for the second course of a reasoned and
conditioned participation by Ireland on the side of
the Allies. In the judgment of my All-f or- Ireland
colleagues and myself, this was the course which best
consorted with the highest interests of Ireland. When
invited by Mr. Redmond's most influential supporter
in the South — Mr. George Crosbie, owner of the Cork

230 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Examiner — to define the lines on which united action
by the nation in this sense could be secured, I drafted
a Memorandum of which the chief articles were
these :

1. That Mr. Redmond should take the initiative
in inviting a Conference with representative Irish
Unionists, some of the most influential of whom I was
in a position to guarantee would act on his invitation.

2. I was willing either to attend such a Con-
ference with him, or to abstain, as he might judge
most useful.

3. Their abhorrence of Partition and the prospect
of a united Irish contribution to the Army would be a
sufficient inducement to obtain the concurrence of the
overwhelming mass of the Irish Unionists in a broader
Home Rule agreement (with due safeguards for
minorities) to be then and there adopted by the Govern-
ment as the price of Ireland's co-operation in the war.

4. Her contribution to be limited (according to
Mr. Asquith's own estimate in Dublin) to an Irish
Army Corps with reserves (say 60,000 men).

5. That force to be raised in county battalions
(after due ratification of the Home Rule Settlement)
by a joint recruiting campaign in which the Nationalist
and Unionist leaders would speak from a common
platform.

The scheme, it will be observed, made careful
provision for the sensibilities of the Parliamentary
majority and offered them, as it turned out, their
last chance of recovering the leadership of the nation.
The concurrence of the Unionists of three provinces
and of the greater portion of the fourth was assured.
That timid and slow-moving body, secretly all along in
sympathy with the All-for-Ireland programme as they
have since avowed, but intimidated from openly
identifying themselves with it, would have joyfully
declared for a Home Rule settlement that would at
one and the same time deliver them from the terror

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 231

of Partition and satisfy their loyal zeal for the war.
Such a combination in such an hour of fate could have
dictated their own equitable terms to British Govern-
ments and Parties, and not least to Sir Edward Carson
who was beginning to be alarmed by the sense of his
own responsibility for precipitating the war.

On the Nationalist side, a firm and united policy
might still have carried all before it. The dissensions
between the Original Committee of the Irish Volun-
teers and the imported nominees of Mr. Redmond had
not yet come to a head. They actually endorsed Mr.
Redmond's pronouncement which the House of Com-
mons hailed with transports as a war-speech. A
meeting of all parties which my colleague Mr. Maurice
Healy and myself summoned together in the Cork
City Hall pronounced for the Allies without a
dissentient voice. The ardent body of a few score
young men who were all that Sinn Fein was at that
time able to muster under its flag in Cork were present,
and bitter as was the trial for them and for our no less
fiery All-for- Ireland youth as well of hearing trusted
Nationalist leaders exhort them to take the side of
England in a quarrel however otherwise after their
own hearts, they listened in respectful silence and
were willing to concede that the unpalatable advice
came at all events from men with whom the interests
of Ireland were as sovereign a consideration as with
themselves. It took the strong arm of England to
restrain their fathers from rushing to the aid of France
in the German Invasion of the Annee Terrible. To
take up arms in defence of the head of the Celtic
nations now would be the most joyous of duties could
it only be squared with their first duty to Ireland.
The contribution we stipulated for would have de-
manded a far lesser sacrifice of Irish blood than was
afterwards squandered on British battlefields, bringing
no thanks — bringing, indeed, bitter calumny on the
race— at the hands of England. The Irish Army

Q

232 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Corps, drawn from the best chivalry of a united nation,
would have covered the Irish name with a glory second
to that of no fighting race on all the battle front ; their
achievements would have earned the undying gratitude
of democratic Britain ; even at the worst — if Ireland's
reward was still the old one of ingratitude and bad
faith — they would have come home a disciplined and
unconquerable army, fortified with the admiration and
goodwill of all the honest world, in enforcing, by
whatever means they might, the demand for the
liberty the Allies were showering upon the most obscure
of the small nationalities that had espoused their cause.

Once more, the right word had only to be spoken,
and the nation would have followed. Once more it
was the wrong word that was spoken and the wrong
turn that was taken. Our proposals were forwarded
to Mr. Redmond with the strong endorsement of his
most powerful supporters in the South. His only
answer was a pompous intimation, through his Secre-
tary, that their communication would receive due
attention. The proposals were, in matter of fact,
never heard of more. Had Mr. Redmond any coherent
plans of his own, his discourtesy would have been of
less account. He had none. The war-speech in the
House of Commons which made such a stir at the time
was ludicrously misinterpreted in two opposite senses.
The House of Commons, always unfathomably astray
in Irish affairs, hailed it with raptures as an Irish
Declaration of War against Germany, the Provisional
Committee of the Irish Volunteers as a promise to
take charge of Ireland on condition that the British
Garrison should be withdrawn. The speech admitted
of both meanings because definite meaning it had none.
Here was the essential declaration revised by Mr.
Redmond himself:1

" I say to the Government that they may to-

1 Ireland and the War. Extracts from speeches of J. E.
Redmond, M.P. Dublin. 1915.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 233

morrow withdraw every one of their troops from
Ireland. I say that the coasts of Ireland will be de-
fended from foreign invasion by her armed sons, and
for this purpose armed Nationalist Catholics in the
South will be only too glad to join arms with the
armed Protestant Ulstermen in the North. . . . We
offer to the Government of the day that they may
take their troops away and that, if it is allowed to us,
in comradeship with our brethren in the North, we
will ourselves defend the coasts of our country."

The speech was probably unpremeditated, under
the temptation to say something amiable in the chaleur
communicative of the Declaration of War, and was
assuredly not intended as a snare for England. The
misfortune was that, in an hour for plainness of speech,
it contained no definite policy at all. Probably
nobody was more amazed than Mr. Redmond by the
extravagant enthusiasm of his English listeners. He
did not, in matter of fact, promise a single Irish recruit
to the British Army, but only to " defend the coasts of
Ireland " if the British Army abandoned the possession
of the country to his Volunteers and Sir E. Carson's.
" Defending the coasts fo Ireland " was the favourite
anti-recruiting locution at the moment. " Defending
the coasts of Ireland " against whom ? Not against
the invasion of a German Fleet, from which the
British Fleet alone could defend them. Mr. Redmond
did not follow out the meaning of his words, but they
were taken by the Irish Volunteers to mean the evacua-
tion of the country by the British Army, and the taking
of their places by the whole armed Nationalist man-
hood of the country, with no other use that could be
conceived for their rifles except to try conclusions with
the Carson Volunteers, should they prove recalcitrant.
In his speech at a great Volunteer Review at Mary-
borough a fortnight later (August 16, 1914) there will
not be found a word of exhortation to despatch a
single Irish soldier on foreign service, but, on the

234 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

contrary, a renewal of the cry of " the defence of the
shores of Ireland " as the one business of his Volun-
teers and a confident assurance that he had got a
promise from the Prime Minister " to arm, equip and
drill a large number of Irish Volunteers ' for that
explicit purpose, adding that the remainder of the
Volunteers would be armed " with the rifles which
my colleagues and I supply and the rifles which are
being supplied from various other quarters."

He furthermore endeavoured to reassure the
country by spreading the mischievous delusion that
the safety of Home Rule was now beyond all peril
or mischance. In the House of Commons on Sep-
tember 1 6, he referred with indignation to the un-
generous hint of the Leader of the Opposition that his
war-speech of August 3, " was an offer of conditional
loyalty." " It was nothing of the kind," he exclaimed
and proceeded to show " the absurdity of his making
it a condition that the Home Rule Bill should go on
the Statute Book, because all through we had the
certainty it was going on the Statute Book." He
propped up this fallacy with a painful lack of candour

" I should like to say this, if the Prime Minister
will allow me — that all through these negotiations,
conversations and so on I have had with him — all
through, on every occasion that I ever had any dealings
with him about this matter, he has assured me that
it was the intention of the Government to put this
Bill on the Statute Book this session. From that he
never wavered, and it would have been an utter
absurdity for me to have made the putting of the
Bill on the Statute Book under these circumstances
a condition with reference to my offer of the Irish
Volunteers."

The fallacy, of course, was that the Government
had indeed promised to " put the Bill on the Statute
Book," but only on the condition, agreed to by Mr.
Redmond and his colleagues, that it was to be accom-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 235

panied by an Amending Bill to be " put on the Statute
Book ' simultaneously, severing six counties from
Ireland and over a million of her population and
placing them under the sway of Sir E. Carson. The
Irish leader conceals the fact that this was the upshot
of all his " negotiations and conversations and dealings
with the Prime Minister about this matter/' and asks
his countrymen to believe that the farce of " putting
on the Statute Book " this barren and abortive Bill
was so complete a triumph for Home Rule that any
further bargaining or conditioning on the part of the
representatives of Ireland would be " an absurdity/'

The two objects of our All-for-Ireland proposals —
the achievement of a great National Settlement under
pressure of the war emergency, and a real, although
limited, Irish contribution to the armies of the Allies
as the price of it — were thus completely frustrated and
the country left leaderless and bewildered even as to
what their titular leader intended them to do. Matters
changed not for the better but for the worse as Mr.
Redmond felt himself impelled to live up to the
unexpected fame of his absurdly misunderstood war-
speech of August 3. But it was not until September
21, in a speech at Woodenbridge, he for the first time
made a clear enunciation of a " twofold duty " of
Ireland for service abroad as well as at home :

" The duty of the manhood of Ireland is twofold.
Its duty is, at all costs, to defend the shores of Ireland
against foreign invasion. It is a duty more than that
of taking care that Irish valour proves itself on the
field of war as it has always proved itself in the past. . .
It would be a disgrace for ever to our country and a
reproach to her manhood if young Ireland confined
their efforts to remaining at home to defend the shores
of Ireland from an unlikely invasion, and shrank from
the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry
and courage which has distinguished your race all
through its history."

236 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

The Original Volunteers, who had understood
his war-speech as a demand for the evacuation of the
country by the British Army and its surrender to the
custody of an armed Ireland, were thunderstruck by
the proclamation at Woodenbridge of the ' * twofold
duty " which they construed to mean recruiting in
England's service, without any stipulation for the
future of the Irish Cause, and they straightaway took
steps to separate themselves from such a programme.
They shook off the tyrannous hold the Parliamentarians
had established upon an organisation they did not
believe in, by the simple method of no longer inviting
Mr. Redmond's nominees to their councils. Numeri-
cally their own ranks were still scanty, and for a time
the Parliamentarians still enjoyed an apparent pre-
ponderance of men as well as a monopoly of funds in
their rival organisation which they called the "National
Volunteers." Mr. Redmond was so deceived by his
usual misjudgment of Irish feeling, as to take the line,
very unusual with him, of directing the coarsest abuse
against the young men who had defeated his
treacherous attempt to lay hold of their organisation :

" These men are not and never were Home Rulers.
They may be or they may think they are revolutionists,
or separatists, or international socialists, or they may
be common or garden cranks, but you and I know
they are not and never were Home Rulers. . . .
When this terrible war is over, then I* say the puny
cavillers and cranks of to-day will again scamper away
to their burrows and they will be forgotten in the
universal rejoicing of a nation emancipated in spite
of them." (Tuam, December 16).

The " twofold duty " was preached with a two-
fold voice during the winter, the recruiting exhortations
being mostly reserved for elderly citizens in-doors,
while the battalions of armed Volunteers outside were
regaled with the glories of home service. But it was
not long before he came to recognise that the discontent

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 237

in his own ranks was deepening and widening. The
sense of incompetence and shiftiness at headquarters
was only confirmed for thinking men by his repeated
assurances that " England has granted the autonomy
for which we have been asking for a hundred years '
(Kilkenny, October 19), and that the only thing
wanting to their triumph was that " it would not be
possible to summon our new Parliament while this
war is raging " — assurances which in the mouth of the
leader who knew that with his own consent the only
" autonomy " granted by England was the destruction
of Ireland as a national unit, and that, war or no war,
a Parliament for all Ireland would never be assembled
under the Statute of which he boasted, were false-
hoods in substance and in fact. The growing con-
viction that the Irish leaders had been jockeyed and
the country betrayed deprived the reviews of the
" National ' Volunteers, which were still large and
showy, of all real meaning, and the recruiting for
General Parsons' Division (whose misnomer, " the
Irish Brigade " was one of the bizarre humours of its
fate) gradually fell away, outside the Belfast neighbour-
hood where the Board of Erin Hibernians had still
power enough to sustain Mr. Devlin in his perfectly
genuine endeavour to beat up recruits.

It became the fashion to father the failure of
recruiting for " the Irish Brigade " upon the arrogance
and anti-Irish bias of Kitchener's War Office. But
it was not the Hibernian leaders who should have
been the readiest to complain of arrogance and
ignorance at the War Office. The War Office ap-
pointed as the heads of the loth and i6th Divisions
Irish generals of sympathy and distinction, Gen.
Parsons (and succeeding him Gen. Hickie) and Sir
Bryan Mahon ; they invited Mr. Devlin to review,
both at Fermoy and at Aldershot, General Parsons'
Division, to which he had unquestionably contributed
a substantial contingent from Belfast, and made no

238 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

objection while the Hibernian soldiers on parade
received their leader with cheers and shouts of " Up,
the Mollies ! " although they ran the danger of much
more numerous soldiers from the South responding
with counter-cries not to the liking of " The Mollies."
War Office rifles were even furnished to a body of
Mr. Redmond's " National ' Volunteers in Cork,
who were for some time entrusted with the guardian-
ship of the bridges in their gay uniforms (for the
wearing of which, by the way, young men were a
few years afterwards sentenced to terms of penal
servitude). The failure of " The Irish Brigade *
was due, not to the War Office, nor, as I am still
persuaded, to the people, but to the vacillations and
halr-heartedness of their leaders. The thousands of
gallant Irishmen who went to the front and died at
the front, in the faith that they were dying for
Ireland, were allowed to make their sacrifice in vain ;
the five hundred thousand men of Irish blood who
fought in the armies of America, Canada, and
Australia, as well as of Britain, were lost in scattered
groups, whose valour brought small reward to the
land of their fathers ; even the best of the
* National ' Volunteers began to waste away back
into the ranks of the original Irish Volunteers, sick
of the politicians' tricks by which the country was
being cajoled. It was all over with any war policy
that could have brought " constitutional " redress to
Ireland.

On the other hand, Sir E. Carson, on the brink
of destruction in the eyes of England as one of the
chief authors of the war, extricated himself with
consummate tact from his dilemma, While the
Hibernian leaders were spurning the offer of united
action with their countrymen and incapable of
initiating any coherent action of their own, Sir E.
Carson drafted his contingent Ulster rebels of a few
months before into an autonomous Ulster Division,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 239

and by their hereditary Orange war-cries as they
crossed the Somme on their famous ist of July and
by the rest of their distinctive and well-advertised
exploits more truly won the heart of England in
their incomparably smaller numbers than the half-a-
million of Nationalists of Irish breed whose blood
watered the battlefields of Flanders and Galllpoli to
no avail.

240 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XV

THE EASTER WEEK REBELLION

As I was entering the House of Commons on Easter
Monday afternoon, the door keeper informed me that
Dublin was in rebellion and that the Castle had been
attacked. Men with eyes to see had long realised
that an explosion was coming. The young generation
in Ireland was chafing in sullen silence against the
inefficiency and degeneracy oi the Parliamentary
movement ; Carson's preparations for rebellion had
only to be imitated to supply the means for a revolt,
and England's war difficulties suggested the irresistible
temptation. Among the younger men of our own
movement there had been springing up a hopeless
feeling that conciliatory methods, however honest and
indeed by reason of their honesty, could be of no avail
against the corrupt tyranny of the Board of Erin and
the cajolery, if not perfidy, of English politicians.
They were already beginning, like the rest, to get their
guns, and join in the route marches of the Original
Volunteers. But so little was I prepared for the
thunderbolt that so suddenly rent the sky, that I had
been spending the short recess peacefully on the sands
at Brighton and returned to London to find that the
venue of rebellion had changed from Carson's Belfast
to the Irish capital and had within a few hours struck
with paralysis the trembling officials of England and
their Hibernian advisers.

That the cataclysm should have come with no
less surprise upon the responsible rulers of the country-
with their innumerable sources of information, is more

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 241

astonishing, but the Report and blue-book of evidence
taken before Lord Hardinge's Royal Commission
relating to the outbreak leaves no room for doubt
that this was so. The evidence demonstrates that the
government of the country was for all practical pur-
poses in the hands of Mr. Birrell and Mr. Dillon, and
they could think of no more masterly way of meeting
what was coming than in the words of the Prime
Minister to " wait and see." The Lord Lieutenant
(Lord Wimborne), indeed, had some not very original
strategic plans for making a swoop on the leaders,
but, when he was overborne by the cheery Mr.
Birrell and his Friar Joseph, he exhibited so little
foresight of the immediacy of the crisis, that he allowed
his Commander-in-Chief to depart for a holiday in
England, and saw no objection to the officers of the
Dublin Castle garrison going off to the Fairy
House Races on the day of the Rising, and went
himself and his Under Secretary within an ace of
being made inglorious prisoners when the rebels
knocked at the gate of Dublin Castle which like the
Viceregal Lodge was at the moment defended only
by " a corporal's guard. " His Chief Secretary had
not been in Ireland since February and then only for
ten days.

There is one part of the official evidence which
would seem to throw upon unfortunate Mr. Redmond
some of the blame for the inaction at Dublin Castle.
He, in conformity with a now inveterate habit, had
withdrawn himself from the region of responsibilities-
and delegated his authority to Mr. Dillon who, it
would seem in his turn, sheltered himself from re-
sponsibility by pointing to Mr. Redmond's failure
to identify himself with his own strong counsels
against the rebels. The following extract from a
letter under date i8th December, 1915, written by the
Under Secretary to the Chief Secretary is published
in the Report of Lord Hardinge and his colleagues :

242 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

1 What is Redmond up to with his comparisons
between Ireland and Great Britain in the matter of
police and crime ? He knows, or should know,
after what Dillon wrote to him over a month ago in the
enclosed ' Confidential letter ' and repeated verbally on
the ^rd instant that the present situation in Ireland is
most serious and menacing. Redmond himself sent
me the other ' private ' enclosure on the 9th. "

It is to be observed that of this letter of Sir Mathew
Nathan which was published for the first time in Lord
Hardinge's Report dated June 26th, there is no mention
in the printed evidence of Sir Mathew himself given
on May i8th nor of Mr.BirrellgivenonMay i9th. The
remarkable letters referred to from Mr. Dillon to Mr.
Redmond, and from Mr. Redmond to Sir M. Nathan
must have been in the possession of the Chief Secretary
or of the Under Secretary and must have been pro-
duced and read during their examination. All re-
ference to them, however, is suppressed in the official
Minutes of their evidence, and the facts would never
have reached the light had not the Commissioners
themselves decided to divulge them in their Report.
Mr. Dillon, who might presumably have been con-
cerned to explain his part in these transactions, did
not present himself as a witness, and the Commissioners
who attached much importance to his action in their
Report, do not seem to have pressed him to give
evidence before them. Mr. Bin-ell's own account of
the difference between the two Irish leaders was
this :

" Mr. Redmond always took the view that the
Sinn Feiners were negligible and he was good enough
to say so in the House of Commons on a particular
occasion. . . . Mr. Dillon was very strongly the other
way, not in the sense of taking action, but very strongly
of opinion that the Sinn Feiners, particularly the Sinn
Fein movement and the insurrectionary movement in
Dublin was a danger, and on that point there was a

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 243

very friendly but strong difference of opinion between
the two.

" Was Mr. Dillon equally in favour of non-
intervention ? — Yes.

" He thought it dangerous and yet he was against
intervention ? — He was against it in the absence of proof
of hostile association with the enemy. If there had been
evidence of hostile association with the enemy which you
could prove, particularly against an individual, he
naturally would have been in favour of a prosecution"

The Irish people will have to await future re-
searches in the archives of Dublin Castle to discover
the text of the letters which would have explained the
nature of the " very friendly but strong difference of
opinion ' ' between Mr. Dillon and Mr. Redmond in
their advice to the Castle authorities in this crisis.
For the present we must be content to know that these
letters were for some unexplained reason deleted from
the Minutes of Evidence before the Hardinge Com-
mission, and that in the main the " difference between
the two ' was that Mr. Redmond wrapped himself
up in an optimistic haze, while Mr. Dillon only awaited
in order to advise immediate action against the rebels
that " proof of hostile association with the enemy '
which, it is elsewhere mentioned, the landing of Sir
Roger Casement in Kerry supplied. And that it was
Mr. Dillon and his coadjutor the " National
President " of the Board of Erin who really mattered,
is obvious enough from this illuminating passage in
the evidence of Sir Mathew Nathan :

" Sir MacKenzie Chalmers — The three people
upon whom you relied for information — ? — Not for
information.

" I mean about the feeling of the country — the
three people upon whom you relied were Mr. Devlin,
Mr. Dillon and Mr. Redmond ? Yes ; I saw Mr.
Redmond comparatively few times.

" Twice, I think, in your Memorandum you used

244 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the words * the Irish Parliamentary Party.' Practically
that meant those three gentlemen ? — Yes."1

There is some pathos in the protestation with
which the Viceroy began his evidence that in the
Dublin Castle scheme of government, the King's
Viceroy is not really of any account, but the rest of
his narrative of the Rising would read like so much
pure comic opera, only that it was so heavily splashed
with blood. The Admiral at Queenstown in the
course of a chat with the local General on April i6th,
mentioned casually that the Casement cargo of arms
had left Germany on the i2th, accompanied by two
German submarines, and that a Rising was timed for
Easter Eve. It was not until April i8th the chat
reached the Viceroy, who wrote off to the Chief Secre-
tary (in London), " a little colloquially, I am afraid,"
rejoicing in " the stroke of luck " by which " our
friend ' (Sir Roger Casement) was captured on
landing, hoping " there would be no nonsense about
clemency in making an example of him," developing
a grandiose plan of his own for a swoop on the Dublin
suspects, and imploring Mr. Birrell (Mr. Birrell of all

1 Another passage from Sir Mathew's evidence is worth
reproducing :

' Whom could you consult when the Chief Secretary was
away ? — The Irish Members of Parliament are frequently con-
ferred with. ... I must state one thing that fell to Mr. Birrell
to do when he was over here (in Westminster) was to see the
Irish Members of Parliament, who were constantly going to him
on every conceivable subject.

" Is that Mr. Redmond's Party or Mr. O'Brien's ?— No.
I am talking entirely of the Party under Mr. Redmond."

For the high affairs of State, the three above enumerated
were " The Irish Parliamentary Party," but the rest of the Party
had their compensations by (in Mr. T. P. O'Connor's indignant
phrase) " making a commonage " of the Chief Secretary's room
in the House of Commons, oblivious of their public vow not to
seek Government patronage, which it is certain covered three-
fourths of the communications on ** every conceivable subject "
which they were " constantly " entertaining Mr. Birrell.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 245

men!) " if you agree, do write and ginger Nathan."
Nathan remained so ungingered that, on the morning
of the f Rising, " I urged that the Castle guard be
strengthened, but the Under Secretary demurred,"
and Lord Wimborne himself, having in vain offered
" to take full responsibility for any possible illegality *
in " making a bag " of six or seven hundred Dublin
Volunteers the previous night1 was at 10-30 a.m. on
Easter Monday morning entirely reassured, " especially
in view of the obvious disorganisation of the insurgents'
plans tkat the Rising timed for this day would not take
place. " Nathan went off to the Castle to get the
Chief Secretary on the wires, and the Lord Lieutenant
who remained at the Viceregal Lodge " had completed
a letter to the Chief Secretary and was in the act of
writing to the Prime Minister deploring the delay and
hoping that no mischief would occur in the meantime
when at 12-30 a telephone message from the police
announced that the Castle had been attacked, the
Post Office seized, Stephen's Green occupied, the
Ashtown Railway Bridge destroyed, and that the
insurgents were marching on the Viceregal Lodge."
So " obvious ' was " the disorganisation of the in-
surgents' plans " that within twenty minutes after the
stroke of noon their columns had taken possession
of Dublin at six different strategic centres, and poor
Lord Wimborne spent " the same afternoon " writing
another despatch to the Chief Secretary announcing
' the worst had happened just when we thought it
averted. The Post Office is seized — Nathan still
besieged in the Castle, but I hope he will be soon out.
Almost all wires cut. Bridges blown up. Every-
body away on holiday." One expects the message
to wind up with a comic war-song from Offenbach's

1 " It was found impossible to have done it for that night,"
he adds, with feeling. It is a cunons fact that none of the official
extracts quoted in this Chapter were ever made public in the Irish
Press.

246 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Grand Duchess. For a last excruciating touch of
humour hear this :

" What troops had you in the Viceregal Lodge on
Easter Monday ? — Ten men.

* A corporal's guard ? — A corporal's guard.

" And in the Castle ? — I do not know ; I suppose
a corporal's guard — not more.

" When they shot the policeman there was nothing
to prevent them going on, of course ? — They could
walk right in, of course."

General Bourn could not have made a more masterly
disposition of his forces.

The Parliamentary Party failed as did we all to
foresee the Rising of Easter Week, but they failed more
inexcusably to foresee its consequences. The first
few days' news from Dublin reduced them to a state
of decent silence and indeed terror in the House of
Commons, but as it became more and more evident
that the insurrection was being crushed by Sir John
Maxwell and the considerable army assembled for the
recapture of Dublin and was not extending to the
country, " the Party " rushed to the opposite extreme
of confidence, and began to regard the Rising with
scarcely disguised satisfaction as marking their de-
liverance from a vague danger which had long weighed
upon their spirits. The effervescence among the
young men, which Mr. Redmond's attempt to capture
the Volunteers had only inflamed, had at last come
to a head, and had been (so the Parliamentary wise
men began to calculate) disposed of for another genera-
tion by the fiasco of Easter Week and the remorseless
executions that followed it. Mr. Laurence Ginnell
charged that the Prime Minister's announcement that
the first batch of the insurgent leaders had been shot
in Kilmainham Jail was hailed with cheers from the
Irish benches. His memory had doubtless been
confused by the recollection of numerous only less
painful demonstrations from the same quarter. In

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 247

accusing them of that particular enormity he was
undoubtedly mistaken and I felt bound, for the sake
of truth and of human nature, to attest that the
announcement had been received with solemn silence
in every part of the House. Characteristically the
Board of Erin newspapers which had for years either
suppressed or garbled everything else I said or wrote,
published and republished my words with an eager
emphasis which Mr. Ginnell might well quote as
proof that it was I, and not he, who was mistaken.
But I added in a passage which the same newspapers
carefully deleted, a number of instances during those
same tragic days, when the Hibernian members acted
with all but equal indecency in cheering wildly ever}
Ministerial announcement of victory for the British
arms and blurting out their own contempt for their
defeated countrymen and their exultation in what they
believed to be their final riddance of " the factionists '
of physical force.

Mr. Redmond sinned with the general ruck,
although with more decorum. While the lives of the
insurgent leaders were still trembling in the balance,
there occurred a revolting scene in the House of
Commons. The Prime Minister having announced,
as the day's news from Dublin : : The rebels continue
to hold some important public buildings in Dublin,
and there is still fighting in the streets," Sir E. Carson
rose to say : "I will gladly join with the Hon. and
learned Member for Waterford in everything that can
be done to denounce and put down those rebels now
and for ever more." Mr. Redmond, speaking in an
atmosphere quivering with English prejudice and
passion, made this inconceivable response : " Will
the House allow me to say just one sentence ? I
really think it is scarcely necessary to give expression,
on behalf of all my colleagues of the Nationalist Party,
to the feeling of detestation and horror with which
we have regarded these proceedings," expressly adding

R

248 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

that he " joined most cordially with the right Hon. and
learned Gentleman, the Member for Dublin Uni-
versity, " in advice which a less impudent arch rebel
than he might well have tendered in a coat of sack-
cloth and with a head strewn with ashes.

Who except Mr. Redmond could have tolerated
Sir E. Carson complaining of sedition and at such an
hour ? To regret and dissociate himself from the
rebellion was one thing, and a thing well within his
right ; to do so by treating as some monstrous crime
a dash for liberty, however temerarious, by young
Irish enthusiasts of indisputable chivalry and purity
of motive, was another and an unnatural thing. To
pretend that in doing so he was saving Home Rule was
to contradict the notorious truth, which was that Home
Rule was lost already and by his Party 's double-dyed
acceptance of Partition, and, as it turned out, was only
to be resuscitated by the inspired madness of the young
fellows who rescued it from the hands of the politicians.
Above all, every honest Irish instinct was revolted by
the spectacle of a Nationalist leader closing with the
audacious invitation to " join hands in denouncing and
putting down these rebels now and for evermore "coming
from the man who not many months before had his
hands red with the preparations for a rebellion against
the King's law more extensive and bloody and incom-
parably more sordid than that of Easter Week. Respect
for the British anxieties of the moment might properly
have restrained him from the recriminations which the
hypocrisy of the ringleader of the Ulster rebellion
would have richly merited ; but not only to refrain
from a chiding word but to make common cause with —
even to outstrip — the arch rebel of the North in
trampling into the mire the gallant young Nationalists
who had only copied his example, showed a perversity
of judgment, a callousness to the spiritual pleadings
of the Irish soul, which once for all made Mr. Redmond
impossible as the National Leader.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 249

His Party, nevertheless, proved themselves equally
perverse in cheering his denunciation of the prostrate
rebels. They cheered again when the Prime Minister
announced that the " National " (i.e., Board of Erin)
Volunteers in Drogheda had proffered their services
to the police against the insurgents, and cheered more
loudly still when the Prime Minister delivered an
euloguim of the least reputable of all their colleagues
who boasted that he had stolen the rifles of the in-
surgents on the night of the meditated rising in the
County Limerick and then made his escape to the
House of Commons to enjoy his blushing honours.
They were to give a still more striking proof of their
alienation from honest Irish sentiment. Mr. Birrell
had just returned from Dublin and handed in his
resignation. This time distressingly serious and with
irrepressible tears in his eyes, he made a moving
description of his feelings as he " stood amongst the
smoking ruins of Dublin and surrounded with my
own ruins in mind and thought " and had the sympathy
of a House melted by his eloquence and by his fate.
He by ill chance proceeded to give a new reminder of
his irremediable incapacity to understand Irish feeling
by hazarding a remarkable prediction : " The unani-
mity of Ireland has as I say even yet been preserved.
This is no Irish rebellion. I hope that, although put
down, as it is being put down, as it must be put down,
with such success and with such courage and yet at the
same time humanity toward the dupes, the rank and
file, led astray by their leaders, that this insurrection
in Ireland will never, even in the minds and memories
of that people, be associated with their past rebellions
or become an historical landmark in their history."

A coarse chorus of assent boomed from the
Hibernian benches. They could not have given more
offence to Ireland's most sacred traditions if they had
cursed the memory of Robert Emmet, the hero of a
curiously similar insurrection outside the walls of

250 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Dublin Castle. If it be true that Success is the god-
dess of an Englishman, Failure, in the patriotic sphere,
is no less truly an object of Irish worship. Our
history for ages is the history of heroic failure, pitted
for ever against odds to which it was no shame to
succumb, and condemned fatally to terminate in the
prison or on the scaffold, in broken hearts and
calumniated names. If Ireland has no other reward
to offer, she has at least a lavish love in which to
enshrine her beaten soldiers, and if her young con-
scripts of Easter Week had done nothing more
memorable than to give up their lives in what the
Prime Minister of England was among the most
generous to acknowledge to be a clean and gallant
fight for a fine ideal, the more hopeless was their
fight, the less willingly Ireland would forgive any
aspersion on their memory.

But as a matter of fact the Easter Week Insurrection
was something more than an obscure deed of despera-
tion. It was, even if it stood by itself, an amazing
military success. A body of enthusiasts having ac-
cording to the official calculation only 825 rifles at
their command succeeded in taking possession of the
seat of Government within a single hour and holding
possession of it for five days against a trained army
of 20,000 men at the least, while the fairest quarter
of Dublin was being tumbled about their ears in a
bombardment whose every shell shock (in the words of
Mr. Healy who witnessed it) " sounded like the thud
of clay falling upon his father's coffin." The one
flaw in their plans was the unaccountable failure to
capture Dublin Castle. It might have been the
easiest part of their enterprise. We have already seen
that the Castle was only defended by a " corporal's
guard J and that, according to the evidence of the
Lord Lieutenant, as soon as the small party of
rebels shot the policeman at the gate of the Lower
Castle Yard, " there was nothing to prevent them

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 251

from going right in, of course." This view is shared
entirely by Major Price, the Director of Military
Intellgience, who " was talking to Sir Mathew Nathan
in his office not 25 yards from the gate when the firing
commenced." When asked " why they did not go
on ? " his reply is : " They could have done it as
easily as possible. Twenty-five determined men could
have done it." The evidence seems to be that, not
even twenty-five, but only " half a dozen Volunteers
in green coats " were available, probably owing to the
poverty of men as well as rifles — still more likely
because great as was the contempt of the insurgent
leaders for the ruling powers, they refused to give
credence to the unimaginable state of unpreparedness
now disclosed in evidence. But it is certain that if
half the number of men detailed to seize the Post
Office or the Four Courts or to entrench themselves
in Stephen's Green had been devoted to the supreme
enterprise of capturing the citadel of English power,
Dublin Castle and the Viceregal Lodge, with the Lord
Lieutenant and the Under Secretary, must have fallen
an easy prey to their arms and a victory so resounding
must have been followed by an uprising in the country
of which nobody could measure the extent or the
duration. Verily it was only an ingenuous Mr.
Birrell and an Irish Party in the last stages of decadence
who could have fallen into the mistake of taking it for
granted that their sneers at the beaten rebels would be
re-echoed by the Irish nation. Any Irish schoolboy
could have taught them that an adventure so glowing
with romantic daring, and crowned with the halo of
so many unflinching deaths in front of the firing-
platoons of England, would be remembered with
pride and tenderness as one of the most inspiring
episodes of our history.

They believed they were dealing with a trumpery
Dublin commotion and were confident they had heard
the last of it once the abscess was lanced by Sir John

252 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Maxwell. Both as to the facts and as to the prophecy,
they were ludicrously astray. The insurrection was
planned on the calculation that Reserve Lieutenant
Von Spindler, the German Commander of the And
would succeed in landing his cargo of 30,000 rifles
and field guns on the coast of Kerry. He did pass
safely through the lines of a great British fleet on the
north coast of Scotland and arrived in Tralee Bay on
the appointed day, and but for the absurd accident
by which the motor-car conveying those who were to
signal to him fell into the sea in the darkness, he would
doubtless have put his guns successfully on shore.
Had he done so, it is now known there was an
abundance of men in every county of the South ready
and panting to take them up, and an insurrection must
have followed which it would have taken England
many months to cope with, could she even have
mustered the great army that would be required for
the purpose in the crisis of her fate in Flanders. It
is not so generally known that even the capture of
Casement and the voluntary sinking of the shipful of
German rifles would not have prevented an insurrection
upon a vaster scale than the Dublin one, had not Pro-
fessor Eoin MacNeill, the Commander of the Volun-
teers, countermanded the order before the news could
penetrate anywhere outside the neighbourhood of
Dublin, that his order had been in turn set aside
(only, it is believed, by a single vote) by the Dublin
Executive. Information not to be doubted came into
my own possession that on the appointed night many
thousands of insurgents from every part of Cork City
and County converged upon the different mountain
passes for the march into Kerry, and were only dis-
persed after scenes of angry remonstrance on the
arrival of a messenger from Dublin, who urged in
vain that the loss of the German armaments had put
an end to all possibility of success. For many months
the abject failure of the Parliamentary politicians had

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 253

been preparing hundreds of thousands of young
Irishmen of high spirit for any chance, however
desperate, of retrieving the honour of their nation in
the fair ranks of war, aoid the evidence before the
Hardinge Commission leaves no room for doubt that
by a natural reaction, the young men seduced by the
intrigues of the Board of Erin into Mr. Redmond's
' National " Volunteers were going over in thousands,
with their arms, to the side of the genuine fighters.
One of the favourite excuses of " the Party " for the
country turning to the side of the rebels was that they
were horrified by the barbarities with which Sir John
Maxwell put the Rising down. It was a misapprecia-
tion of Irish feeling as false as the rest. " The
country ' ' were, indeed, horrified by the twenty-one
shootings in cold blood in Kilmainham Prison, but
it was not so much that they pitied the young idealists
as they admired and envied them, and they attributed
their fate, not so much to the English militarists, as
to the laches and incompetence of " the Party "and its
leaders. For the young Republicans of the Original
Volunteers, of course, Parliamentarianism in any
shape was the enemy. But they knew themselves to
be and would have remained a minority of no great
dimensions, had not the mind of the country far and
near been seething long with distrust of the Parlia-
mentary politicians, and that not, as " the Party '
fatuously tried to persuade themselves because the
War Office had been uncivil in their dealings with
Irish recruits, or even because of the Kilmainham
fusillades, but for very much deeper reasons. Even
the older men — " the sane and moderate elements,"
as they came to be nicknamed — although, until the
astounding revelations that were to come later of the
possibilities of guerilla warfare, they still believed
armed rebellion to be stark madness, were already
filled with disaffection to a Parliamentary Party steeped
to the lips in a partly corrupt and wholly disgraceful

254 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

bargain for Partition, and felt their pulses throb at
the gallantry and unselfishness of the insurrection
which, according to Mr. Birrell and his Hibernians,
was only to be remembered with execration by the
Irish Nation.

The wise men in Westminster persised in their
faith that the whole affair was a Dublin bubble and
that the bubble was burst. For a moment they were
disillusioned by the arrival of Mr. Dillon from Dublin,
where he had been besieged in his house in North
George's St. under the protection of a party of military.
He burst into the House of Commons in a state of
intense febrile excitement, and under the scandalised
eye of Mr. Redmond, delivered a panegyric of the
Dublin insurgents even more extravagant than had
been his abuse and ridicule before the Rising. As we
have seen, there had been " strong differences of
opinion ' between him and his titular leader, when
there was question of " gingering Nathan/1 and when
even the gentle Nathan asked : " What is Redmond
up to, after what Dillon wrote to him over a month
ago in the enclosed ' (still unpublished) " ' Con-
fidential ' letter to him ? ' The " strong differences "
this time took an exactly opposite turn. While Mr.
Redmond thought the occasion demanded " on behalf
of all my colleagues " an expression of his and their
1 detestation and horror " of the rebellion, his nominal
lieutenant, fresh from Dublin, broke into a passionate
paean to the glory of the rebels which, it may truly
be said, did more to wound the feelings of the British
House of Commons than all the frank hostility of the
insurrection. Nor were his denunciations in high
falsetto of the military altogether deprived of their
sting by the absurd anti-climax at which he arrived
when lie complained that his sen had been insulted
by some subordinate officer who did not express him-
self in terms of proper respect for the name of Dillon,
and with arm upraised registered the vow : " No son
of mine shall ever enter the English Army."

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 255

This, however, was but an excited moment of
panic on the part of a man who had to do something
to make Dublin habitable for him ever again.
He, like the rest of " the Party/' soon fell
back into Mr. BirrelPs comfortable infatuation that
the " unanimity of Ireland has even yet been pre-
served " — and preserved, of course, in support of the
Board of Erin. Before long they had every Cor-
poration and County Council filled with Hibernian
nominees passing " unanimous " resolutions expressing
the country's " detestation and horror " of the wicked
rebels — resolutions which, before many months were
over, the Boards that passed them wiped out from their
books with penitential tears in the hope of absolution
from their electorate. The rebels were being court-
martialled or deported in their thousands, the last of
their newspapers were extinguished, and the country-
laid prostrate in a silence that seemed to be the brother
of death. The reign of the Board of Erin was ap-
parently so completely re-established that we had the
farseeing Mr. Dillon" assuring any Republicans who
still ventured to show their heads that " the War Office
paid no more attention to their antics than to the
hopping of as many fleas."

256 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XVI

" AN IRISH PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT."

MR. ASQUITH met the Easter Week crisis with a
4 gesture ' which, had he persisted, might, even
at the half-past eleventh hour, have saved Home
Rule and himself. He went across to Ireland in
person, visited the rebels in their prisons — it was even
made a high crime that he shook hands with some of
them — learned things that were not likely to be
divulged in evidence before Lord Hardinge's Com-
mission and returned with the conviction that England
was not dealing with a gang of criminals, but with the
best youth of a nation — that it was not Dublin Castle
or Sir John Maxwell's firing-platoons that had won
the day — that, on the contrary, it was " Dublin Castle '
that was doomed by God and man to disappear, and
it was militarist terrorism that must disarm before the
more unconquerable spirit of Liberty. Hearts the
most lacerated by recent events could not be impervious
to the soothing influence of the pilgrimage of an
English Prime Minister who came to Ireland not to
insult the memory of Pearse and his brother martyrs,
or to traduce their motives, but to do justice to their
romantic adventure, to confess that their fight had been
* a clean one," and to solicit advice by what great
measures of conciliation he could best prove that they
had not died in vain. Furthermore, on the morrow
of an abortive insurrection savagely put down, and
with the knowledge of the futility of expecting any
further military aid from Germany,1 the great mass

1 Sir Roger Casement was bitter in his complaints of the
neglect and contempt which met him on every hand in Berlin.
Compare Mr. Ronald McNeilFs account of the sympathetic
experiences of the emissary of the Ulster Covenanters, Mr.
Crawford, in Hamburg and in the Kiel Canal.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 257

of the population might, nobody then doubted, be
still weaned from counsels of violence by some practical
demonstration that Parliamentary methods were not
wholly vain nor English promises always perfidious.
A deputation from the All-for-Ireland League who
waited on Mr. Asquith in Cork — headed by Captain
Sheehan, M.P., whose credentials were his own
services in the Munster Fusiliers, and the lives of two
of his gallant sons buried on the fields of Flanders —
gave the Prime Minister in a sentence the programme
which even at that dark hour might have spelled
salvation for the two countries. It was — "Any price
for a United Ireland, but Partition — never under any
possible circumstances!"

A statesman of the Gladstone stature, returning
to London with such convictions, would not have
rested a day nor relaxed a muscle before giving them
practical effect. Mr. Asquith 's incurable defect was
not want of courage or of constructive capacity, but
a genial indolence which was growing upon him as his
unexpected passion for human companionship ex-
panded. There is no evidence that he personally
went a step further upon the road he had opened up
in Ireland. He made the gran rifiuto and handed
over his Irish task and with it his own future to the
ready hands of Mr Lloyd George. Weighed though
the latter was with a thousand feverish cares as Minister
for Munitions, his dauntless spirit did not hesitate to
accept the inheritance bequeathed to him by his
unsuspecting chief. His ignorance of Irish affairs
was fathomless as the ocean — so fathomless that, as
will be seen in a moment, he was unaware that Mr.
Redmond had ever said : " There is no longer an
Ulster Difficulty," and had never heard that Mr.
Devlin's B.O.E. Hibernians were an exclusively Catholic
Order. His genius lay in first making daring imagina-
tive proposals and afterwards thinking out how the
facts might fit in with them, or might be brutally

258 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

ignored if they did not. That is not to say that he
was consciously heartless or unscrupulous. I think
he was always cloudily sensible of the beauty of the
Irishfcause, both for ethnic reasons, which enabled him
to see Celtic visions beyond the Irish seas as well as
amidst his own haunted Welsh mountains, and also
because Ireland in the House of Commons had shown
him the pattern of glorious hardihood which he was
himself to copy and improve upon for the upliftment
of his Welsh brethren in the House of Commons, up
to his day an ineffectual bilingual folk. Even his
ignorance might have had its advantages, since it
saved him from any inveterate prejudices in affairs
so surcharged with prejudice as those of Ireland.
It will always be debatable whether if he had accepted
the Chief Secretaryship and devoted to it the prodigious
energies — the matchless dynamic power of " push and
go " — which enabled him to turn the munitionless
debacle of Mons into the breaking of the Hindenburg
line, he might not have succeeded, where Mr. Asquith
with his majority of 98 and a sterilised House of Lords
had failed through loss of nerve or a too easy temper.

The misfortune was that in his eyes an Irish settle-
ment was only a residual product of the trememdous
Imperial munition manufacture he was engaged in.
Everything had to be viewed from the standpoint of the
world-war, and of how America was to be brought in.
Whatever sentiment, Irish or Ulsterite, blocked the
way had to be coaxed, and if notcoaxable,to be crushed,
untroubled by the nice questions of schoolgirls as to
right or wrong, with something of the condescension
of one of the great ones of the earth accustomed to
play with lions as with lambs, and the self -righteousness
of one whose aim was to set up the horn of his nation—
and no doubt, in some modest degree, his own. Mr.
Lloyd George was sagacious enough to see all the
advantages of having the solution of the Irish problem,
and with it of the war at one of its most critical

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 259

moments, transferred to his own hands, but he had
no notion of allowing his ambitions to be circumscribed
within the dingy limits of the Irish Office. As will
be seen, he seems at first to have toyed with the tempta-
tion of accepting the Chief Secretaryship, but he lost
little time in contradicting the nimour in the news-
papers that he had stooped so far to conquer. He
had only consented to be the Deus ex machina whose
bare appearance with his enchanted wand was to work
in Ireland the same miracle by which he had glorified
the Ministry of Munitions. Being in a hurry, and with
but half his thoughts upon his work, he, unluckily,
hit upon a solution so extraordinary that its audacity
was its only merit, and his elementary ignorance of
conditions in Ireland its only excuse. It was nothing
less than a proposal to hand over a country where the
shots of the insurrection had barely died away to a
Provisional Government of Irishmen to be in some
apocalyptic manner selected.

It was the first time, during a five years* term of
power, Mr. Asquith's Cabinet had thought of calling
into counsel a body of Irish Nationalists whose pro-
posals they had hitherto spent their time in deriding
and thwarting. It was possibly the reports the Prime
Minister had brought back from Dublin, which gave
them their first inkling that Mr. Redmond and the
Hibernians were a spent force, and made them rush
to a conclusion equally extreme in the opposite
direction, that ours was the only Parliamentary force
left which had any chance of retaining the confidence
of the young men and at the same time of reassuring
the Unionist minority. According to the official
calculation, plainly, the All-f or- Ireland League offered
the principal hope of working out Mr. Lloyd George's
impulsive plan for straightening out the Irish tangle.
The compliment was a pretty one ; but belated
homage of that kind, it can scarcely be necessary to
say, was not likely to shake our conviction that the

260 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

proposal now shadowed forth rather than put in
definite terms was a fantastic and impossible one, and
from the outset of my first conversation with Mr.
Lloyd George I thought it a duty without ambiguity
to tell him so. The idea apparently was the formation
of all sorts of elements, Nationalist and Unionist,
into a Provisional Government to " carry on '
until the war was over. In a country where the
fires of civil war were only half extinguished,
where the insurrectionary youth were rather fired than
cowed by the fate of their leaders before the bullets
of the firing platoons and the savage sentences of the
courts -martial, one set of Nationalist Parliamentarians
who had forfeited public confidence beyond repair,1-
another set whose voices had not been allowed to be
heard for years in three out of the four provinces — and
a third set, the Ulster Covenanters, still raging with
the passions which only the world-war prevented from
finding vent in an insurrection of their own — were to be
miraculously combined to relieve magnanimous
England of the responsibility fo rruling Ireland, And
with what a commission ! Nothing less than, with
our co-operation and under the protection of a British
Army, to give practical effect to the pact between
Mr. Redmond and Sir E. Carson set forth in the
House of Commons a few weeks before — viz., ' * to
denounce those rebels with horror and detestation and
put them down for ever more," and by such means
to reduce Ireland to silence until the war was safely
over, without the smallest guarantee of any National
Settlement worth the name to follow. I should, no
doubt, have displayed more of the wisdom of the
serpent, had I played with Mr. Lloyd George's sug-
gestion until he had first developed it in all its crazy
particulars — if, indeed, he had got so far as thinking

1 No specific mention was made of Mr. Redmond's Party,
but to leave them out would be the one folly uncommitted by
the scheme.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 261

out any particulars at all. Prudently or imprudently,
I thought it fairer to him and to everybody to make no
concealment from the first of my conviction that the
institution of an Irish Provisional Government of
such a sort and at such a moment was a wildly —
almost insanely — impracticable project and could only
put an end to the last hope, that after an interval of
appeasement our own slower but surer plans of con-
ciliation might once more come within the range of
practical politics. Everything was to depend upon
our being wheedled into consent to Partition in some
shape. That hope once dissipated the Provisional
Government was incontinently dropped and this is
probably the first intimation the world has got that
it was ever in contemplation.

However, I had better let my part in the transaction
tell its own story from notes made on the days of the
various conversations between us (or in one instance,
the day after) while my memory was still fresh :

MEMORANDA
(MAY 23, 1916)

On a request conveyed through T. M. H (ealy) I
met B (onar) L (aw) alone to-day in his room at the
House of Commons amidst suffocating clouds of
tobacco-smoke. He asked was there no way of taking
advantage of the present opportunity ? I said for the
moment all was chaos. The best thing the Govern-
ment could do was to try to soften the memory of
recent happenings in Dublin by fearless investigation
into responsibilities and by leniency all round. He
asked was not some settlement — even a provisional
one — possible ? I said anything hastily patched up
was sure to turn out badly, but if a policy of appease-
ment were first tried for six months, there would be
every prospect of bringing the best Irishmen together

262 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

to devise some generous settlement before the war
was over. Our own position had been stated in a
sentence to A (squith) when he was in Cork : " Any
price for a United Ireland, but Partition — never under
any possible circumstances/* Then," he said,
shaking his head : " It is all up. It is useless to think
of Ulster coming in." " For the moment I quite
agree," I said. " That is why I despair of any move
while feeling is at present fever heat on both sides."
B. L — " That is very discouraging." O B.— " Who
can be otherwise than discouraged ? Do you suppose
the tragedy of it all, and of what might have been is
not haunting me day and night ? Better discourage
you than mislead you into thinking Partition in any
shape can ever do anything except make bad worse."

He quite agreed that facts had to be faced, and
asked " if I should have any objection to meet Sir E.
C(arson) and Col. Craig ? ' I replied not the least —
that I never obtruded my views on others but was
always willing to state them frankly to anybody who
cared to listen. He said Sir E. had always expressed
the highest respect for my action for the last ten years,
but he dared say there would be little use in our meeting
if my position as to the exclusion of Ulster was un-
alterable. " But could not," he again suggested,
" something be patched up even provisionally ? Would
it not be possible for you in a Parliament of the other
three provinces to become leader of a powerful Opposi-
tion, with the Unionists of the South on your side and
in that way bring round Ulster ?" I said he little knew
the Unionists of the South. In the higher interests of
Ireland I had been fighting for their lives at the risk
of my own for the past thirteen years and not more
than a dozen of them had dared come on a platform to
declare for me, although they were all ready enough
to protest their sympathy in secret. I did not blame
them. They were intimidated like our own people
by the political machine and would be more back-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 263

boneless than ever in an assembly from which Ulster
was banished. B. L. — " Do you think it would be
quite impossible to attract Ulster back, if the thing
was approached temporarily in a friendly spirit ? J
I replied that " a three-quartered Parliament in Dublin
would be hopelessly handicapped from the first.
They would have no funds for anything except to
pay the placehunters, and there would be no generous
spirit to appeal to. They would divide from the first
day into two bodies — the placemen and their backers,
and the young idealists who would shrink from the
whole ugly business and turn to other means — that
is to say, if you could even get them to tolerate the
thing at all. You could not. Any attempt to vivisect
the country they would regard as the worst crime in
all England's catalogue. You would probably have
the barricades thrown up again in Dublin on the
opening day. Whereas Ulster had only to remember
they were Irishmen, and come in on the magnificent
terms which we proposed, and which they now could
have with universal assent, and the bare fact of such
an Irish Reunion would do more to capture and disarm
the Sinn Feiners than ever your armies will do, and you
would at once have all the materials for a strong and
level-headed National Government of Ireland. All
this could have been brought about without much
difficulty five or six years ago, before the Larne gun-
running commenced, if A(squith) had then gone to
Ireland in the same spirit of conciliation and concession
as he has just done. Now it is both too late and too
soon. You have set up an Ulster Provisional Govern-
ment and you have brought an Irish Republic on the
scene. But I don't say for a moment all is lost. Spend
the next six months in cultivating a better feeling and
your opportunity may quite possibly come again. "
That, he said, might well be, but that would involve
a long delay, and he seemed to intimate that in the
meantime the men behind R. were forcing him to go

8

264 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

back to a policy of Obstruction, in order to recover
their popularity, and that the effect might be disastrous
to the prospects of the Allies. I said in their despera-
tion anything was possible, but Parliamentary obstruc-
tion would be less harmful than if they grasped at a
Partition of Ireland Act which they would be wholly
incapable of getting to work, for they would have the
whole race against them. The main strength of the
Rebellion was that it was the reaction against the
bungling and corruption by which the country had
been ruled in obedience to a sham-Catholic secret
society which did far more to alarm Protestant Ulster
and to compromise the highest interests of England
than the uprising of the fine young fellows they had
just been shooting down in Dublin. The one hope
was to appeal to a higher and broader Irish patriotism.

B. L., who impressed me much by his straight-
forwardness, again expressed his feeling of dejection,
but said, " We've got to do something," and said there
might still be some use in a meeting between C. and
myself. So we parted. In the beginning of the
interview he intimated that, if it should be found
necessary to appoint a Liberal as Chief Secretary, his
friends were inclined to favour L(loyd) G(eorge)
although he knew what I thought of him. But he
did not leave the impression that anything had actually
been decided upon.

P.S. — A few hours later the L. G. nomination was
announced by L. G. himself to T. M. H. as a fait
accompli.

(MAY 25, 1916)

T. M. H. told me L. G. had called him into his
room, and asked if I would be willing to see him. H.
said he did not know owing to his treatment of me on
certain occasions L. G. might remember. But, of
course, no such objection could be thought of. Met

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 265

him to-day at the Metropole (Munitions Headquarters).
He said, " I suppose you know why I want you. I
am going to see what I can do for Ireland." I replied :
" I suppose you are tired of being told you are a man
of courage. But I am afraid that is the only comfort
I can give you on your journey." " Things are very
bad," he said, " but is it quite so bad as that ? "
O'B. — " I was once one of the most sanguine of men,
but I am nearer to despair of anything I can do than
I was ever before in the darkest times." L. G. —
"" Oh, come, you are a brave Irishman. Something
will have to be done. Is there no way of getting all
the best Irishmen together, even provisionally ? "
He then said he knew I would dismiss from
my mind all former differences between us —
that, of course, he knew how I felt about the old
budget troubles — that, as I knew, he would have
excluded Ireland altogether if he had been allowed.
" You admitted yourself I was bound to be guided
by the majority of the Irish Party." I said a very
much worse thing in my eyes was his appropriating
the first of the Home Rule Parliament's four sessions
for his Insurance Act, and forcing it upon Ireland, and
also his part in the abominable finances of the Home
Rule Bill. Worst of all, he must forgive me if I did
not find it easy to forget that he had destroyed the
Irish Party by making them Treasury pensioners. So
long as Irishmen were doing good work in Parliament
their countrymen never refused to support them
generously. Now they had ceased to depend on the
Irish people, and in consequence Irish seats in Parlia-
ment had become like Dispensary Doctorships or
Corporation jobs, a mere scramble among men with
the longest tailed families and the least creditable
secret influence. Hence the kind of men the Irish
Party were now filled with. " Yes," he said, " those
who have turned up since Parnell's time are a poor
lot. What has become of your young men ? " I

266 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

could not help blurting out : " Those of them your
Government have not turned into place-hunters you
have been shooting in Kilmainham Jail. You have
ruled Ireland for six years through a pseudo-Catholic
Secret Society of the most sordid kind, and you are
now face to face with the reaction. Your own Secret
Society is being countered with another, which is at
least worlds above it in idealism and disinterestedness."
He took it all with great good humour. " I suppose
you are referring to Devlin's Society, the Hibernians ? '
he said, and then laughingly : " Healy told me while
I was disendowing the Church in Wales I was endowing
the Molly Maguire Church in Ireland." He asked :
" Is Devlin's Society really confined to Catholics ? '
I said : " You did not do me the honour of listening
while I was endeavouring to get you not to endow them
under the Insurance Act, or you would know that this
Hibernian Society is so exclusively Catholic that
Grattan or Robert Emmet or Parnell as Protestants
would be debarred from membership unless they first
pledged themselves to frequent the Catholic Sacra-
ments. Even their Catholicity is such a sham that
the Order was a few years ago under interdict from
Rome, which was only raised on their abandoning
the blasphemous form of initiation which was by
placing the postulant's hand upon a crucifix while
making his vow of secrecy." L. G. touched the bell
and asked the Secretary to 'phone to the Irish Office
for the numbers of the Ancient Order of Hibernians
in Ireland, I told him R(edmond) in the House of
Commons estimated them at 90,000, but they had
since much increased. The Hibernian " Approved
Society " under the Insurance Act would not probably
represent one third of the total. The reply came back
from the Irish Office that they would have to telegraph
to Ireland for particulars. I found it hard to refrain
from commenting on these two grotesque instances
of the wisdom with which Ireland is governed — that

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 267

L. G. did not know the Mollies were an exclusively
Catholic body, and that nobody in the Irish Office
could tell him the numbers of what had been for years
the f most formidable organisation in Ireland. I
apologised if I had been a bit rough, but it was because
the Government had closed their ears to the most
elementary facts that they had landed themselves and
us in the present mess.

" Well," he said, with unbroken good humour,
" something will have to be done and you must help
us." I replied : " Willingly if I could honestly tell
you I can see anything to be done for the moment
except mischief. As I told B. L. when he was kind
enough to ask me, it is both too late and too soon —
too late for the concessions that might have won
Ulster four or five years ago, and too soon to hope that
any small haphazard measures can have any effect
upon the passions now raging. You might as well try
to quench a live volcano with a watering pot." * Do
you really think the insurrectionary spirit is still alive,
or at least that it will spread ? " he asked. I replied
by repeating some verses written by Pearse the night
before his execution : " How are you going to put
down a spirit like that ? They may seem poor verses
enough, but they will strike a spark from many millions
of souls." " It is all very sad," he said, " but they have
no leaders." " Leaders have a way of turning up
in Ireland when they are least expected," was my
comment. " A few years ago you might have won
them all — both Sinn Fein and Ulster."

He admitted that no real concessions had ever been
made to Ulster. " No," I said, " strict justice perhaps,
but justice raw and unboiled. When I proposed some
real concessions, I was set upon with the cry that I
was handing Ireland over to the veto of twelve Orange-
men, and when on behalf of my friends, I made the
only protest ever heard in this House against the
bargain for the Partition of Ireland, our people were

268 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

told in their lying newspapers that we had voted
against Home Rule, and it was upon that villainous*
cry our candidates were beaten at the County Council
and District Council elections." I noticed that L. G.
at once pricked up his ears and looked thoughtfuL
Quite clearly, the opportunist politician had jumped
to the conclusion that the Partition of Ireland could
not be such an unpopular measure, since we had
suffered at the polls for protesting against it. I soon
disabused him of the illusion. " That," I said, " was
how the corruptionists blinded the unfortunate people
to the truth. Now that honest Irishmen are beginning
to realise what really happened they would tear the
fellows limb from limb that would attempt to play
the game of Partition in their name."

L. G. changed the subject and pressed me whether
something might not still be done, even provisionally
" until the war was over " (a phrase that struck harshly
on my ear) and for the first time made any direct
reference to the Provisional Government scheme.
The suggestion was a purely tentative one. He did
not go into particulars as to how it was to be formed,,
but I inferred we were to be a sort of connecting link.
I was amazed and told him so in pretty candid terms >
for he seemed immediately to draw back. I told him
bluntly any such thing was at this moment imprac-
ticable ; no genuine Nationalist could touch it as a
nominee of England and while the country was under
the heel of martial law. " Well," he said, " there
must be good Irishmen whom it might be well to take
into consultation," and questioned me as to names*
He seemed to regard R. asfini and no longer of much
account. I agreed, but with regret. R.'s judgment
was all right, but circumstances were too strong for
him and he ended generally by doing the wrong thing.
He mentioned Sir Horace Plunkett. I said I had
never entertained any unfriendly feeling for P.
He was a high-minded and devoted Irishman only

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 269

that he got it into his head that the history of Ireland

began with " " With his creameries — Yes," broke

in L. G. I remarked that with the more go-ahead
farmers he had a good deal of influence, but was
detested by the town shopkeepers. " Including
Dillon," he interjected with a grin. Various names
were canvassed, nearly all of whom I spoke favourably
of, but doubted whether there was any personality
that could bring them together in the present culbute
generate. Stephen Gwynn 's name cropped up. L. G.
remarked that Gwynn did not speak bitterly of any
one. I agreed. L. G. was surprised to hear G. was
a Protestant. I added that he was a grandson of
William Smith O'Brien, who was a Protestant, too.
L. G. looked a bit bewildered as if it were the first
time he heard speak of Smith O'Brien. I recalled
that Gwynn, M'Murrough Kavanagh and a number
of other clever young Protestants had begun by joining
Lord Dunraven, but were intimidated by the abuse
of all who came over to us in the Molly Press and
allowed themselves to be seduced by seats in Parlia-
ment which the Mollies alone could give. Two of
the most valued Protestant members of the Land
Conference were silenced with baronetcies by the
Aberdeens, and T. W. Russell, who might have been
an immense power among the Ulster Dissenters
allowed himself to be bullied into " toeing the line J
and got his job. " His influence now does not count "
was L. G.'s comment.

I said that was how the elements that might have
brought about as easy a settlement on Home Rule as
upon the far more envenomed Agrarian problem had
been debauched, or frightened. He questioned me
as to who would be an acceptable Lord Lieutenant,
adding to my amazement : " You know I am not
going to be Chief Secretary " (shrugging his shoulders)
' I could not think of pinning myself to an office like
that." I said that would be a very grievous disappoint-

270 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

ment to begin with. " I might go over to see for
myself how things stand." I inferred from his re-
ference to Wimborne that he had thrown over
Wimborne. I told him he must quite understand
that I wanted nothing for anybody, and I only ventured
opinions about individuals very reluctantly and solely
because he knew so little of the country. Dunraven
was of all the Irish Unionists the man of most capacity
and tolerance as a statesman, but I took it for granted
would be of all men the least welcome to R.'s friends
or masters, although in their present plight they
might grasp at anything. He was curiously enough
abused for the two very things that would secure his
fame by and bye — his success in reconciling the
landlords to give up landlordism, and in breaking the
hostility of the Southern Unionists to Home Rule.
But I presumed his time had not yet come. L. G.
shook his head, but said nothing. I mentioned a few
other names — Lord Carnarvon, whose father was the
first great Englishman to embrace Home Rule and had
suffered for doing so ; Lord Shaftesbury who had been
three times Lord Mayor of Belfast, was Chancellor
of the Belfast University, and was known to be at
heart reconciled to Home Rule by consent ; and the
Duke of Devonshire, of whom I only knew that his
children lived at Lismore and loved Ireland better than
England. He asked what of Lord Derby ? I said
I knew nothing pro or con, except that his name would
be identified in Ireland with recruiting and possibly
conscription.

Had I any objection to talking things over with
Sir E. Carson and Col. Craig ? I told him I had no
objection to meeting anybody of any section, with the
possible exception of Devlin (for reasons I must
decline to discuss) ; at which he made a gesture of
annoyance which convinced me that Devlin and he
have not yet broken off relations, and that he thinks
D. may still find refuge in the Labour ranks. We

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 271

then drifted away into general talk of the situation.
He referred with great cordiality to my brother-in-
law, Arthur Raffalovich, whose familiarity with the
laws of currency seemed to have made an enormous
impression upon him, and whose geniality and mastery
of English was most welcome to him in his com-
munications with the Russian Minister of Finance.
He took an extremely gloomy view of the war, saying
that the Italians were doubled up and France bleeding
to death. He agreed with me that what England
wanted was not men, but a man, admitting that the
new style of unwarlike English conscripts could not
very much count. He was quite alive to the superiority
of the French as soldiers, and spoke with enthusiasm
of some of their generals — Petain, Castelnau and a
little Breton, Maud'huy, whom he had met, but
referred with alarming irreverence to Joffre who, he
said, owed his position to political reasons, there being
a dread in Republican France of any too successful
soldier — all of which, it must be owned, impressed me
with the superficiality of his own judgments. We
parted on the understanding that he was to arrange
an interview with C.

(MAY 30, 1916)

Met Sir E. C. with L. G. at Metropole. C. said
he was afraid there was no prospect of a satisfactory
settlement " for the moment." " That," I observed,
" was exactly what I had been advising L. G.," but
I was glad to think his statement implied that later on,
when the present bitterness abated, a settlement by
consent was quite on the cards before the winter was
over. C. concurred, adding that the difficulties of
anything immediate had been greatly aggravated by
the Rebellion. People in Ulster were constantly
asking him how were they to hand over the country
to the authors of the Pro-German rebellion and of

272 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

certain speeches in the House. I burned to makeja
different answer and remind him of Catiline com-
plaining of sedition, but contented myself with re-
calling that we had never promised that Ireland was
to be won except by H. R., and yet the mere proffer
of H. R. — miserable a fiasco as it was turning out to
be — had revolutionized Irish resentment so far that
there must be at least five hundred thousand Irish
soldiers fighting in the various Allied armies. L. G.
nodded approvingly. C. said he was speaking of the
difficulties in dealing with Ulster. Apart from the
religious trouble, which he never liked to speak of,
there was the dread of the commercial men for their
trade, and the hostility of the Northern workmen who
were constantly passing; to and fro between Belfast
and Glasgow and Liverpool. He had always thought
separate Trade Union laws was one of the mistakes
of those who framed the H. R. Bill. I intimated that
it was a perfectly adjustable difficulty, as the Southern
Trade Unionists were just as inextricably mixed up
with the British Trade Unions.

C. said that H. R. Government had proceeded
all along on the assumption that Ulster did not count .
I said that could never be charged against my friends
and myself at all events. C. said he had always felt
that from the beginning I had realised the situation >
but R. told them there was no longer an Ulster problem.
L. G. (in amazement) — " Did he really say that ? '
C. — " He did, indeed, and said there would be no
difficulty in putting down any resistance in Ulster
with the strong hand." I said that kind of thing was
bluff — there was bluff on all sides. The cards of my
friends and myself were on the table all the time. If
Ulster would only join us in Dublin, she could prac-
tically name her own terms. The Irish Unionists
would become the biggest individual Party in an Irish
Parliament, and might even be its rulers if they threw
themselves into a patriotic and sensible programme.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 275

C. — " You cannot expect Ulster to come in just now."
O'B. — " No, nor anybody else. That is why I urge
there should be nothing precipitate. Spend the next
six months in mollifying the present bitterness — take
your military precautions by all means, but don't be
afraid to own there were faults on both sides. Trust
to leniency rather than to force, and we will then be
all in a better humour to come together in a United
Ireland." L. G. (with sudden energy) — " In six
months the war will be lost." C. (throwing up his
arms) — " If the war is lost we are all lost." L. G. —
" The Irish- American vote will go over to the German
side. They will break our blockade and force an
ignominious peace on us, unless something is done,
even provisionally, to satisfy America." O'B. — " That
is to say, of course, that whatever is to be done shall be
done for war purposes. Take care I beg of you, in
the interests of the war as well as of Ireland, that you
will not infuriate Irish-American feeling rather
than appease it. I most solemnly believe that will be
the result if you attempt anything on the basis of
splitting up Ireland. Make no mistake about it we
are at a point at which all our labours for a better
feeling for the last thirteen years may be lost. All
honest Irish feeling will be so fiercely against you, you
will have to send an army corps to open your mutilated
Dublin Parliament and in spite of them the people
will bundle the whole crew of them into the Liffey.
And " (turning to C.) " don't think I say it in any way
as a taunt, but what happened in Dublin the other day
would be child's play compared with the horrors in
Belfast. Your men are dogged fighters, no doubt,
but so are ours, you will admit. Even if you could
outnumber them, and it would be a tougher job than
you had in Easter Week in Dublin, you would have to
reckon with the rest of Ireland, and with hundreds of
thousands of Irish soldiers when they get back from
the war." C. did not utter a word of dissent.

.274 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

L. G. clung obstinately to his view that, come
what might, something must be done before the
American elections or Wilson would be returned and
the war lost.1 He announced positively that the
Government had information that the Germans were
planning a new descent upon Ireland. He spoke
again with the utmost gloom of the military situation,
and in such exaggerated terms that the object was
plainly to frighten C. Not without success ; for C.
was visibly affected and said with a deep emphasis
that Ulster would go very far indeed rather than see
the war lost. That was all he could say. L. G. —
" It is saying a great deal. It is a very important
statement." O'B. — " So important that if it means
a United Ireland, we are all at one. But that is just
the point, and there is no use trying to blink it. What
ideal men have for ages been suffering for is Ireland
a Nation. Go on with this Partition business, and you
would make the very name of Ireland an impossible
one. You would have to find two new names for it —
I suppose Orangia and Molly-Maguire-land — and you
would leave five-sixths of an honest Irish race without
a country or an ideal." L. G. — " We are only speaking
of a provisional arrangement." O'B. — " A ' pro-
visional ' arrangement that is to last until Col. Craig
and his men of their own free will walk into a bankrupt
Dublin Parliament, for the pleasure of being ruled by
Mr. Devlin and his Mollies." C. avowed that he had
never liked Partition. The Ulster men had grasped
at it as their only chance of preserving their British
citizenship, and nothing else had been offered them.
They had before them the fate of the Unionists of the

1 This curious prediction is another instance of quantula
sapientia regitur mundus. The candidate favoured by England,
Ifgathered, was Roosevelt, who was, in his own phrase, " beaten
to ajfrazzle " in the Republican Convention. By another blunder,
no less comical, of the Washington Embassy, the real Republican
candidate, Mr. Hughes, was reported to be an enemy of England.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 275

South. In Cork itself they had been driven out of the
County Council and the Corporation, and that, he
believed, because they were supposed to be in favour
of O'Brien's concessions to the North." O'B. —
" Rather because these concessions had not been
closed with by the Irish Unionists themselves. My
own friends met the same fate and are very proud of
it. Things of that kind are to be expected everywhere
from an unscrupulous political machine. A genuine
Irish Parliament would soon deal with the gang who
run it, if the Irish Unionists would only look on Ireland
as their own country, and give us a chance."

L. G. pressed me again to make some alternative
suggestions, saying : "I have failed to get a single
suggestion of any kind from the other people. What-
ever I propose they will find fault with, but they will
not take the responsibility of making a single definite
suggestion themselves." O'B. — " They are waiting
until they see how the cat will jump in Ireland, no
doubt. But you have had my alternative suggestions
before you all the time — I have never criticised without
offering some counter-proposal, and you would never
listen." L. G.— " Yes, but now ? ; O'B.—" I^have
told you quite definitely what my view is — six months
of conciliatory government to pave the way for a
Conference of Irishmen on the basis of a United
Ireland, with whatever aid you can get from Overseas
Prime Ministers like those of Canada and Australia
where Ulstermen and Nationalists live side by side
in freedom without friction." L.G. — " But can you
give us no suggestion of something to be done at once
to save the war ?" I said that was to me a new situation
and it was not quite fair to expect me to be prepared
with any considered proposal, but as far as I could
judge on the spur of the moment, a far more effective
way of impressing American and Irish opinion than
the experiment he had mentioned which was bound
to fail badly and at once, for want of any basis of

276 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

agreement, would be that Parliament should give
Ireland some such guarantee of freedom after the war
as the Tsar and the Duma had given with such striking
effect to Poland. It ought to be possible to arrange
a debate which would be practically unanimous and
would at once strike the imagination of Ireland and
of America. C. and L. G. were afraid the difficulties
would be almost insurmountable. L. G. (with bitter-
ness)— " You would have somebody like Dillon
starting up without even knowing the effect of what he
was saying and wrecking the whole business. " O'B —
" If you refer to his performance of the other night
he knew perfectly well what he was at. He was only
trying to make Dublin habitable for him. But that
only proves D. can be easily enough brought to bow
to the inevitable."

I then urged upon C. that he knew how to put his
views in such a way, with all that was at stake, as to
strike a note that would capture the hearts of young
Irishmen, Sinn Feiners and all. If he would then
take a secret Referendum — " yes " or "no " — of the
Covenanters upon a letter of advice signed by himself,
and such men as Craig, Londonderry, Shaftesbury and
Sharman Crawford (whose name was still one to
conjure witha mong the Dissenters) 90 per cent, of the
Covenanters outside Belfast and Portadown would
gladly endorse his action and give him a mandate to
see things through. C. — " I don't even know whether
I could get these people to sign it." O'B. — " If you
will allow me to say it, the great mistake you make
about Ulster is to minimise your own power there.
Without you, we should still have plenty of street
riots, but nothing more formidable." C. shook his
head and laughed. I added that all the vows of the
Covenanters were made against a Home Rule Bill
which was now given up or rendered unworkable by
its own authors. There would be the advantage of
beginning with a clean slate, with possibly some big

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 277

scheme of Federation of the whole Empire in which
the Covenanters' right of Imperial citizenship might
stand upon the same footing as if they were English-
men. C. said he had always felt and even publicly
stated that the situation might be entirely changed
under some Federal arrangement which would pre-
serve to Ulster its Imperial standing and under which
Ireland might be treated as a unit, with general
consent.1 L. G. pressed me to put my suggestions
in writing. I said I should willingly do so, although
no doubt any Irishman who made a helpful suggestion
of any kind at this moment took his life in his hands.
As C. stood up to leave he, I think, greatly surprised
both of us by stating that, having regard to the
exigencies of the war, which were to him the supreme
consideration, he would consult with his friends in
Ulster and advise them to reconsider the whole situa-
tion under the new conditions we had been discussing,
L. G. — " That is a very important declaration indeed."
I left immediately after.2 I am confident I have

1 Subsequent developments led me often and anxiously to jog
my memory on this point, and I have not a shadow of doubt that
this precis, made at the moment, accurately records Sir E. Carson's
statement that, in the Federal arrangement to which he looked
forward with hope, Ireland was to be dealt with as a unit.

2 Some minor episodes in the conversation, which were also
noted at the time, may here be added :

L. G. (to me)--" Did not Sir Edward once prosecute you ? "
O'B. (laughingly) — " Have you already forgotten your old leader's
injunction to ' Remember Mitchelstown ' ? " C. (with marked
cordiality) — " I think Mr. O'Brien is the most forgiving Irishman
I ever met." O'B. — " Oh, all these things were the fortunes of
war, and we had the comfort of knowing we gave as good as we
got." I thought L. G. winced perceptibly at the reference to my
readiness to forgive.

In the course of some reference to R. (whom L. G. seemed
rather disposed to regard as a back number) I remarked : " Give
R. his brief and I know no man who can make a more eloquent
use of it in the House of Commons." C. — " That is so. He
has an admirable manner. R. and I always got on very well,
we began together on the same circuit." L. G. — " Did R. have

278 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

noted all the references to Partition made in the inter-
view. L. G. when I pressed him as to his own position
only said : " Mind, I am making no proposition."

The next morning (May 31) I sent the promised
Memo, to Mr. Lloyd George, who was attending a
Cabinet meeting.

In a covering letter, I wrote : " Enclosed jottings
are the best I can do as the result of my cogitations
last evening. If you like to see me again, I shall be
at your disposal all this day and to-morrow, after
which ' Bellevue, Mallow, Co. Cork/ will find me.
But I am far from wishing to obtrude myself un-
necessarily. I hope enclosed communique from to-
day's Times is not accurate.1 Any confident announce-
much practice ? " C. — " No, but it was because he became a
politician. That I have never done. I have remained a lawyer
first and a politician afterwards."

Lord Pirrie was mentioned by L. G., who said he supposed
he had no influence in Belfast. C. — " No. He preferred a
peerage to the power he might have had as the head of his great
shipbuilding yard." L. G. — " I don't think you or I would make
that mistake."

Referring to the effect a broad National pronouncement from
C. would have on young Irishmen, I mentioned that Professor
John MacNeill, up to the eve of the Rising the Commander-in-
Chief of the Volunteers, was attacked by a Molly crowd in Cork
for calling for " Three cheers for Carson and the Ulster
Volunteers ! " and the Chairman of the meeting — a Cork Town
Councillor named Walsh, sentenced to death for his part in the
Rising, had got his skull fractured on the same occasion. " Is
that really the case ? " asked L. G. C. — " Yes. I noticed it at
the time, but I thought it was that poor Swift MacNeill, the
M.P., who was referred to." O'B.— " The Sinn Fein MacNeill
was once a believer in Redmond and his policy, as Walsh was
in mine." C. — u Indeed, he was. I have a document signed by
Redmond and MacNeill appealing for subscriptions for their
Volunteers. They proposed to take the defence of the shores of
Ireland into their own hands, whatever that might mean." L. G.
looked as if the Irish Sphinx was too much for him.1

1 Referring to a statement that Mr. Lloyd George would on the
motion for the Adjournment for the Recess announce an Irish
Settlement on the basis of the Buckingham Palace Conference.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 279

ment just yet would almost surely lead to bitter dis-
appointment hereafter and would force me, at least,
to make it clear that the Buckingham Palace basis —
which was Partition — is for us impossible and even

JL

undiscussable. Indeed that seemed to be the view of
our interlocutor of last evening as well."

The Memo, simply elaborated my suggestion that
4 if, unfortunately, it should be essential to take any
decisive public action at once," the best way of
favourably impressing both Ireland and America
would be an * agreed ' debate in the House of Com-
mons involving a distinct pledge of National Self-
Government for Ireland, " acceptable to the people
of every part of the country," to be worked out by a
small conciliatory Conference. I now added the
suggestion (notable in view of subsequent events)
that the debate " should be initiated by an impressive
message from the King (the Tsar did the same in the
case of Poland) " in which case, " it seems impossible
to imagine that any responsible person of any Party,
British or Irish, should misconduct himself. . . ."

" All would, of course, depend on the nature of
Sir E. Carson's declaration. If he were armed with
the assent of the Covenanters (which he might with
certainty obtain upon a strong representation of the
War Danger and a guarantee that any agreed settle-
ment hereafter would be founded not on the present
Bill but on a new Federal arrangement securing to
the Ulstermen substantially the same rights of Imperial
citizenship as to Englishmen, Scotchmen or Welsh-
men) he might safely be trusted to lay the proper
emphasis upon the readiness of Ulster to reconsider
the situation under these new conditions, and to do so
in a manner that would appeal to the imagination of
young Irishmen in Ireland and in America, rousing
their National pride and dispelling any apprehension
of dismemberment of the country. What would be
most important would be a definite promise to go into

T

28o THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Conference with all sections of his countrymen with
a view to the reconsideration of the entire question
of a new and wiser settlement by consent. It can
hardly be doubted that Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Walter
Long and other men who carry weight in Ulster would
co-operate. "

The Memo, wound up in these words : " Please
bear in mind that these suggestions are only made, at
your request, as a bad second best to my own pre-
ference for slower and better matured action, nothing
except the War Emergency in the least shaking my
belief that any sudden or ill-advised attempt to solve
the difficulty (so to say) * by miracle ' will only lead
to more widespread dangers hereafter. And it must
be clearly understood that, to any scheme expressly
or impliedly contemplating Partition in any form,
my friends and myself are unalterably opposed."

Neither to the Memo., nor to the accompanying
letter did I ever receive a reply. But Mr. Lloyd
George did publish in the Times of the following
morning an official denial of the communique of the
previous day, and he made no statement of any kind
before the Adjournment for the Recess. For good
reason, as will be seen in the following chapter.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 281
CHAPTER XVII

THE FINAL SURRENDER OF THE SIX COUNTIES

THE madcap " Irish Provisional Government " scheme
for " putting down those rebels for evermore " was
not heard of again. Apparently without a day's
delay, Mr. Lloyd George dropped it and fell back on
the Buckingham Palace Partition project in an aggra-
vated form. Having once opted for Partition he paid
me the compliment of recognising that other and more
accommodating counsellors would have to be called
in. Here consequently stopped my own inner know-
ledge of his operations. We must await the confidences
of the other parties to these transactions (if we are not
destined to wait in vain) in order to be able fully to
reconstruct the history of the next week, but it may
be safely concluded that on the very day following his
interview with Sir E. Carson and myself, Mr. Lloyd
George summoned Mr. Redmond and Sir E. Carson
to the Hotel Metropole to discuss a wholly different
programme and it is certain that before the end of the
week, Partition was the settled policy of the Govern-
ment, of the Hibernian Party and of Sir E. Carson,
with the Four Counties of the Buckingham Palace
Conference advanced to Six, and the Six Counties
established as a separate autonomous State.

Fortunately the dates enable us to fill up with
tolerable accuracy the gaps in the strange and wonder-
ful story of the famous " Headings of Agreement n
arrived at between Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Redmond
and Sir E. Carson1. Inasmuch as it is to that instru-

1 It was never officially stated that Mr. Lloyd George included
in his invitations Mr. Dillon, whom he had the previous day
referred to in terms of undisguised dislike and contempt, but
Mr. Dillon himself proudly insisted that he was one of the high
contracting parties to " The Headings of Agreement."

282 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

ment is unquestionably to be traced the collapse of
the Parliamentary Movement, and the recognition of
Partition as the indispensable basis of all negotiations
for the future, it becomes a matter of high historic
importance that the circumstances in which it was
negotiated and under which it was subsequently
abandoned should be ascertained in some detail. On
May 3ist Mr. Lloyd George was in possession of my
Memo, containing the suggestion (since " something
must be done at once ") of a solemn Parliamentary
Guarantee of National Self-Government for a United
Ireland on the initiative of the King, to be followed
by a policy of all-round lenity in the administration.
To that communication (invited, not volunteered),
no reply was given. On June loth, little more than
a week later, Mr. Redmond was able to call his Party
together in the Mansion House, Dublin, and to
announce the " Headings of Agreement ' between
Mr. Lloyd George, Sir E. Carson and himself for the
surrender of the Six Counties upon terms, open and
covert, in the highest degree discreditable to the
British Minister and to the Irish leader. On June
1 2th, two days afterwards, Sir E. Carson obtained the
assent of his Ulster Unionist Council in Belfast. On
June 1 3th, the next day, a special Convention of the
Board of Erin Order of Hibernians (not, observe, of the
public organisation, the United Irish League) was held
in Dublin, so secretly that no news of the event leaked
out until the following morning, and no official report
was issued at all. It was discovered, however, that
the object of the secret Convention was to secure the
influence of the Order in extorting the consent of the
Nationalists of the Six Counties to the terms under
which they were to be surrendered to the Orange
Free State, and this result Mr. Devlin, who, as National
President of the Board of Erin, occupied the chair,
succeeded in accomplishing after five hours' dis-
cussion. Within less than two weeks, therefore, the
charm was wound up, and the bargain clandestinely

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 283

concluded between the Covenanters and the
Hibernians, without the slightest pretence of con-
sulting the country in general, or even the open
organisation of the United Irish League, whose
Constitution once proclaimed it to be the sovereign
National authority in Irish affairs, but which had by
this time dwindled into the innocuous outward shell
of the Hibernian Secret Society.

The double object of Mr. Lloyd George's latest
coup was to keep America in play by exhibiting before
her eyes the spectacle of a great Home Rule settlement
actually accomplished by mutual consent, and to
keep both the American and the Irish mind bewildered
as to its terms until the American elections were over.
It was not for many months afterwards that either
America or Ireland began to find out that the new
bargain was one to expunge from the Home Rule Act
the Clause that was its saving salt — the establishment
of a National Parliament — and to amputate from the
mother country, six counties, illustrious as the scenes
of her most heroic battles against English conquest,
and containing all but a fourth of her population and
wealth. The enormity could, of course, never have
been perpetrated without the connivance of a Party
of Irish " Nationalists " who would have been hooted
into oblivion if they had given the faintest hint of such
a programme to the constituencies by which they were
elected.

The first deceit practised upon the country was
that, while Mr. Redmond published through his
Party on June loth what purported to be a summary
of the " Headings of Agreement," the full text was
not published until seven weeks later (July 28th) after
the bargain had collapsed, and was published then,
not by Mr. Redmond or at his desire, but by the
Government in their own defence. There was a more
painful discovery still. It was found that the authentic
text contradicted in its most vital particulars the
version which Mr. Redmond had been induced to put

284 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

before the country to calm their apprehensions and to
manoeuvre them into consent. The two versions of
the First Article of the Headings of Agreement have
only to be printed side by side to illustrate the serious-
ness of the discrepancy.

MR. REDMOND'S THE ACTUAL TEXT.
SUMMARY.

1. To bring the Home i. The Government of
Rule Act into immediate Ireland Act, 1914, to be
operation. brought into operation

as soon as possible after
the passing of the Bill,
subject to the modifications
necessitated by these in-
structions.

The First Article as published in Dublin was one
well skilled to befool Irish opinion, for it seemed to
promise the immediate realization of all the hopes
embodied in " the Act on the Statute-Book." The
true text of the bargain, containing the words " subject
to the modifications necessitated by these instructions J
put a very different complexion on the transaction, for
one of " the necessary modifications " was to be the
repeal of the First Clause of the Act of 1914, viz. :
" i. On and after the appointed day there shall be in
Ireland an Irish Parliament, consisting of his Majesty
the King and two Houses namely the Irish Senate and
the Irish House of Commons."

In other words, the repeal and annulment of the
solemn recognition of the unity of Ireland as a Nation.
Nor was the public mind much clarified by Mr.
Redmond's presentation of the Second Article.

MR. REDMOND'S THE ACTUAL TEXT.

2. To introduce at once 2. The said Act not
an Amending Bill, as a to apply to the Excluded
strictly War Emergency Area, which is to consist
Act, to cover onlv the of the six counties of

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT

period of the War and a
short specified interval
after it.

285

Antrim, Armagh, Down,
Fermanagh, L'derry, and
Tyrone, including the
Parliamentary Boroughs
of Belfast, Londonderry
and Newrv.

Nothing could be less candid or more hazy than
the published version ; nothing clearer than the actual
wording, which was not published until all was over.
To the average plain man, the Amending Bill referred
to in Mr. Redmond's version might well seem to be
some innocent detail to cease with the war. He got
no hint that the genuine Second Article was a proviso
that the Home Rule Act was " not to apply to the
Excluded Area," without qualification or termination,
and the " Excluded Area " was expressly defined and
earmarked to be six counties and three corporate
boroughs, containing nearly one-fourth of the popula-
tion of Ireland. Some mention had to be made of the
fate of the Six Counties ; but with how much candour
may be judged by reading side-by-side Mr. Redmond's
Article 4 which was Article 3 of the Actual Text.

MR. REDMOND'S
4. During this war
emergency period, six
Ulster Counties to be left
as at present under the Im-
perial Government.

THE ACTUAL TEXT.
3. As regards the ex-
cluded area the executive
power of His Majesty
to be administered by
a Secretary of State
through such Offices and
Departments as may be
directed by order of
His Maje'sty in Council,
those offices and depart-
ments not to be in any
way responsible to the
new Irish Government.

286 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

The Six Counties, instead of being " left as at
present/' were in fact to be erected into a separate
State, ruled by a separate Secretary of State and an
elaborate series of separate Departments, wholly
independent of the Home Rule Government in Dublin.
So far from the arrangement only lasting, as the Irish
people were jauntily assured * during this war
emergency," the text contained no hint of such a
limitation, and the very nature of the complicated
and expensive machinery of government proposed to
be set up in the Six Counties forbade any assumption
of a mere stopgap contrivance to be cast aside after
the few months in which the war might be concluded.
Not to the country, nor to the Hibernian Convention
in Belfast — nor it may be surmised to the rank and
file of " the Party " itself, was there any disclosure of
this carefully-elaborated apparatus of Partition vouch-
safed, until the authorised text of the " Headings of
Agreement ' was published by Mr. Lloyd George
after the breakdown of the bargain.

There was another and not less reprehensible
concealment of the truth. The Third Article in Mr.
Redmond's summary was : " During that period,
the Irish members to remain at Westminster in their
full numbers." At first sight it might well read as a
concession of the first magnitude. It was, in reality,
for the politicians, the price of their surrender and it
was the subsequent partial repudiation of this Article
by the Government on which the Partition bargain was
broken off. For what would have been the practical
effect of the proviso ? It would have established the
existing members of the Hibernian Party for the rest
of a Parliament which was not to be dissolved as long
as the war endured, in the double capacity of members
of the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, with the
accompanying Treasury stipend of £400 a year, and
in addition as the ipso facto majority of the mutilated
Parliament in Dublin, without re-election, and without

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 287

responsibility to the electors who were already
hungering for the opportunity of dismissing them
from their service. They would thus have obtained
the control of an annual patronage of from £2,000,000
to £3,000,000 without the smallest danger of being
brought to account by their constituents for a period
of at least three years. In the meantime, all the spoils
of Dublin Castle, of the Four Courts and of the fifty
Castle Boards, of the University, and of the Inter-
mediate and Primary School Staffs, and in addition
all the offices of profit of the local governing bodies
of three provinces from a Co. Secretaryship or a Town
Clerkship to the humblest Workhouse portership,
would have been available for distribution among the
partisans of the ruling politicians in the Dublin Parlia-
ment and an army of officials and office-hunters might
thus be enrolled to garrison the three provinces in
preparation for the inevitable if far distant day, when
the Hibernian Bosses would have to seek a renewal of
their powers. True, the volcano which was presently
to burst was known to be already deeply burning.
But the subterranean fires which the corrupt bargaining
or incompetence of the Parliamentarians was doing
more than Sir John Maxwell's firing-parties to ac-
cumulate, might still be held in check a little while
longer. It was with this knowledge the tying the
hands and gagging the voice of the constituencies
while these tremendous changes were being plotted
was deliberately organized, in order that honest
opinion should have no chance of showing itself,
until the country should be confronted with the fait
accompli, and the Board of Erin Partitionists installed
in sovereign power.

All this the only version of the " Headings of
Agreement ' placed before the country carefully
concealed. It was a scheme of political profligacy
more widespread in its sweep, more impudent in its
defiance of all constitutional right or privilege in the

288 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

people, than that by which Lord Castlereagh pur-
chased the life of the Irish Parliament and which
Gladstone thought he was not extravagantly describing
as a system of " blackguardism and baseness." It
is not to be believed that the mass of the Hibernian
Party — plain, blunder-headed men — realized much
better than the bewildered people themselves the
turpitude of the transaction ; the record stands, how-
ever, to the shame of their intelligence, if not of their
political morals, that of the 57 members who attended
the Party meeting at which the project was disclosed
all but two accepted the terms which were to be the
price of their assent to the Partition of their country.1

Mr. Dillon's subsequent complaint against the
Government was that " they did not rush ' the
Headings of Agreement " hot-foot J as a War
Emergency measure through the House of Commons
as soon as the nominal assent of Ireland had been
extorted. He and his confederates were not certainly
open to any imputation that they did not for their own
part " rush them hot-foot " through Ireland with a
haste as indecent and unconstitutional as the proposals
themselves. Under the constitution of the United
Irish League, a National Convention was the sovereign
authority in all matters of National policy. No
National Convention was summoned. It was, of
course, because no National Convention, however
sophisticated, could have been trusted to examine
the text of the " Headings of Agreement ' without
rejecting them with horror. The leaders refused to
hold consultation in any form with the people of the
three southern provinces, as though the projected
mutilation of their nation was no business of theirs.
The secret organization of the Board of Erin alone was
called into counsel, while the public organization was

1 The two dissentient members, to their honour be it
remembered, were Mr. P. O'Doherty (North Donegal) and Mr.
P. J. O'Shaughnessy (West Limerick).

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 289

ignored. The Party meeting was held on June loth.
We have seen already on June i3th, a special Con-
vention of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (B.O.E.)
was held in Dublin so secretly that the news did not
become known until the small hours of the next
morning and at this gathering the influence of the
Order was pledged in support of the Lloyd George
proposals. But even within the ambit of the secret
Order, a Convention was only to be risked in the six
surrendered counties, where the ascendancy of the
Board of Erin was complete.

The upshot of the secret proceedings of June i3th
in Dublin was the summoning of a secret Convention
of the Six Counties on June 23 in Belfast. Although
this Assembly was ruthlessly policed by the Hibernian
Order, and the admissions so manipulated as to exclude
any but a derisory minority belonging to other
organizations, it taxed the most desperate resources
of Messrs. Redmond, Dillon and Devlin to conquer
the instinctive repugnance of these Ulster Nationalists
to respond to the appeal to stand passively by while
their country was being cut up on the dissecting table
under their eyes and by their sanction . Mr . Redmond ,
who presided, found it necessary not so much to offer
reasons for the surrender as to threaten the collective
resignations of Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and himself,
if it were not tamely submitted to. So unnatural was
the sacrifice demanded that, even amongst the most
fanatical of the Hibernian faithful, the murmurs rose
high, until nothing short of the menaces and the tears
of the leaders could have prevented them from breaking
bounds altogether. Mr. Redmond, whose only
sedative for his angry listeners was the pitiful
assurance that the Partition was to be only of a tem-
porary character, found his only real argument in
the solemn threat with which he concluded :

" It is the duty of a leader to lead, but if my own
people refuse to follow my lead, I must decline

290 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

absolutely to accept responsibility for a course of
action that is against my conscience. I regard the
acceptance of these proposals, in the conditions I have
stated, as vital to the Irish cause. As leader I point
the way. It is for you to say whether you will follow
me or not. If, then, this is the last time that I ever
can appeal to the people of Ireland, I will have done
so in obedience to the dictates of my heart and

conscience.'

It will be observed that his appeal was not " to
the people of Ireland/' but to a secret society in one
corner of Ireland, and at a secret meeting of which the
country would have heard nothing, had not a patriotic
reporter, at the risk of a fractured head, jotted down
his words. That the lead was not Mr. Redmond's
lead, the Convention by a sure instinct divined, for
it was Mr. Dillon whose speech was half-drowned
with taunts and interruptions identifying him as the
true author of the unhappy tactics of which Partition
was the miserable culmination. Mr. Dillon, however,
continued to protest that ' these proposals were a
necessary measure to safeguard the National Cause '
and promised to " execute himself," like his trusted
leader, if the Hibernians thought differently. Even
Mr. Devlin — and in Belfast he was in a small way
Coriolanus in Corioli — found the accustomed paean
of " Up the Mollies ! " changed for an underswell of
doubt and wrath from Hibernian throats. He, too,
discovered that the threat of resignation offered the
only chance of turning the tide and concluded with the
heroic resolve that " if Mr. Redmond went down, he,
too, would go down with him." Even faced with
such an avalanche of leader less chaos, the most
reliable Hibernian Assembly that the Hibernian head-
quarters could furnish could only be induced to do the
unnatural deed and approve the " Headings of Agree-
ment ' by a majority of 475 votes against 265. It
was actually on the strength of the sulky majority of

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 291

210 Belfast Hibernians — the only body of Irish opinion
anywhere that was not sternly denied consultation in
any shape — that the Parliamentary Party hastened
to demand that the separation from Ireland of the
Six Counties should be " hurried hot-foot through the
House of Commons as a war emergency measure."

292 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XVIII

HOW THE PLOT MISCARRIED

IT might well seem there was no further obstacle to be
apprehended from Ireland. On the day (June 23)
when the Belfast Convention was being coerced by
the leaders' threats of resignation, the only public
protest against Partition attempted in the South — a
meeting called by my colleague Mr. Maurice Healy and
myself in the Cork City Hall — was frustrated by theu-
dicrous misunderstanding already related. The Lord
Mayor of Dublin refused the Mansion House to Nation-
alists who proposed to make the indignation of the Irish
capital heard. But as week followed week and the
consequences of the bargain began to make themselves
understood, no machinery of suppression, however
perfect, could altogether stifle the disquiet which was
beginning to stir in the heart of the bewildered country.
On July zoth, the indignation of the Nationalists of
the North blazed out at a meeting in Derry which
struck the stoutest of the Partitionists with dismay.
The speeches sounded like the first volleys of an
insurrection. They were prefaced by the reading of
a letter from the Bishop of Derry (Dr. McHugh)
inveighing against " Mr. Lloyd George's nefarious
scheme " and adding :

" But what seems the worst feature of all this
wretched bargaining that has been going on is that
Irishmen calling themselves representatives of the
people are prepared to sell their brother Irishmen into
slavery to secure a nominal freedom for a section of the
people. . . . Was coercion of a more objectionable
and despicable type ever resorted to by England in

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 293

its dealings with Ireland than that now sanctioned by
the men whom we elected to win for us freedom ? '

The Derry meeting came to a series of resolutions
condemning " the proposed partition of Ireland
whether temporary or permanent ' pledging the
Nationalists of the North " to oppose by every means
any attempt to set up a separate Government for the
Ulster counties/' and " to resist the authority of such
a Government if set up," and summoned the Hibernian
members for Fermanagh and Tyrone " to oppose
exclusion or resign their seats." The example of
Derry was contagious. The Nationalists of Dublin,
barred out from the Mansion House, ran the risk of
holding a public meeting in the Phoenix Park — the
first attempted since the proclamation of Martial
Law in Easter Week — adopted the Derry resolutions,
hooted the name of Mr. Lloyd George, and cheered
to the echo the declaration of their Chairman (Alder-
man Richard Jones, a man of moderate opinions, who
had been a steady supporter of Mr. Redmond) that the
idea of the Cabinet appeared to be to bribe a whole
Party, and that " if their Parliamentary representatives
did not respect their wishes, they must insist on their
resignation." The rising feeling of the nation was
mirrored in a letter of the Bishop of Limerick (Dr.
O'Dwyer) to a Committee belatedly formed in Belfast
to resist the Lloyd George proposals :

" I can well understand your anxiety and indigna-
tion at the proposals of your own political leaders to
cut you off from your own country. I have very little
pity for you or yours. You have acquiesced in a kind
of political servitude in which your function was to
shout the shibboleths of what they call * the Party.'
You have ceased to be men ; your leaders consequently
think they can sell you like chattels. Our poor country
is made a thing of truck and barter in the Liberal
Clubs."

It was this unforeseen outbreak of National anger

294 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

which frightened " the Party " into running away from
its bargain and consigning the " Headings of Agree-
ment ' to the waste-paper basket. The nominal
excuse for the rupture— a speech of Lord Lansdowne,
alleging that the separation of the Six Counties was
not to be a temporary one — was, as will be seen in a
moment, a wholly untenable one.1 The history of
the breakdown is a deeply instructive one. On July
roth the Prime Minister (Mr. Asquith) openly avowed
that the negotiations had proceeded " on the basis of
immediate Home Rule, with six Ulster counties
excluded. " All his colleagues, he declared, were
willing to share the responsibility of bringing in a Bill
to legalise these proposals. It was then, also, he for
the first time divulged the amazing news that " the
Irish House of Commons was to consist of the persons
who were for the time being members returned by
the same constituencies in Ireland to serve in the
Imperial Parliament." The Bill was to be a pro-
visional measure, but he added : " A united Ireland
could only be brought about with the assent of the
excluded area." This was a sufficiently clear re-
pudiation of the assurances lavished in Ireland during
the previous month that Partition was to be " a purely
temporary arrangement," but Sir E. Carson took care
to put an end to the last shadow of doubt on the subject.
Fastening upon the Prime Minister's allusion to the
arrangement as provisional, he asked if " the six Ulster
Counties would be definitively struck out of the Act of
1914 ? ' Mr. Asquith assented and added that " they
could not be included hereafter without a new Bill."

1 There was a subsidiary complaint — that in order to placate
Mr. Walter Long and other Unionist members of the Coalition
Cabinet, the proviso, maintaining the Irish Members in full
strength at Westminster, was restricted to Irish Members in the
existing Parliament only, but as this would still leave the Hibernian
Party for three years the masters of the Dublin Parliament and
retain them as paid members of the Imperial Parliament as well,
the objection was not in itself a serious one.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 295

Mr. Redmond made no attempt to question the
Prime Minister's falsification of his own and Mr.
Dillon's repeated assurances in Ireland, but the
Hibernian Party, silent in presence of Mr. Asquith's
official announcement, pounced upon a similar
announcement by Lord Lansdowne in the House
of Lords on the following day (July nth) to lay hold
of that unfortunate nobleman as their scapegoat.
Lord Lansdowne, in the course of a speech explaining
the policy which the Government intended to pursue
during the transition from military rule to the pro-
jected self-government of the future, mentioned that
the Amending Bill to give effect to the " Headings of
Agreement," " will make structural alterations in the
Act of 1914 already on the Statute Book, and therefore
will be permanent and enduring in its character, but
will contain at other points temporary provisions,
such, for example, as those dealing with the House of
Commons which it is proposed to set up in the near
future." The Hibernian Party did not see fit to
arraign Lord Lansdowne 's announcement in the
House of Commons which there was nothing to
prevent them from doing by a Vote of Censure, but
upon the day after the speech (July i2th) Mr. Redmond
issued a statement to the newspapers furiously de-
nouncing it "as a gross insult and a declaration of
war on the Irish people," and declaring that " if this
speech were to be taken as representing the attitude
and the spirit of the Government towards Ireland
there would be an end to all hope of settlement."
Lord Lansdowne 's reference to the " permanent and
enduring character of certain structural alterations in
the Act of 1914 " was " a gross breach of faith " and
"any departure in the direction indicated 'in Lord
Lansdowne 's suggestion would, so far as we are
concerned, bring the negotiations absolutely to an
end." " Valiant words, my masters ! ' Lord
Lansdowne replied the next day (July I3th) : "In

296 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

making my statement as to the permanent character
of certain provisions of the Amending Bill I did not
intend to go, and I do not consider that I did go,
beyond the declaration made by the Prime Minister
in the House of Commons on the loth instant that the
union of the Six Counties with the rest of Ireland could
only be brought about with, and can never be brought
about without, the free will and assent of the excluded

area."

That, of course, was the undeniable truth ; but
instead of straightly taking the Home Rule Prime
Minister to task and calling for the publication of the
text of the " Headings of Agreement " which must
have decided the question of " a gross breach of
faith " one way or the other, the leader of the Hibernian
Party confined himself to an extra Parliamentary dis-
pute in the newspapers with a Tory nobleman who had
no friends. An unofficial attempt on the same day
(July 1 3th) to elicit in the House of Commons the
real nature of the bargain was, as always happens in
such cases, ineffectual :

" Mr. William O'Brien — When may we expect the
Irish Amending Bill ? Is the Right Hon. Gentleman
aware that the Irish people are in a state of utter
bewilderment as to what the proposals are ? Will he
put an end to the suspense by producing the Bill at
the earliest possible date ? "

Mr. Bonar Law (acting as Leader of the House) —
I am sorry that at present I cannot give any date for
the introduction of the Bill.

Mr. p'Brien— Can the Right Hon. Gentleman
give no indication when we are to have the Bill if
ever ? Or if we cannot have the Bill is there any
objection to publishing as a White Paper the precise
terms submitted to Sir E. Carson and Mr. Redmond ?
Surely there cannot be two different versions ?

Mr. Bonar Law — There may be a difference of
opinion as to the advisability of adopting that course,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 297

but I can assure the Hon. Gentleman that it is the
intention of the Government to produce the Bill as
soon as possible."

The Bill was never produced, and the text of the
" Headings of Agreement " was never disclosed until
after the rupture. Mr. Redmond's rejoinder to Lord
Lansdowne (July I4th) was again made through the
newspapers, not in his place in the House of Commons.
He repeated that there was a distinct violation of the
agreement " which was reduced to writing," and the
matter " could only be cleared up beyond dispute by
the production of the Bill." One might suggest that
he himself possessed an equally effective way of
' clearing the matter up beyond dispute " by pub-
lishing the full terms of the agreement " which was
reduced to writing," of which he cannot fail to have
secured a copy, and of which he had himself made
public a painfully fallacious version in Ireland. A
few days later there was not a cough of protest from
the Hibernian benches when Mr. Asquith having
again dodged a question of Mr. Ian Malcolm calling
for the production of the Bill, the present writer
interposed with the unceremonious inquiry : "Is
not the Prime Minister yet aware that he would have
the thanks of every human being in Ireland except the
place-hunters if he put this hateful Bill into the fire ? "
As a matter of fact all this belabouring of Lord
Lansdowne as a whipping-boy in the place of their
own Home Rule Prime Minister was in the nature of
theatricals, devised to supply a sensational finish before
the curtain had to be dropped. What really struck
death to their souls was that the storm in Ireland was
every day growing angrier. The end came after
various alarums and excursions when Mr. Redmond
moved the adjournment of the House with the object
of tearing up the " Headings of Agreement " and the
resulting Bill. He made a fine show of repudiating
Mr. Asquith 's renewed allegation that even the Home

298 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Rulers in the Cabinet only agreed that the Home Rule
Act should be brought into immediate operation on
condition that the Six Counties " should not be
brought in except by their own consent and by the
authority of an Act of Parliament." He repeated that
after Lord Lansdowne's speech : " I had only one
resource left open to me and I called for the immediate
production of the Bill." (He omitted to mention the
other resource left open to him, which was to call for
the immediate production of the " Headings of Agree-
ment ' or to produce them himself). What Mr.
Redmond described as " the sorry story " of his last
humiliating dealings with the Cabinet on the subject
deserves to be reproduced in his own words, as a
warning to all Irish negotiators who may be tempted
to part with their power of bringing slippery English
Ministers to their senses :

" I ask the House to mark what I am now going
to say. On July 2Oth I received a most extraordinary
message from the Cabinet to the effect that the con-
sideration of this draft Bill had been postponed and
that a number of new proposals had been brought
forward. When I asked what the nature of these
proposals was, I was informed that the Cabinet did
not desire to consult me about them at all, and that
they would not communicate with me in the matter
until they had again met and had agreed upon what
new proposals they would approve of. ... I asked
was any new proposal submitted on the question of
the provisional character of the Bill ? I was told it
was quite impossible to answer my question. The
next communication I received was on Saturday last
when the Minister for War (Mr. Lloyd George) and
the Home Secretary (Mr. Herbert Samuel) requested
me to call and see them at the War Office. They
then informed me that another Cabinet Council had
been held and that it had been decided — mark you,
decided — to insert in the Bill two entirely new pro-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 299

visions, one providing for the permanent exclusion
of the Six Ulster Counties and another cutting out
of the draft Bill the provision for the representation
of the Irish members in full force at Westminster
during the transitory period, and I was given to under-
stand in so many words that this decision was not put
before me for the purpose of discussion or consultation,
that the decision was absolute and final and the Right
Hon. Gentlemen described themselves to me as
messengers without any power or authority to discuss
these questions in any way whatever with me, and they
informed me that it was the intention of the Govern-
ment to introduce a Bill containing these provisions,
practically whether we liked it or not."

It was a somewhat heartless return for Mr.
Redmond's services to his Liberal allies and (it may
be unfeignedly added) to the Empire, and might well
deserve an even more heated protest. Unfortunately
in substance the same decision as to the permanence
of Partition had been publicly announced by the
Prime Minister in the House of Commons in his
hearing more than a month before without a word of
protest, heated or otherwise. Allowance may be
freely made for the simple-heartedness with which the
Hibernian leaders allowed themselves to be over-
reached by Mr. Lloyd George, and also for the fact
that they had by this time parted with their power to
eject from office a Coalition Government which could
not have been formed without their unconditional
consent. It was, however, not an altogether unfitting
punishment of their own want of candour towards
their trusting Irish countrymen.

Upon the point that the heads of settlement had
all along agreed that the Six Counties should not be
automatically included without the authority of a
fresh Act of Parliament, Mr. Lloyd George stood
firm. " The only thing that the Government said now
and said all along was that this should be made clear

300 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

on the face of the Amending Bill. The rest was a
dispute about words." He admitted that the heads of
the settlement had been departed from to the extent
that the Irish members were not to remain in full
strength in Westminster beyond the term of the
existing Parliament, but this was in deference to the
Unionist members of the Coalition Cabinet who
declared it would be impossible to get a single member
of their Party to consent to maintain them in the
Imperial Parliament after a General Election and after
a Home Rule Government had been set up in Ireland.
But until the General Election they would remain,
both at Westminster and in the Dublin Parliament.
What he understood from the member for Waterford
was that he would not merely resist this modification
but would resist the whole Bill. (Hibernian cheers),

" If that is the view of the Irish members," Mr.
Lloyd George concluded, ' of course, it would be
idle for the Government to bring in a Bill for bringing
Home Rule into immediate operation under any
conditions. I deeply regret it. ... I still believe
that the Bill, even with these variations, would be a
beginning of self-government and liberty for Ireland,
and from the bottom of my heart I regret that my
friends from Ireland cannot see their way to accept
it. They, however, know their own country, its
difficulties and conditions, and it is for them to decide.
The Government ought not, and will not, force this
proposal upon them."

Sir E. Carson's triumph was complete. Were
they not playing with words, he asked, in talking about
* permanence " in connection with the exclusion of the
Six Counties ? All the permanence that he could get
or had demanded was that the Six Counties should be
struck out by this Parliament. If any subsequent
Parliament (he added with grim irony) desired to put
them in, it would be open to them to do so.'>%. But
there was one thing more, he proceeded^to say :

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 301

" Without going into the terms of the Memorandum,
I made it perfectly clear that Departments would
have to be set up in Ulster under the Home Office,
orf some Secretary of State here — Departments in
every branch of government, from the judiciary down
to the Post Office, and, the different Departments
which govern Ireland, and I made it quite clear upon
the face of the document which is relied upon by the
member for Waterford (the " Headings of Agree-*
ment ") that all these separate Departments were to
be set up and that no officer or no Department which
had anything to do with the new Irish Parliament was
to have any jurisdiction whatsoever of an executive
character in the Six Counties. Does any body suppose
that that was set out on the face of the Memorandum
as a matter that was merely to continue for a few
months and that then these Six Counties were auto-
matically to come in ? The thing would be ludicrous.
You actually set up a whole system of new government
at enormous expense in relation to the Six Counties,
and then say that those Six Counties at the end of the
war or at any time automatically were to come in.
What would become of your Departments and your
officers? . . . Therefore the talk of this as provisional,
if you mean by provisional that it was to stop and that
the Six Counties were automatically to stop, and that
the Six Counties were automatically to go back into
the rest of Ireland, seems to me, on the face of the
document, absolutely absurd."

The Prime Minister, he triumphantly concluded,
had said that the Six Counties could not be included
without a new Bill and he stood by that agreement.
Mr. William O'Brien, who followed Sir E. Carson,
said it was plain that if Mr. Lloyd George had to some
extent run away from the phraseology of the
Memorandum, the member for Waterford and his
friends had, under pressure from Ireland, run away
from its substance, which was the agreement for

302 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Partition. He made every allowance for the diffi-
culties of the member for Waterford, but it did seem
lamentable that it should have taken all but a second
Rising in Ireland to convince him how dangerously
the tide of indignation in Ireland was running against
this proposal. He had apparently found no resource
except to pick a quarrel upon any pretext with his
own agreement, in the hope of extricating his friends
and himself from their mess by pitiful hair-splitting
about mere verbal distinctions between the original
Memorandum and the Government's position to-night.
" It was too late for the hon. and learned Gentleman
either to recede or to advance. The one fact con-
nected with this Memorandum to which the Irish
people would attach the smallest importance was the
fact confessed in the whole course of this debate,
that a majority of their own representatives agreed
to a separation from Ireland of six of her richest and
most historic 'counties and of a fourth of the whole
population of Ireland under conditions which nobody
except a quibbler or a fool could represent as tem-
porary or provisional."

In view of the forecast it contained of the course
of events in Ireland during the following years and of
the unscrupulous misrepresentation of the speaker's
efforts from the start to avert a consent to Partition
which proved to be fatal, some lengthier extracts from
this speech may be forgiven, the more especially as
it was suppressed or garbled by the Irish newspapers
in their usual fashion :

" I really thought that we had heard the last of
this miserable plea that the amputation of Ulster from
the body of Ireland was to be a mere temporary or
provisional operation. No man in Ireland can be any
longer gulled by a statement of that kind. The whole
point is this — that the Irish people have been asked
to split our ancient nation into two antagonistic states,
which are specially delimited with a view to collecting

303

into each of them the maximum of old religious and
racial animosities. That is what the great majority
of the representatives of Ireland bound themselves
to do when they agreed to the terms of the original
Memorandum. "The Minister for War (Mr. Lloyd
George) has repeated to-night what has happened as
to the kind of Partition really contemplated. Lord
Lansdowne's speech only brought to the test the
system of deceit that has been going on in Ireland
upon the subject for the past two years. The Irish
people have been shamelessly assured that the moment
the war was over, the Home Rule Act would come into
force automatically for all Ireland. That assurance
was given by gentlemen who heard the Prime Minister
solemnly pledge himself that it could never be brought
into operation without an Amending Bill and that any
notion that Ulster could ever be brought into obedience
to it by coercion was ' absolutely unthinkable.' The
Minister for War has recalled to-night that, even
before Lord Lansdowne spoke at all, the Prime
Minister in this House announced that the Six
Counties with three great Irish boroughs, should be
definitely struck out of the Home Rule Act and that
they could never be replaced except by a new Act of
the Imperial Parliament. What does that mean ?
The member for Trinity College is the winner and
could well afford to be in good humour when he
pressed for no further guarantees as to permanence.
He is not depending upon what have been called
scraps of paper for his guarantees. We are told the
original Memorandum did not guarantee to Ulster
permanent exclusion. No, Sir, but did it guarantee
to Ireland the contrary, that the exclusion would not
be permanent ? That is the marrow of the question —
that that agreement would have left Ulster absolute
mistress of her own future by the consent of both
parties in this House. But the member for Trinity
College has a still more solid guarantee, perhaps the

304 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

most solid guarantee of all. He has the guarantee of
the representatives of Ireland who are prepared —
* temporarily ' and ' provisionally/ of course —
to exclude Ulster and set her up as a separate State,
with separate rights and interests and a separate form
of government — and are pledged furthermore never
to join in coercing Ulster to give up that privileged
position. He has the guarantee practically speaking
of this whole House, except our few selves, that no
coercion of this kind can ever be attempted without
a new Act of this House to force Ulster to come in.
Need I say to any sane man listening to me that such
an Act is about as likely as that this Imperial Parlia-
ment should pass an Act forcing the people of London
to annex themselves to Germany ? ... It is our
belief — and this is my answer to the member for
Trinity College's soft words — that if once Ireland
were, by the votes of her own representatives, to
accept her dismemberment, the mischief could never
be undone except by a bloody revolution. I will not
in this House make any attack upon the conduct of
Irish members. This is not the proper venue. The
proper and the constitutional course would have been
to send them back to their own constituents — they
have already exceeded their mandate by more than
twelve months — send them back to their constituents
and give the Irish people at least some voice in the
most tremendous change that was ever proposed for
our nation — upon an issue which is practically whether
the Irish Nation is to take her life with her own hands.
On the contrary, what is your proposal ? In the
original Memorandum, and even now, you promised
to relieve these gentlemen for several years from any
responsibility to their constituents, and I have a strong
suspicion that one of the principal reasons for the
breakdown of these negotiations is that the Govern-
ment have not been able to extend that arrangement
indefinitely. You may be ashamed of the scheme

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 305

now, but instead of the democratic and constitutional
way of taking the verdict of the country, you proposed
something that would really have staggered Pitt or
Castlereagh. They only proposed to change the site
of a Parliament from one country to the other, while
you proposed to give to the same gentlemen a Parlia-
ment of their own in Dublin and to leave them
members of this House as well, and that without sub-
mitting themselves to any judgment by public opinion
in Ireland. Was there ever such a proposal ? Your
simple method of constituting an Irish Parliament —
you democratic and Radical gentlemen — was to
transfer seventy members of the Party who sit behind
me from their Party room upstairs to some unburnt
building in Dublin. Instead of taking the verdict
of the country, you proposed to set these gentlemen
up as a sovereign oligarchy over Ireland during a
reign of at least two and a half years — men elected
by nobody, but imposed by force upon their fellow
countrymen, in spite of their indignation and ab-
horrence. And this caricature of a Parliament,
nominated by this House, paid £400 a year apiece by
the British Treasury — even if they are self-denying
enough to refuse themselves any additional remunera-
tion for their labours in Dublin — this is the beautiful
experiment which you have begotten in Martial Law
and will have to enforce by Martial Law. This is
what you call making Ireland ' a Nation once again ! '
This is what you call fighting the battle of the Small
Nationalities — by making Ireland a Nationality small
enough already smaller still by robbing her of her
richest province ! This plot has broken down, I
am glad to say, but it will never be forgotten, nor
forgiven by the Nationalists of Ireland.

" Proposals of a very different kind have been
made to the Government which would have appealed
to the imagination of Ireland and of the United States.
These proposals — I make bold to say in his presence —

306 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

would have gone nearer to the heart of the member for
Trinity College, and they would have left Ireland an
indestructible entity in a Federalist arrangement. It
is too late to go back upon all that. The work, I am
afraid, will now have to be left to other men, if not in
other times. The real cause of the recent rebellion
in Ireland was not Germanism or German gold.
It was that you have driven all the best and most
unselfish of the young men of Ireland to despair of
the constitutional movement by your bungling, by
your ignorance, by your doubledealing in this House
and with the Irish members in reference to the Home
Rule Act on the Statute Book, and finally by the
savage methods by which you have for the last six
months had your vengeance for the Rising. You
have only succeeded in filling the hearts of multitudes
of the best men of our race with a loathing for Parlia-
mentarianism, British and Irish, and by an inevitable
reaction from your subservience to one sectarian
secret society you have raised up another and a more
formidable secret society whose ideals, at all events,
are pure and unselfish, and who have proved their
courage to fight and die like men for these ideals.
If the mutilated Dublin Parliament you would have
set up under this agreement could have succeeded in
anything it could only have been in re-establishing the
evil ascendancy of that sectarian secret society which
has been your undoing as well as ours. You would
have had against you all the men who are teaching the
young generation by their pens or in their schools and
all those (and they are to be counted by hundreds of
thousands) who are ready for any sacrifice of liberty
or life for the old ideals of Irish Nationality and a
United Ireland. Luckily for yourselves you have
broken down in this plot for Partition. If you had
proceeded, you could not have averted another rebellion
and you would have lost perhaps for ever the key to the
heart of National Ireland. You would have handed

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 307

over the future of Irish politics to the Irish Republicans
and you would have brought us back to the days when
the quarrel between Ireland and England was regarded
as incurable and everlasting. Fortunately for
England as well as Ireland, this particular Partition
plot at all events is dead and damned to-night and
millions of the Irish race will rejoice with all their
hearts to-morrow at its failure."

Mr. Dillon, who spoke next, went out of his way,
for some curious reason, to obtrude himself as the
principal figure in the negotiations, which he admitted
that " nobody in Ireland liked or pretended to like,"
and professed himself still willing to stand " by every
word of the written document which we have ; '
he added in strange forgetfulness that if they " had
the written document " in their possession, they had
never up to this moment published the true terms of
it to their own countrymen. For the rest, although
he complained that " assurances were given to Sir
E. Carson behind our backs which were never given
to us," he omitted to attack the real culprits, who were
the Home Rule Prime Minister and the Home Rule
Secretary for War, and fell back on his old tiresome
thesis that it was all the fault of the wicked Tory Lord
Lansdowne. With a not too obvious logic, he com-
plained that the Government had neglected to give
the agreement " the only chance it had, which was
to put it through Parliament hot-foot as a war-
emergency measure after the Irish Party had obtained
the consent of the Belfast Convention." In other
words, that the English Government did not rush
into law in 1916 the Partition Act of 1921, before
the Irish people could have the smallest possibility
of protesting, or even understanding !

Mr. Asquith, who wound up the debate, could
only administer to Mr. Dillon the cold comfort of
categorically repeating that Lord Lansdowne only
repeated his (the Prime Minister's) own statement

308 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

<c in the clearest terms in this House that there must
be no coercion of Ulster and that the six excluded
Counties should not be put back by any automatic
process but only by an express Act of Parliament.
There was no demur at that/' he added, with a
significant gesture towards the Hibernian benches
" and I felt entitled to assume that there was general
agreement."

At eleven o'clock the motion was suffered to be
" talked out " without even the melancholy heroism
of challenging a division. With the bargain for the
Partition of Ireland, defeated though it was for the
moment, perished the Home Rule movement of
Parnell. The " Headings of Agreement," endorsed
by 75 of the 83 Nationalist representatives of Ireland,
became the indisputable Magna Charta of Sir E.
Carson's Six Counties, and to that unhappy instrument
must be traced the responsibility for all the years of
disappointment, bloodshed and devastation that were
to follow.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 309

CHAPTER XIX

A TALK WITH MR. BONAR LAW

MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S flirtations with the All-for-
Ireland policy passed through three phases, each of
them seemingly favourable to that policy, but all of
them, whether through ignorance or design, fatal to a
fair trial of its proposals. He was captivated by our
concessions to Ulster, and proposed the Buckingham
Palace Conference to discuss the only concession we
declared to be inadmissible. He next invited us to
contemplate with him the splendid phantom of an
" Irish Provisional Government," and abandoned it
to fall back upon a Partition Conference even more
noxious than that of Buckingham Palace. No sooner
had that manoeuvre also come to grief than he now
broached a proposal so like unconditional adoption
of our programme of " Conference, Conciliation and
Consent " that the mass of our own friends marvelled
we did not at once embrace it with effusion. It in
reality perverted our programme of a settlement
to be sought by a small body of notables, acting under
the control of a Referendum, into an unwieldy Con-
vention of politicians discredited and detested by the
country, and so constituted that it must ineluctably
eventuate in Partition or in nothing.

Some months before he had committed himself
to the new adventure, I made a last attempt to per-
suade him in what direction lay the true and only road
of safety. It may be convenient to insert here my
precis (made, as usual, at the moment) of an interview
I had with Mr. Bonar Law on March 25th. He had
complained, in plaintive terms, in the House of Com-

310 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

mons that no Irishman of any section came near him
or the Government to offer any suggestion since the
collapse of the " Headings of Agreement " negotiations
in the previous summer. It may be recollected that
when in my interview of May, 1916, with Mr. Lloyd
George I suggested the advisability of waiting for six
months of gentleness and appeasement in Ireland
before attempting a settlement intended to last, Mr.
Lloyd George foretold that " in six months the war
will be lost, unless something is done at once."
Nothing was done and the war was not lost, and
although Mr. Wilson was elected to the Presidency in
despite of England's grotesque intrigues to put Mr.
Roosevelt in his place, Mr. Wilson was on the
eve of throwing America's broad sword into the scale.
He was, however, still hesitating, in view of England's
cat-and-mouse play with Ireland, or we should
probably have been importuned with no further
languishings for an Irish Settlement. There was,
consequently, still the imperious necessity that " some-
thing must be done at once " and this time we were
dealing not with a subaltern but with a Prime Minister
in the saddle for the great stakes of his life, and with a
Chancellor of the Exchequer only less important, to
whom as the second of the Triumvirate of which Sir
E. Carson was the third, Mr. Lloyd George was
indebted for his triumph over the easy unobtrusiveness
of his late Chief. So long, therefore, as the faintest
chance remained of turning to account the lesson
taught by the discomfiture of the " Headings of
Agreement ' intrigues, I resolved that Mr. Sonar
Law must not be allowed any right to complain of
being left without a new insistance upon that advice,
however unpalatable, of whose soundness the Ministry
had received a telling confirmation. OfMr.Bonar Law's
own straight forwardness, courage and loyalty of charac-
I had preserved an impression sufficiently warm to
make communication with him a matter that required
no finesse.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 311

2$th MARCH, i

Saw B. L. in Downing Street at eleven o'clock.
Told him I wanted nothing ; consequently my per-
sonality might drop out of the controversy. He
expressed great readiness to hear proposals, saying he
hoped I might take a more sanguine view than the
last time. I said time had proved it was better to
depress him than to mislead him. He said, it was, of
course, an almost hopeless business. When I pro-
ceeded to read my proposals, prefacing them by
saying their basis was that Partition in any shape was
undiscussable and impossible, he at once broke in :
" I am afraid anything would be quite impossible for
Ulster except Partition. I am only now speaking for
myself. I am to see George presently." I urged
that, while the difficulty was now infinitely greater
than it was a few years ago, the attempt to try con-
cessions to Ulster had never been made, and things
could not possibly be worse if the attempt failed. He
intimated that C. and Craig were most willing but were
certain they would be thrown over in Ulster and that
Ulster would rebel the moment there was any attempt
to bring them in. I said that that could only be a
matter of prophesy which I for one utterly disbelieved.
But why not bring matters to a test by proposing to Ulster
some great scheme of concession approved by the most
enlightened Irish Protestants, North and South, and
then warmly recommended by the Imperial Con-
ference ? He could not be got to explain what was the
difficulty about trying. He fell back upon the same
arguments in almost the same words he had used last
year — the question of the two distinct races, etc. I
pointed out it was not here a question of two races,
but of three, and that the third (the Presbyterians)
had been our steady allies up to a few years ago. That
no difficulty had been found in the South in absorbing

312 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the Normans, the Adventurers in Sir Walter Raleigh's
time and the Cromwellians ; that as to the North the
Protestants had as a matter of fact taken the lead in
the two greatest Nationalist movements of a century
ago — the Dungannon Convention and the United Irish
movement in Belfast ; that if Unionists would only
read the Unionist Lecky I would defy them to repeat
there was any unbridgable gulf between the three
races. He said the United Irish Movement was only
a phase of the revolutionary movement in France, and
that the Ulster Dissenters were still above all else
democrats and would stand no subjection ; that the
feeling among the gentry in Ulster was much more
pliable, but that the workmen in Belfast would simply
hear of nothing. He repeated a remark of his before
that, to show how completely different the two races
were, he had gone from Glasgow to Belfast, and it was
exactly like being in the same city. I remarked that
was very largely a mere question of accent ; that
Devlin was almost unintelligible in the South for the
same reason. His conclusion was so ill-founded that
it was actually Scotch artisans imported from Glasgow
that saved Devlin's seat. I read for him my proposals
and suggestions as to the type of men who might form
an Irish Conference. He said all would seem ex-
cellent, if we were dealing with reasoning beings, but
we are not. I asked was not that giving up all hope
between the two countries in despair and without even
making a trial ? I said our people could not fight
England, but they could worry the life out of her—
twenty millions of them scattered through America
Canada and Australia. Pointed out also that if the
United States came into the war, they would insist
upon a voice at the Peace Conference, and would
make Plunkett's policy of Dominion Home Rule
practical politics, and they would have Ireland's eyes
turned from this Parliament to the Peace Congress.
He said the sympathy of America with Ireland had

become less active of late years, and would be quite
satisfied if Home Rule were granted to the parts of the
country that desired it. I said he little knew American
politicians, if he believed they would not be guided
by Irish opinion, and the Irish in America far from
being appeased, would be goaded to madness by any
division of their country. I pointed out also that it
was the hope of a peaceful Irish settlement alone that
had for years tranquillised the Irish in America and
reduced the Clan-na-Gael influence to as small pro-
portions as the Sinn Feiners in Ireland until the
collapse of Parliamentarianism gave them their chance ;
that if they now found their moderation misunderstood,
the consequences would be disastrous. He repeated
that there was no use in arguing with the Ulster men ;
Heaven only knew what might happen if their men
came home from the war and found. there had been
any giving way. I reminded him that argument might
apply with much more seriousness to the Nationalist
soldiers from Ireland, England and the Colonies who
were at least five times as numerous as the Ulster
Unionists. He said although they had pledged them-
selves to make the attempt, he did not at all know
whether they would not have to abandon it. He
intimated that his own notion was to renew the pro-
posal as to the six counties, with power to any county
to join the Irish Parliament after five years, if there
was a majority of even 5 per cent, in favour of doing
so. That was practically last year's bargain, minus
a possible reunion of Tyrone after five years.

I told him I believed as long as the world lasted,
they could never get the Irish race to tolerate that, or
any other form of Partition, and that there would be
absolutely no section of Irishmen at their backs except
the placehunters ; and no self-respecting Nationalist
could ever raise his voice again for peace between the
two countries ; that the universal impression would
be that such a proposal would not be a genuine

314 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

attempt at a settlement, but only intended to throw
dust in the eyes of the Americans in order to bring
them in. We got talking over the general situation.
I explained to him the difference between the
Republican fighting party which I believed to be
still comparatively small and the sentiment of Sinn
Fein, which included the best part of the uncorrupted
portion of the country. He said they had no leaders.
I said in the sense of politician leaders that was true-
that, if they had leaders of more acute political
intelligence, the constitutional movement would by
this time be reconstructed and be a greater force than
ever and the Easter Week Rising would never have
taken place. He said the fact appeared to be that
nobody had any power at present of getting any
settlement enforced. I agreed that that was lamentably
true, but might be remedied if some great agreement
by consent was once put before the country by Irish-
men who were not professional politicians, and if in
this way new men and younger men were attracted
into the country's service ; but this could only be done
if the Government pledged themselves to see an Irish
settlement by consent resolutely through, no matter what
any set of politicians did. Obstructionists could never
face a General Election if we got thus far. He told

me one of my most important friends, had given

him to understand that Redmond's party would come
back from a General Election with no greater loss than
i o or at most 20 seats. This estimate seemed to have
made a most unfortunate impression upon him.
Electoral calculations are the morals of Ministers. I
replied that it would be idle to prophesy in a state of
anarchy such as now prevailed, but my own forecast
was a very different one indeed. I could not see how
more than ten of them could come back, even if the
Bishops should deem it prudent to renew their doubled
subscriptions in support of them. He asked what
about the Bishops — did they really desire a Home

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 315

Rule settlement at all ? — did they really want Catholics
and Protestants to come together ? I replied that I had
no means of judging their inmost thoughts ; I doubted
whether they themselves quite knew where they stood ;
but if there was any foundation for the suggestion that
they did not desire Home Rule, it was surely a good
argument with Irish Unionists that their power in an
Irish Parliament was not likely to be so overwhelming
as they sometimes apprehended. Of one thing he
might make quite sure — that not even Dillon's one

fast friend among them, Dr. would ever publicly

pin himself to any Partition proposal however plausible.
We talked matters over for an hour and a half. He
asked for my written proposals and suggestions for
Conference, and said he was to see L. G. shortly
after and would submit them.

To the end he seemed obstinately of opinion, it
must be Partition or nothing ; but spoke with great
hopelessness of that and of the war, and as he
accompanied me to the hall-door said it would perhaps
be better to do nothing, if they would be satisfying
nobody. I said better nothing than mischief.

316 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XX

MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S " IRISH CONVENTION "

(I91?)

MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S new expedient for the
pacification of Ireland, and his last before he called
in " the Black-and-Tans ' was marked by his
characteristic defects as a statesman. It was
improvised, it was uncandid, and it was open to
be changed into something quite different at a
moment's notice. So open to change, that the new
programme which he unfolded in a circular public
letter to Mr. Redmond, Sir E. Carson and myself,
contained two self-contradictory proposals for a
' deal," one of which was dropped without a word
of explanation, when the other was first mentioned
in the House of Commons : — So sly as to raise the
suspicion among plain men that it was not framed
for Ireland at all, but as the only means of conquering
America's last hesitation about entering actively into
the war. For the main achievement for which his
" Irish Convention " will be remembered was that the
injunction to "go on talking' was elaborately kept
up for eight months, until President Wilson made up
his mind for his invasion of Europe, and the assembly
of talkers was then quietly bundled out of notice.

The chances are that Mr. Lloyd George was
neither so good nor so bad as he seemed from opposite
angles. A politician whose main business it was to
win the war, his first concern was to corral the
Americans ; but he would doubtless have honestly
welcomed an Irish Settlement on its own merits, as
a by-product — as, so to say, a Mesopotamian excursion

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 317

from his Flanders front. The first plan disclosed in
his invitation to Mr. Redmond, Sir E. Carson and
myself in May, 1917, was frankly a Partitionist one : —
it was to revive the old " Headings of Agreement " and
to put the Home Rule Act into operation forthwith in
26 counties, on condition of the remaining six being
expressly excluded, a " National Council " of derisory
powers being added by way of keeping up diplomatic
relations between the two rival Irish States, in order
to save the face of the Hibernian Partitionists. This
scheme, it cannot be doubted, would have been closed
with by Mr. Redmond, as he had closed with the
* Headings of Agreement/' had not the recent progress
of Sinn Fein daunted the hearts of his Party. In the
February of that year Count Plunkett, father of one
of the leaders executed for his part in the Rising of
Easter Week, had been returned for North Roscommon
by a startling majority. Again a week before Mr.
Lloyd George launched his new offer another leader
of the Easter Week Rising, then in penal servitude,
was returned by a narrow majority for North Longford,
up to that time considered an impregnable stronghold
of Hibernianism. Had the majority of 37 been turned
to the other side, the first offer of the Prime Minister —
that of Partition, naked and unashamed — would have
been eagerly grasped at by the Hibernians, whose last
chance of existence now depended upon getting hold
of the power and revenues of their three-quarter
Parliament before the rising tide should overwhelm
them. But more intimidating than the figures at any
individual election was the letter published on the
eve of the polling from Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of
Dublin — since the death of Dr. Croke, much the most
influential Churchman in the political counsels of
Irishmen — in which he made the memorable pro-
nouncement that, to his knowledge, " the cause of
Ireland had been sold " — a letter which, if it were
published in time to reach the mass of the electors

318 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

must have turned the defeat of the Hibernians into a
panic-rout. Mr. Redmond made no disguise of the
fact that it was because he knew that " in my opinion
it would find no support in Ireland/' that he set aside
in a sentence the first of Mr. Lloyd George's alternative
schemes, and wished with all his heart it could be
forgotten.

The second was more plausible and on a first
inspection seemed to concede the main points the
All-for-Ireland League had long been struggling for.
It was that " a Convention of Irishmen of all creeds
and parties " should assemble to draft a Constitution
for their country, the only limitation imposed upon
their powers being that it must be " a Constitution
for the better Government of Ireland within the
Empire," and the Prime Minister pledged the Govern-
ment to carry into law any proposals of the Convention
which might secure " the substantial agreement " of
its members. What could look franker, more generous
or more confiding ? Many even of the most sober-
minded of our own friends were transported with joy.
Great was their amazement when, after much
pondering, I felt compelled to decline the invitation
to participate in a project which seemed to be the
official adoption of the solution of the Irish problem
by Irishmen themselves, and its enactment by the
common consent of every English Party, which we
had never ceased to press without giving way before
outrage or ridicule. " Is not this the triumph of
all you have been contending for ? "it was impulsively
urged. " What more can you desire ? ' Sore was
the bewilderment when the reply came : " What alone
I or you desire is an Irish Conference which shall
have a chance of success. Constituted as Mr. Lloyd
George proposes to constitute it, this Conference (or
as he prefers to call it ' Convention ') cannot possibly
arrive at any agreement except one for Partition, and
consequently what seems nominally a compliance

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 319

with our programme can lead to nothing except the
certainty of defeat for all we have been striving for/'
The truth was that the apparent contradiction between
the Prime Minister's two proposals was only on the
surface. He gave up the first — that of undisguised
Partition — for Mr. Redmond's brutally opportunist
reason, that " the people would not stand it," thus
nakedly stated ; but he only gave it up to carry it
more surely into effect by means of an " Irish Con-
vention," overwhelmingly composed of pledged
Partitionist politicians, "Nationalist' and Unionist,
which must either agree to Partition, or disagree
altogether, and thus throw the blame for a failure upon
Ireland herself in the eyes of the Allied Powers.

All this is plain enough now, but was so little
understood at the time by a public condemned to a
carefully organised ignorance of the truth that it
required some strength of mind to resist the temptation
of a war-weary country to grasp at peace at almost any
price. In the event, it was this Convention which
led unavoidably to the Partition Act of 1920, with all
the far-reaching calamities that followed it. Its
history is therefore as absorbingly interesting as it
is up to the present unknown. My own decision was
not hastily taken. To Mr. Lloyd George's first
invitation I made the following friendly reply :

" London, May lyth, 1917.

" Dear Mr. Lloyd George, — In reply to your letter
of yesterday afternoon, I have no difficulty about
giving for the information of the Cabinet the view of
my friends and myself as to your Irish proposals. I
have already repeatedly declared myself unalterably
opposed to any scheme of Partition, and therefore
need not discuss the suggestion for its revival in a
Government Bill. As to the alternative suggestion for
a Convention or Conference of Irishmen of all classes
and creeds to draft a Constitution for Ireland, my

320 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

friends and myself are, of course, prepared to give a
hearty support to the Government in giving effect to
a principle we have so long contended for, subject to
the discussion of details on Monday next.
Sincerely yours,

WILLIAM O'BRIEN."

" On Monday next ' (May 21) when the Prime
Minister laid his proposals formally before the House
of Commons, he dropped altogether the offer to put
the Home Rule Act into operation forthwith in the 26
counties, and he abstained from giving any detailed
information as to the constitution of his " Irish Con-
vention/' In my remarks, accordingly, I extended
a sympathetic, though necessarily guarded, welcome
to that portion of his project, but could not avoid
pointing out that Partition still lurked ominously in
the background and warning the Government against
any such composition of the Convention as might give
rise to the suspicion that it was to be dominated by the
nominees of Parties already committed by their
adhesion to the " Headings of Agreement." The
warning was made imperative by the speech of the
leader of the Ulster Party, Sir John Lonsdale, pro-
claiming that Partition could be the only basis of the
" substantial agreement " to which Mr. Lloyd George
pledged himself to give legislative effect, and by the
further speech of Mr. Redmond adumbrating a plan
(which was subsequently adopted) by which the bulk
of the Convention would consist of delegates from the
Corporations and County Councils of Ireland — almost
all partisans of his own — who had been allowed
already, owing to the war, to outstay their mandate
from their constituents by two years and who were so
notoriously at variance with the new spirit in the
country that, as soon as the country was allowed, it
swept them bodily into oblivion. In the friendliest
spirit, I urged our own conviction that success was to

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 321

be found, not in any large, unwieldy and unrepre-
sentative assembly of partisans, but in a small group
of ten or a dozen Irish notables commanding general
respect, and depending for a Democratic sanction to
their proceedings upon a proviso that any agreement
of theirs must be submitted straightaway to a Referen-
dum of the electorate of all Ireland. My observations
wound up with a warning to which the course of
subsequent events gave some significance :

' What I want the House to mark is that you have
never yet tried either of the measures I have suggested.
You have never called the whole electorate of Ireland
into consultation upon a definite scheme, agreed to by
Irishmen commanding general confidence. You have
never offered any concession to Ulster except one
which would call upon us with our own hand to take
the very life of our motherland as a nation. ... If
you break down now — I pray you not to delude your-
selves— you will not kill the Irish Cause, but you will
kill any reasonable chance for our time of recon-
structing the Constitutional Movement upon an honest
basis. You will kill all Irish belief in this House or in
any Party within it. You will set up the right of
Rebellion, whether for the Covenanters or the Sinn
Feiners as the only arbiter left in Irish affairs. You
will justly make Parliamentary methods even more
despised and detested than they are at the present
moment by the young men of Ireland."

Once more the Government purchased the support
of the Hibernian Party by following their fatal advice.
It became known at once that the Convention was to
be little better than a mob of Hibernian partisans,
and its success — if its success, on any after basis but
Partition, had ever really been desired by its projector —
was about to be compromised from the start. Upon
the following day, while there was still a hope of
averting the utterly unconstitutional constitution now
designed for the Convention, I willingly acceded to the

322 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

proposal of the Chief Secretary, Sir Henry Duke, for
an interview upon the subject. My note of our
conversation, taken down at the time, will best explain
what happened between us :

May 22, 1917.

T. M. H. called to say Duke was anxious for an
interview with me. Saw him after questions in his
own room. He was profusely kind and even de-
ferential. I said I had doubtless said a good deal last
night that was disagreeable to him and his friends,
but that it was one of our rices as a race, to be tempted
to say things that they thought would be agreeable to
strangers rather than to warn them of unpleasant
realities. He said of course one was bound to face
the facts and they were not cheerful. After a good
deal of solemn peroration not coming to any particular
point, he came to the real object of the interview. He
first asked whether I had any suggestion to make as to
the chairman of the Convention. I told him I did
not think it mattered a farthing until he had first
settled whether it was to be a big Convention or a
small Conference ; for I was absolutely convinced
the big miscellaneous gathering would end in a fiasco,
with the result that especially after L. G.'s admission
last night that this was not an Irish measure but a war
measure, Irishmen would be sure to suspect that the
object was to submit this question nominally to Irish-
men under conditions they knew must fail, and then
inform the Americans the blame lay on the Irishmen
themselves. He shook his head and made various
solemn gestures, but could only be got to say that so
far as he and those immediately connected with him went
there was certainly no design to pack the Convention
so as to make it fail. I said nobody would suppose him
guilty of so diabolical a plot as deliberately packing it,
but they ought to know the Ulster Unionist Council
would make Partition the first business of such a
gathering and would if beaten withdraw, and that on

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 323

the other hand if the Redmondites were the kind of
nominees of local boards R. suggested last night, they
might in their desperation agree to some plausible
scheme of Partition which would save the situation
for the placehunters, but would be resisted by the
country in a way that would never make it possible
to assemble such a Parliament, in addition to all the
other troubles that would be inevitable in a time of
such intense popular passion. He made a statement
which had a disagreeable ring intimating that the
Government would take care that no violent persons
would be among the nominees. I said that might
only discredit the Convention altogether, even before
it sat. He put to me the question would I be willing
to take part in the Convention or at least ask my friends
to take part ? I replied that that was an hypothetical
question — that before answering it I should want to
know first in what spirit the Ulster Unionist Council
would agree, if they agreed at all, to take part, and
then how the Convention was to be constituted. He
proceeded to give me particulars of the proposed
constitution. First he said there was to be the sub-
stratum which was to be composed of the Chairmen
of County Councils, Mayors of Corporations and
delegates of other local representative bodies ; next
representatives of the Labour Councils and next of
both orders of Teachers. I told him at once, as I had
told him the previous night, that the first group of
bodies would constitute it straightaway a packed
Convention in the Redmondite sense ; that the great
majority of these bodies are Hibernian nominees, who
owed to the Mollies their election and their titles as
magistrates and innumerable other jobs for their
relatives and themselves ; that they repaid them with
salvoes of votes of confidence in " the Party " ; that
these Boards had long exhausted their mandate and
were so wholly out of touch with the present feeling
of the country that they would lose their seats whole-

324 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

sale if they were obliged to face their constituents ;
and that any decision founded on the votes of such
men, most of them Partitionists, would be received
with a shout of ridicule or indignation in the country.
He made no attempt to reply, but said that was only
the substratum. The next stratum was the clergy
of all denominations. What they proposed was to
ask the Bishops to select the priests who were most
suitable and the same with the Church of Ireland and
the Presbyterians. I said I was sorry to be obliged
again to throw cold water, but the truth notoriously
was that the priests were divided into two categories,
the old priests and the young ; that the Bishops would
inevitably choose the graver dignitaries, and leave out
in the cold the young priests who sympathised with
the Sinn Feiners, and who could easily rouse the
country against the Convention. He agreed that this
was so, but seemed to have no alternative. Finally,
he proposed that the upper stratum, from which
he hoped leaders that would direct the Convention
in a wise way would develop, would consist of a certain
small number of M. P.s chosen by each of the three
Irish Parties, a small number of Irish peers, and a
certain number whom the Crown reserved the right
of nominating. In the beginning he mentioned with
a knowing look : " Enough has not been made of the
provinces. After all the provinces are great historical
divisions." " Yes," I said, " unfortunately the causes
of great historical divisions."

He returned to the question of the Chairmanship
of the Convention on which he said everything might
depend. I asked him to forgive me for pointing out
that he was putting the car before the horse ; that he
was rather thinking of small things about the Con-
vention itself than of the possibility of an Agreement
from any Convention so constituted, and that what he
had told me had confirmed me in the conviction that
from such a Convention nothing could be expected

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 325

except a breakdown or some partition compromise
which the country would reject with fury. The only
chance of success, such as it was, lay in following the
precedent of the Land Conference. Then the land-
lords' official organisation — the Landowners' Con-
vention— like the official organisation of the Ulster
Unionists scoffed at the first proposal of the Land
Conference and they by an overwhelming majority
refused to take part in it. Dunraven appealed over
their heads to the mass of the landlords, with the
result of success and a warm vote of thanks from the
Landowners' Convention to the Conference they had
refused to join. In the same way we would appeal
to the sense and interest of the bulk of the unofficial
Unionists. If a satisfactory agreement was reached
it should be submitted to the whole people of Ireland
by Referendum and if accepted should be passed into
law on the responsibility of the Government. Therein
lies the one path to success instead of asking two of my
friends to begin with a hopeless protest against Partition,
in opposition to two bodies of politicians inexorably
committed to it beforehand. D. listened with deeper
interest, intimated there would be no difficulty about
a Referendum and before we parted dropped the
remark : " The Landowners' Convention passed a
vote of thanks to the Land Conference. The Ulster
Unionist Association may pass a vote of thanks to the
new one." He asked me for my list of suggested
Conference and suggested basis of settlement and asked
me to see him again. I also insisted upon a Sinn Fein
representative, suggesting either Griffith or John
MacNeill if he and his brother prisoners were first
released. He dropped a singular remark apropos of
the Sinn Feiners — " We may have to fight them."
I said : ' If you do, God help you and all of us."
He threw up his hands with a gesture of dis-
couragement.

I find appended to this Memo, a note dated May
24, 1917 :

326 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

As I was passing through the Division Lobby, on
the second reading of the Franchise Bill to-night, Sir
J. Lonsdale overtook me and agreed that if there was
any chance at all, it would be through a small Con-
ference. The bigger body, if it ever came together,
was sure to be abortive. I urged him to make a final
attempt, remarking : " I have no longer much personal
interest in the matter, but, believe me, unless some-
thing can be done now, those who come after us will
have reason to rue it." He said with very sincere
feeling : " Whatever comes, you have fought for
your country better than any other man in this House."
Ronald McNeill came up as we were conversing, and
said : " Are you converting William O'Brien, John ? '
Lonsdale replied (again spoken with real feeling) :
" No, O'Brien has very nearly converted me."
McNeill said : " You were right in saying it would
have been easy enough to pull things through five
years ago." " It is a pity," I remarked, " you Ulster
gentlemen did not then do more to help me." You
gave the answer in your own speech," he replied,
" you were only 7 to 70. After the treatment you
received yourself, how could you expect Ulstermen to
put themselves under the heel of a man like Dillon
who at a moment like this accuses us of being in
conspiracy with a German spy ? ' " Dillon would be
a very unimportant man to-day," I said, " if you had
taken a different course." " Anybody is good enough
to stick a knife into an open wound," was his reply.
While we were conversing, Birrell passed us like a
spectre, looking so dreary.

Before we parted, the Chief Secretary asked me
to supply him with the names of those likely to be
found effective members of the Conference of Irish
notables which I contemplated. I sent him the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 327

subjoined panel, not as one to be rigidly adhered to,
but as including types of the kind of Irishmen, high-
minded, tolerant and representative of the finest Irish
qualities, whose deliberations were likely to bear fruit :

i. The Lord Mayor of Dublin (Aid. O'Neill).

2 and 3. The Catholic and Protestant Archbishops
of Dublin.

4. The Marquess of Londonderry.

5. The Earl of Dunraven.

6. Gen. Sir Hubert Gough.

7. Major William Redmond, M.P.

8. Viscount NorthclifTe.

9. Mr. William Martin Murphy.

10. Mr. Arthur Griffith.

11. Mr. Hugh Barrie, M.P.

12. Professor Eoin MacNeill.

The list was drawn up without previous con-
sultation with any of the individuals named, and would
have then seemed to the general public a daring one ;
but the prudence of the choice has so successfully
borne the test of time that few would now dispute that
had a dozen such men been brought together, when
first suggested, several years before, or even then at
the half-past eleventh hour, they would not have
separated without arriving at a memorable National
Agreement. Two of the Northern representatives
suggested — Lord Londonderry and Mr. Hugh Barrie
— were among the three Ulster representatives named
on the Committee of Nine which brought the one
gleam of hope that visited the proceedings of the
Convention. Lord Northcliffe whom I had never
met was at the time Mr. Lloyd George's closest con-
fidant. His great paper was one of the most powerful
of the dynamic forces that won the wTar. That his
influence would not have been misused is clear enough
from a note of his dated 3oth April, 1917, on the
occasion of a previous essay of mine in the same
direction :

328 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

" Dear Mr. O'Brien, — Your letter reached me
to-day.

Curiously enough I was discussing this very matter
with Sir Edward Carson yesterday afternoon. I do
not believe that I should be a welcome member of
any such Conference. I have been violently criticised
in Ulster. But I do believe that an Irish Conference
of strictly Irish people is one of the means towards
a settlement. Very few English people understand
Irish people. Yours very truly,

NORTHCLIFFE."

Another singular success was the choice of General
Hubert Gough. I had never met him or been in
communication with him in any way. He was only
known in Ireland as the leader of * the Curragh
Mutiny," and my suggestion of him as an apostle of
National Peace would have been once grasped at by
the malicious as an unheard of act of traitorism, and
even by the worthiest would have been received with
head shaking and silence. All I knew was that he
had come of a gallant and genial line of Irish soldiers ;
that the part he had taken at the Curragh would give
him an indisputable title to be heard with respect in
Ulster ; and that with a no less gallant and no less
genial Irish soldier like Major " Willie ' Redmond
he would have supplied an irresistible soldierly argu-
ment for Irish peace. How true was my intuition
may be judged by an extract from a letter General
Gough wrote me years afterwards (February 13, 1921),
when he first heard of the liberty I had taken with his
name :

" It was absolute news to me to find that you had
mentioned my name as far back as May, 1917, as one
of those who might arrive at some sane solution for
the government of our unhappy country, and I must
say how very broadminded I think it of you to have
put forward such an idea. However much I may feel
my own incapacity for dealing with such a question,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 329

I can at least be confident that I would never have
adopted the present bloody and repressive methods
which are being so brutally employed in Ireland
to-day. However, I do not suppose anything could
have been devised to unite all Irishmen more closely
and in more real sympathy. The terrible misfortune
is that this real sympathy among Irishmen is being
brought about by means which can only raise antipathy
and hate between Irishmen and Englishmen. I can
see no light at present and it is distressing to feel one
is deprived of all power to alter things."

Mr. Duke left upon my mind the impression of a
man convinced of the unwisdom of the proposed
composition of the Convention, but powerless to alter
it. One other auspicious opportunity offered of
reconsidering the matter before it was too late. No
sooner did the Government plans get abroad than the
Sinn Fein Executive in Dublin passed a resolution
unanimously rejecting Mr. Lloyd George's invitation
to be represented by five nominees of Sinn Fein.
Perceiving by the wording of the resolution that their
decision applied to the outrageously unrepresentative
character of the contemplated assemblage, and not
to some more broadly conceived Irish settlement by
Irishmen in Ireland, I at once telegraphed to Mr.
Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Fein move-
ment, and at that time (owing to the internment of
Mr. De Valera and his chief fighting men in English
prisons) the virtual leader and director of Sinn F&n
affairs in Ireland :

" London, May 23.

" Confidential. May I ask does your objection
to a big Convention bound to end in fiasco or Partition
extend to a Conference of a dozen genuinely repre-
sentative Irishmen whose agreement, if any, would be
submitted to people of all Ireland by Referendum ? "

His reply was :

330 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

" Dublin, May 23.

' I should be willing to state my views to a Con-
ference of Irishmen. Absolutely reject Convention." *

Taking the offer to be one of moment, I com-
municated it without an hour's delay to the Chief
Secretary, urging that it would ensure the participation
in genuine Peace negotiations of the Irish Party of the
future and expressing my own confidence that the
co-operation of responsible men of the highest in-
telligence of the stamp of Mr. Griffith and Professor
Eoin MacNeill would be found to be of priceless
advantage. I did so, although I had just been hearing
news which satisfied me that the Cabinet's mind was
made up against us :

Hotel Windsor,

May 24, 1917.
Private. —

Dear Mr. Duke, — From all I hear, it is useless
to hope to dissuade your colleagues from the so-called
* Irish Convention " they have resolved upon.

I consider it, however, a duty to send you enclosed
telegrams which passed between Mr. Griffith and
myself yesterday. His reply proves that it would
be still possible to secure the co-operation of the
immense mass of Irish opinion represented, though
very vaguely, by the sentiment of Sinn Fein.

All that, however, seems now given up, and I am
afraid the great body of Irish Nationalists will be left
no escape from the conclusion that the proposed
Convention will be held for Anglo-American war
purposes and upon lines which are bound to aggravate
instead of composing the present troubles.

I shall be much obliged if you will kindly return
me the suggestions as to the personnel and basis of

1 It was stated by Mr. Michael Collins in 1922 that Mr. Griffith
laid down conditions. He did not do so in any communication
with me.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 331

settlement of an Irish Conference on the Land Con-
ference model, which I gave you on Tuesday.

Yours very faithfully,

WILLIAM O'BRIEN.
Rt. Hon. H. Duke, M.P.

P.S. — Mr. Healy has a suggestion for a preliminary

* Conference ' to draw up a programme for the

' Convention," if the Government still persists in

having one. He, like myself, however, thinks it

useless to persist in the face of the attitude of the

Government. — W. O'B.

Mr. Duke's only reply — one of pathetic helpless-
ness— was this :

" Irish Office,

c Dear Mr. O'Brien, — I enclose, herewith, the
two documents which you kindly entrusted to me.

Yours truly,

H. E. DUKE."

332 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XXI

TO TAKE PART OR NOT TO ?

SINN FEIN was thus ruled out of the programme of
a Government which had to wait for the lessons of
years of bloodshed and horror to appreciate the value
of the patriotic offer which Sir H. Duke was compelled
almost rudely to repulse. It is impossible to believe
that Mr. Lloyd George had not the Griffith telegram
before him when he shot his bolt defining the member-
ship of his Convention in a way which he knew must
render the collaboration of Sinn Fein and of the All-
for-Ireland League impossible. He had made up his
mind to cast in his fortunes with the Hibernian and
with the Ulster Partitionists.

A characteristic stroke of the small politicians,
British and Irish, followed. The Hibernian leaders,
accustomed to rely upon petty Government doles and
favours as a means of concealing their failure in great
things and lost to all power of diagnosing the new
spirit they were dealing with, came to the conclusion
that their best hope of rehabilitating themselves with
the country, and, in the cant of the day, of " creating
a friendly atmosphere " for " the Irish Convention '
was to advise an Amnesty for the Sinn Fein internees.
Accordingly, when an evening or two afterwards I
went over to Dublin, to make a last effort with Sinn
Fein before announcing my own decision as to Mr.
Lloyd George 's invitation, it was to see Mr. De Valera
and his interned fighting men — some four thousand
of them — flocking over by the Holyhead boat to the
frantic joy of a country that not unnaturally received
them as conquerors. Be it remembered that up to

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 333

that time the Irish Republic had no existence of any
kind, even in name. The utmost length to which the
first Sinn Fein Convention of five hundred delegates
in Dublin in the early part of 1916 went was a
resolution : " That we proclaim Ireland to be a
separate nation " — as Mr. Lloyd George did a few
years afterwards. Neither Count Plunkett's election
for North Roscommon, nor Mr. McGuinness' for
North Longford had been fought on the Republican
issue. It was not until a few days after his return to
Ireland from his English prison that Mr. De Valera
for the first time made the Irish Republic the electoral
touchstone of the future. Any other programme had
now, however, been wiped off the slate by Mr. Lloyd
George's own hand. When Mr. Griffith did me the
favour of calling upon me at the Shelbourne Hotel,
the streets outside were throbbing with the rejoicings
for the returning fighting-men. With all Mr. Griffith's
moral courage — and it was dauntless — there was
obviously no more to be said for peace. The Amnesty
which must have followed as a matter of course once
a genuine National agreement was arrived at, was now
justly despised as a mere Hibernian electioneering
trick. Its only effect was to convince the Irish people
— even those who were most reluctant to own it —
that the fighters of the Easter Week dispensation were
the only men to deal with shifty British Ministers.
Sinn Fein in its most militant shape was rooted more
firmly than ever as the best hope of a country which
had already irrevocably sentenced Parliamentarianism
to die the death.

Not for the first, nor the tenth time, Mr. Lloyd
George failed to see the "" fundamentally right " thing
and did the obviously wrong one. No sooner was the
composition of the Convention disclosed than it
became evident it must end in Partition or throw the
blame for its abortiveness upon Ireland. Of the 101
members 80 at the lowest estimate were Partitionists

334 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

of the Hibernian Party or of the Orange Party. The
representation accorded to the political parties — 5
delegates apiece to the Hibernian Party, the Ulster
Party and Sinn Fein, 2 to the All-for-Ireland League
and 2 to the Irish Labour Party — was on the face of
it a perfectly fair one. It in reality covered a gross
deceit. The Hibernian Party, with a nominal repre-
sentation of only 5, obtained some 70 representatives
through the Mayors of Corporations and the Chairmen
of County Councils and District Councils, nearly all
the direct nominees of the Board of Erin ; the Ulster
Party, technically restricted to 5 representatives,
numbered 20 at the least through the delegates from
the Unionist County and District Councils and the
nominees of the Crown. These two Parties com-
bined, counting a majority of something like 8 to i of
the entire body, were publicly committed to a Par-
tition agreement if there was to be any at all. Into
this Partitionist sea, the five Sinn Feiners and the two
All-for-Ireland representatives were to be precipitated,
rari nantes in gurgite vasto, with whatever help they
might receive from four known opponents of Partition
who were included among the direct nominees of the
Crown. Worse remained behind. Sir E. Carson,
the only person who could operate any change of
front from the Ulster side, held personally aloof from
the Convention, and the participation of his Party
was made expressly subject to the condition that their
five representatives at the Convention were to agree
to nothing without first obtaining the approval of the
Ulster Unionist Council — an extern body of the
Covenanters' staunchest extremists — who were not to
figure publicly at the Convention at all, but were to
act as a Black Cabinet to revise or veto any agreement,
even if recommended by their own Parliamentary
representatives. The Convention was thus to be a
collection of puppets, of which it was to be Sir E.
Carson and his Ulster Unionist Council who were to
pull the strings.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 335

After Mr. Redmond's death, Lord MacDonnell,
in a letter to the Times mentioned that the Irish leader
had confided to him that he would never have entered
the Convention if he understood at the time that this
was to be the arrangement. If he was unaware of it,
it must have been because he failed to notice either the
resolution of the Ulster Unionist Council making the
stipulation regarding their veto in the most dis-
tinct terms, or my own reply to Mr. Lloyd George
(dated June 18, 1917) in which I made this fatal flaw
in the constitution of the Convention one of my
principal reasons for declining to nominate repre-
sentatives from the All-f or- Ireland League : " On
the other hand, while my friends and myself would
welcome the most generous representation of the
unofficial Unionist population of Ireland, the Govern-
ment scheme ensures to the official Ulster Unionist
Council a full third of the voting power of the Con-
vention, under the direction, moreover of a Committee
not present at the Convention, but specially nominated
by the Council to supervise its proceedings from
outside. The terms of the Resolution under which
the Ulster Unionist Council consented to enter the
Convention make it clear they have only done so as a
war measure, and relying upon the assurances of the
Government that they need fear no Parliamentary
pressure if they should adhere to their demand for the
exclusion of the Six Counties as a minimum — a
demand, indeed, which was conceded to them last
year by the Irish Parliamentary Party. It is con-
sequently obvious that the chances of any agreement
by the Ulster Unionist Council other than one based
on the separation of the Six Counties are all but
hopelessly handicapped from the start, and the tempta-
tion dangerously increased to those Nationalist
politicians who have already committed themselves
to dismemberment."

If this were not a sufficient proof how complete

336 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

would be the veto of Ulster, any possible doubt on
the subject was removed by a candid statement in
the House of Commons from Mr. Bonar Law, in
which the man who was next to Mr. Lloyd George,
if even second to him, the most important member of
the Ministry, pledged himself that the assent of Ulster
would be regarded as indispensable to the " sub-
stantial agreement " in the Convention on which the
Prime Minister undertook to legislate. Mr. Red-
mond's own want of foresight was, therefore, alone
to blame if he was not warned in good time that nothing
could come from the Convention unless with the
consent of the Ulster Unionist Council, and that
consent, he already knew, was only to be had by
reviving the old pact for the separation of the Six
Counties. Notwithstanding these conclusive warnings
that the Convention must end either in Partition or in
abortiveness, a perfect torrent of entreaties was for the
next month poured upon my head from all sorts of
worthy peace lovers, imploring me to make the All-
for-Ireland League a consenting party to the imposture.
On 1 3th June the Prime Minister addressed to me in
cordial terms an invitation " to nominate two repre-
sentatives of the Party under your leadership to serve
as members of the Convention/' My reply, dated
June 1 8th, expressed " with deep disappointment }
my conclusion that " while the Government have
nominally adopted the principle of allowing the
constitution of Ireland to be settled by agreement
among Irishmen, they have done so under conditions
which must render that principle a nullity. There
can be little or no hope that a Convention constituted
as the Government have directed can arrive at any
agreement except some hateful bargain for the Partition
of the country under some plausible disguise. " I
admonished him that " to attribute the blame for such
a decision or for the failure to arrive at any better
one to the unrepresented Irish people would be little

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 337

short of an outrage upon Ireland and would be a gross
imposition on the credulity of friendly nations abroad,"
and intimated that under the circumstances " I have
made up my mind with reluctance, and indeed with
poignant personal sorrow, that I must decline to
undertake any responsibility in connection with a
Convention so constituted. "

Sir Horace Plunkett, who was to be the Chairman
of the Convention, did me the unusual honour of
addressing to me two public letters couched in terms
of high courtesy asking me to reconsider my decision,
adding that, in his belief " if you could see your way
to come in, you would bring a good many more than
your own immediate followers." In my reply, I
pointed out that in his letter he had forgotten " the
objection which is the most fatal of all — namely, that
at least 90 of the 100 members of the Convention will
be the nominees of the two Irish parties of politicians
who only last year came to an agreement to form six
Irish counties into an * excluded area ' to be separately
administered through departments responsible only
to an English Secretary of State under an arrangement
which could never be terminated without a new Act
of the Imperial Parliament." My colleagues and
myself had made it known that we were ready to go
into the Convention to resist Partition against all odds,
" if the august body of Bishops, Catholic and Pro-
testant, who signed the recent manifesto, saw fit to
delegate to the Convention representatives of their
Order as to whose * unrelenting opposition to Partition,
temporary or permanent ' (to use the Bishops' own
words) the bulk of the Convention could be left in no
possible doubt," but I was obliged to add : " Un-
happily their lordships have decided in a sense which
has given rise to grave misunderstandings and for
reasons which this is not the time to discuss but which
have not lessened the anxieties of patriotic Irishmen."
To Sir Horace's gentle reproach that, in refusing to

338 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

participate, I was " casting off the mantle of National
Unity," which had so long been mine, my reply was :

" Our small band have fought, not for a con-
temptible verbal victory, but for a practical agreement
which would make Irishmen of all parties and creeds
willing partners in the government of an undivided
Ireland, and while nominally pursuing that object,
the organisers of the Convention have so loaded the
dice that, short of a miracle from Heaven, the only
agreement likely to be arrived at is one for the
permanent division of Ireland among the place-
hunters of both f actions. "

But his letter seemed to open one avenue by which
our participation might still be possible. He made
it an " essential point ' that an agreement by the
Convention should be " submitted for popular approval
by Referendum or otherwise," and intimated that this
"would unquestionably" be done. " If he made this
statement on official authority ' I answered, a
Referendum would still leave it possible for us to
take part. Sir Horace Plunkett, in his second public
letter, avowed that " unfortunately, I have no authority
to make any official person responsible for the state-
ment, but I did not speak without having the best of
reasons for believing that what I said was true. If,
I am able to give you my authority later, I will gladly
do so." The " later " announcement of his authority
was never made, and so that avenue to the recon-
sideration of our decision was closed as well. Mani-
festly, with Sir Horace as with myself, the Chief
Secretary had inclined towards a Referendum for all
Ireland, but was promptly put in his place by those
who had Sir E. Carson to satisfy. A Referendum for
all Ireland was now and had always been the terror
of his life.

For all that, the most trusted of my own advisers
began to waver, under the influence of that cry of
"" Peace ! " where there can be no peace which some-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 339

times sweeps over Ireland with the weird pathos of a
Banshee. With, perhaps, the most influential of
them all, for his breadth of judgment, Lord Dunraven,
I had been compelled to differ on Conscription,
although with a respect for one another's different
points of view which was never diminished for an
hour on either side. * I agree with you," he wrote,
on the first disclosure of the Constitution. " If
Redmond's majority can come to any agreement with
Lonsdale, they can carry it. What I fear is some
agreement involving carefully concealed Partition " :
but he eventually yielded to the argument that our
absence would let judgment go against us by default,
and accepted for himself the invitation of the Crown.
I suspect that Mr. Healy's preference inclined in the
same direction, although with the loyalty in which he
never failed throughout these soul-trying years, he
forbore to say so.1 Mr. William Martin Murphy,,
the proprietor of the most widely circulated of the
Irish newspapers, The Independent, had been all along
a convinced believer in the policy of the All-for-Ireland
League, but to Ireland's heavy loss he hesitated to-
enforce his opinions in his paper, acting, as he told me
more than once, on the advice of Lord Northcliffe :
" Never come out strong until you've first got your
circulation ; once your circulation is there, you can
say anything you like." His first impression of the
Convention was my own :

" Dartry, Dublin,

28th May, 1917.

" Dear Mr. O'Brien, — I agree with you about the
danger of Partition. Bonar Law's reply to Ronald
McNeill has turned the Convention which was in-
tended as a trick into a farce. The Ulsterites will be
able to say : * Heads I win, tails you lose.'

1 Had I his leave to publish them, Mr. Healy's letters, teeming
with diamondiferous wit, and laden with piquant items of secret
information, would make a valuable addition to the inner history
of the time.

340 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

After Partition is repudiated by four-fifths of
Ireland, it is to be set up again at the Convention.
My present feeling is to advise that the whole scheme
should be ignored until Lloyd George repudiates
Bonar Law's promise to the Ulsterites.

I think I will write to Northcliffe and tell him
that all confidence in the bona fides of the Convention
was knocked on the head by Bonar Law's statement.
It is evident that he expected some question from
Dillon to which he referred.

Sincerely yours,

"WM. M. MURPHY.
Wm. O'Brien, Esq., M.P.,
Bellevue, Mallow."

Later on, however, Mr. Murphy confessed he
was a little shaken by the disgraceful cry that his
object was to wreck the Convention, with which he
was assailed in public and in private. He now wrote
that " I have no doubt whatever the three of us '
(Mr. Healy, himself and myself) " would dominate
the show with the combinations which I think could
be got together and the fear of public opinion outside
acting on the Co. Council Chairmen, " and he too
ended by accepting the invitation of the Chief
Secretary, adding : " If I cannot do any good there,
I may be some check to those who would do mischief."

One of the entreaties it was most difficult to resist
was a secret message I received (June 26) from a
member of the Cabinet for whom I entertained a
sincere respect, and the difficulty of resistance was all
the greater that the message came through one whose
single-minded services as an intermediary in the
highest quarters were of priceless value to Ireland
throughout these years, although they were rewarded
with the usual brutal injustice by Irish politicians.
This was the communication of the Minister to my
excellent friend :

" Go over and see O'B. ; don't give him messages

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 341

from me direct ; but move him. I know so much
more than he can know of the North East people.
I know how hard and almost impossible it is for them
to confer with R. or he with them. . . . O'B. has got
very near the Northerners. He, if anyone can bridge
the last gap. Will he not do it ? If he knew all that
is in the wind and how much importance attaches to
his attitude he would."

It can scarcely be necessary to accentuate the his-
torical value of this testimony from a Cabinet Minister
of exceptional authority with " the Northerners,"
both as to the transformation our conciliatory labours
might have wrought in them, had we received even
common toleration from our own side while there
was still time, and as to the evil effect on the mind of
" the Northerners ' of the Hibernian ascendancy.
It was too late to think of all this except with a sign.
In an Hibernian-ridden and an Orange-ridden Con-
vention, neither we, nor, as it turned out, the sober
Conciliationist Northerns could do anything but wring
our ineffectual hands in presence of an artificially
constructed majority whose programme was : " Either
Partition or nothing."

My friend received my answer with sorrow, most
gently and most diffidently expressed ; but his next
communication contained a startling confirmation of
my prognostication that Partition, in even a more
offensive form than I had suspected, was up to that
time the settled purpose of the projectors of the
Convention :

" The forces that are gathering in this connection
are very interesting and complicated and frankly not
to my liking. I will throw out the idea as I get it
from very high up. There is a lot being said about a
Federal Commission, and the idea is not merely Home
Rule all round but Partition all round — that England
is to be broken up into two States, Scotland, two ;
Ireland, two, and Wales one ! Then also it is believed

342 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

that Smuts and Borden have dealt a death-blow to
Empire Federation ; that what we are asked to work
on now is a lot of local Federal Units — the B. Isles,
Canada, Australia, S. Africa, N. Z. — and that these
scattered federations are to be loosely united under the
Crown in what I suppose will be called a * Confederacy
of States.' ... I feel that the issue — that a score of
vast issues — whether they emerge for better or for
worse hangs on the toss of a coin."

My indomitable friend worked on for a manageably-
sized Conference as the true remedy, but reported :
' No, their minds run on big battalions and noise !
They think that a small Convention will be described
in the U. S. as * hole and corner/ and that the columns
given to it over there will be in direct proportion to
what Jones of Nevada used to call * base Roman
numerals ' ' ; he struggled for at least a Referendum
of all Ireland and could only get as far as dim under-
standings that the Convention itself might order a
Referendum - - a Referendum which, ex hypothesi,
would be one to destroy their own guilty (but
successful) conspiracy ! They were still harping
on " the U. S. and the big battalions and noise P

Finally, on the eve of the sitting of the Convention,
the Prime Minister came to the charge once more,
in a manner probably without a precedent in the
usages of Prime Ministers, by addressing to me a
second public letter (dated from Downing St. aoth
July) asking me would I not withdraw my refusal ?
He had nothing better to offer than these anodyne
generalities : " The Convention is a sincere effort to
see if Irishmen in Ireland can agree on a settlement
which will make for better relations between the
different parties in Ireland and happier relations
between Ireland and Great Britain. With the object
in view, I know that you are in full sympathy, and I
most earnestly hope that you will respond to this
appeal, which I understand, has come also from many

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 343

other quarters, to give your help toward securing the
success of the Convention."

The controversy was wound up in a letter in which
I repeated that " the type of Convention selected by
you defeats its stated object with fatal certainty by
leaving the great mass of Nationalist opinion all but
wholly unrepresented and conferring the power of
decision upon a majority of politicians who have
notoriously lost the confidence of the Irish people,"
and begged of him to persevere no further with a
Convention hopelessly out of touch with Irish public
opinion, but to fall back upon a friendly conference
of the most potential friends of peace in all parties as
the only means — a forlorn one enough by this time —
of finding a way out.

Unluckily this latter advice was now a counsel
of perfection. An event had just happened which
put an end to the last chance of negotiating otherwise
than with weapons of steel. At the battle of Messines
on June yth, Major " Willie " Redmond, like the
' vera parfait, gentil knight ' ' he was, insisted " on
going over the top " at the head of his men and met
his death. His only complaint, we may be sure, was
that he could but repeat the dying cry of Sarsfield at
Landen : " O that this were for Ireland ! " For his
constituency in East Clare, Mr. De Valera offered
himself as a candidate on the straight issue of an Irish
Republic. The Hibernians made a supreme effort
to rehabilitate their fortunes and, what, with the
sympathies enkindled by the young soldier's fate, the
high expectations created by the Convention, and a
candidate of widespread local influence, they were
fatuous enough to count upon an easy victory. To
their stupefaction, the Irish Republic carried the day
with a majority of five thousand votes. Had the
figures been* reversed, a Partition scheme must have
been carried through the Convention with not more
than half a dozen dissenting voices. East Clare put

344 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

an end to the danger of the Convention coming to a
criminal agreement for Partition, but it was only to
create a new danger — for the uprise of the Republic
forbade the possibility of any other agreement, since
if it were to meet acceptance by the country in its
present mood, it would not have the smallest chance of
acceptance either by Ulster or by the British Parlia-
ment. The Irish people are too ready to make idols
and too ready to break them. It was by men too little
known to excite either idolatry or animosity that the
ways were to be in the long run straitened out. But
for the next four years, at all events, Mr. De Valera,
with his Republican Tricolour, was the National idol,
and Mr. Griffith and his peaceful penetrationists were
laid up in lavender. The presence of Sinn F&n at an
amicable Conference-table was no longer practical
politics. Elated with what seemed the cleverness of
a paltry electioneering dodge, Mr. Lloyd George and
his Hibernian counsellors released Mr. De Valera and
established the Irish Republic.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 345

CHAPTER XXII

THE DEATH OF MR. REDMOND

NONE the less, the joint Convention of the Hibernians
and Covenanters assembled in Dublin on July 25th,
amidst decorative surroundings that might well give
a good-natured people like the Irish the impression
that some great work of peace was on foot. The
Convention held its sittings within the historic walls
of Trinity College amidst the finest stage scenery the
genial Provost, Dr. Mahaffy, could provide ; a
President of respectable neutrality was found in Sir
Horace Plunkett ; not a few single-minded Irishmen,
with a nobler gift for peace and goodwill than for the
mean realities of politics, were induced to join in
attempting to elevate the assembly above the normal
manoeuvres of the politicians ; for months the country
was permitted to hear of nothing but patriotic
junketings and speeches, "passed by the Censor, "over-
flowing with the raptures of " the Black Northerns "
at the discovery of the charms of " the Sunny South,"
and corresponding responses from the Sunny South
to the advances of the dour men of the Black North —
all purely for exportation to " the U. S." As a pre-
caution against any premature disclosure of the truth,
the business meetings of the Convention were held in
private, and any report of their secret sittings, any
comment or even any " reference " to them in speech
or newspaper was declared a crime under the Defence
of the Realm Act. The impatience of the country
was sought to be allayed by not over-candid assurances
from Sir Horace Plunkett in his banquetting speeches
from time to time that all was going well. " The

346 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

U. S." had to be kept amused by such romantic scene-
painting and by the band for many months before the
curtain could finally be lifted and then only to exhibit
the actors scurrying off the stage, like as manyjpoor
ghosts at cockcrow. The realities of the drama were
going on in America itself, where England was playing
for the soul of President Wilson. In the Ireland of
real life the Volunteers were silently arming and
drilling their battalions, paying but a contemptuous
attention to the love-feasts of the politicians in Mr.
Lloyd George's " Irish Convention. "

Those who may have the curiosity to dip into the
musty volumes of shorthand notes of the secret sittings
will find that week after week, and month after month
passed without any attempt to grapple with the real
problem, which was to win over Ulster without
Partition. Plenty of patriotic platitudes and over-
flowing, but the most studious determination on both
sides not to come to business. It is one of the curious
ironies of history that almost every speech at these
secret sessions was one that might have been delivered
from an All-for-Ireland platform any time for the five
previous years. They were speeches of eager longing
for the co-operation of Irishmen of every class, creed
and racial origin ; no longer a whisper of those
exhortations to give " a dose of the old medicine '
to " our hereditary enemies," the " rotten Protestants/'
and " the blackblooded Cromweliians ' with which
Hibernian oratory had for melancholy years resounded,
Ah ! welladay ! had all these tardy speeches of abashed
Hibernians and patriotic Southern Unionists of the
Lord Midleton stamp only been delivered in the light
of day and a few years before, how differently con-
temporary Irish history might have been written !

The explanation of the amorphous condition of the
Convention was only too simple. A Partition Agree-
ment could have been at any moment struck up by an
overwhelming majority if the Hibernians could have

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 347

plucked up courage to hark back to their Party's
surrender of the Six Counties more than a year before.
But the mobbing of Mr. Redmond outside Trinity
College on the opening day, and the mobbing of Mr.
Redmond and Mr. Devlin again in Cork (which was
the only notice the young men deigned to take of their
proceedings) — above all the recollection of the message
of doom from East Clare, kept alive by the hints the
unrepresentative majority were receiving every day
of their lives of the indignation and contempt of their
constituents — completely daunted the mass of the
County Councillors and Town Councillors from
following their Parliamentary leaders an inch further
on the road to Partition.

When after five months' barren deliberations, the
word was passed, now that " the U. S." was squared,
that the Convention must somehow finish up, they
found their heads bumped against a stone-wall, and
could discover no way through it or over it except one
which strikingly confirmed those who had urged a
small Conference of Notables as the only practical
means of working out a Settlement by Consent.
What happened deserves to be recalled from the
oblivion to which the rest of the proceedings of the
Convention were deservedly condemned. The only
approach to business of any kind they found practicable
was to suspend the operations of the Convention
proper altogether and to delegate their powers to a
" Committee of Nine." It was excellent, or rather it
would once have been. They forgot that their Com-
mittee of Nine was subject to two disabilities from
which our Conference of ten or a dozen notables would
have been free. They sat without any representative
of Sinn Fein— that is to say of the only organisation
which could speak for five-sixths of the Nationalists
of the country ; and the representatives of Ulster on
the Committee of Nine were not free agents, but the
nominees of an outside Orange tribunal, the Ulster

348 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Unionist Council, without whose imprimatur any
agreement of theirs must be valueless. The prac-
ticability of the one plan, and the impracticability
of the other were demonstrated in a still more
remarkable manner. Two of the three representatives of
Ulster on the Committee of Nine — Lord Londonderry
and Mr. Hugh Barrie, M.P. — were actually two of
those I had suggested as fit and proper persons in my
Memo, to the Chief Secretary. They justified the
confidence in their conciliatory temper and large-
mindedness so well that, whenever the secrets of the
council-chamber come to be revealed, I have the best
reason to know it will be found that the three repre-
sentatives of Ulster (the third being a lawyer of
enormous influence in the North, Mr. McDowell)
so long as they were left free to act on their own
judgment, collaborated cordially with the remainder

J Cf •/

of the Committee of Nine in formulating an agreement
which under happier stars might have developed into
a benign National Settlement. But under the con-
stitution of Mr. Lloyd George's Convention, the three
Ulster representatives were made cyphers in their own
province. No sooner had they submitted their con-
ditional agreement to Sir E. Carson's occult Vigilance
Committee, who were the real masters of the Con-
vention, than their partiality for any agreement other
than Partition was pitilessly snubbed, and the Com-
mittee of Nine was doomed to barrenness and failure
as had been the plenary Convention.1

A rebuff like this ought in all honesty to have been
the signal for the dissolution of the Convention ; but

1 It is worthy of remark that Mr. Ronald McNeilPs book,
Ukter's Stand for the Union, carefully suppresses any mention
whatever of the " Committee of Nine," who arrived at the only
genuine all-round agreement produced by the Convention. The
suppression is all the more significant that the author tells us :
" My friend, Mr. Thomas Moles, M.P. (the official Ulster Secretary
of the Convention), took full shorthand notes of the proceedings
of the Convention, and he kindly allowed me to use his transcript."

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 349

they " kept on talking " for other weeks and months
to come, until America was duly afloat for the scene of
war, and a number of worthy men who had been
formed into Sub-Committees gravely pursued their
investigations into the Land Purchase question, and
the Irish Mines and Minerals question, and ad-
ministered good cheer to weak minds by propounding
a pious opinion against Conscription. The only
affectation of real life left to the Convention was the
attempt of Mr. William Martin Murphy, after the
Committee of Nine had been reduced to nothingness,
to wind up the Convention to a declaration for
Dominion Home Rule. Quite a hopeless enterprise,
it is true, and one, curiously enough, in which he was
obstructed with persistency by the Chairman, Sir
Horace Plunkett, who later on was to found a Dominion
Home Rule League all his own, as though he were the
original patentee of the specific, but who now (as Mr.
Murphy more than once confided to me) engineered
the latter out of every endeavour to submit the subject
squarely to the Convention. The iron will of Mr.
Murphy, which did not bend before " Jim Larkin '
when his tyranny was at its height, was not to be easily
broken. Standing alone in the beginning in an
assembly which did not love him, his stubbornness was
not long in securing the adhesion of the two most
formidable men in Mr. Redmond's Hibernian majority.
The time had come when no Hibernian durst whisper
" Partition ' above his breath. Mr. Devlin must
have become sensible already that he had got down
at the wrong side of the fence. He never afterwards
quite forgave Mr. Dillon for the unlucky lead whicl
induced the Hibernian Grand Master to stake his
future as the prime mover of the Belfast Convention
at which he had succeeded in thrusting the Partition
agreement down the throats of the Nationalists of the
Six Counties. He now made a desperate attempt
to refill the sails of his popularity by joining Mr.

350 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Murphy and proclaiming himself for nothing short
of Dominion Home Rule. His example was imitated,
or more likely dictated, by Dr. O'Donnell, the Bishop
of Raphoe, who had long been the most ambitious
politician in the ranks of the Hierarchy. It was he
whose patronage gave the Board of Erin wing of the
Ancient Order of Hibernians its first foothold in
Ireland, and he, too, who took a principal part in
establishing its supremacy as the real governing
power in Ireland. His Lordship had realized earlier
than some of his venerable Brethren that Partition
was no longer a viable policy, at least in the North.
During the last months of the Convention he, like
Mr. Devlin, transferred his allegiance to the Dominion
Home Rule programme of Mr. William Martin
Murphy, and left Mr. Redmond in a state of tragic
isolation.

The story is a pitiful one of desertion by the
Hibernians and a fresh act of faithlessness by Mr.
Lloyd George. He had already been guilty of one
breach of faith with the Convention. He pledged
himself at the outset to carry into law any decision
which might secure a " substantial agreement " among
its members. He afterwards sat dumbly by while
Mr. Bonar Law in his name cancelled that pledge by
announcing that any " substantial agreement " must
include the Ulster group to be of any avail. The
Prime Minister was now to commit a still more
impudent breach of the undertaking on which the
Convention was brought together. The Government,
he stated in the House of Commons, proposed to
summon the Convention " to submit to the British
Government a Constitution for the future government
of Ireland within the Empire." No sooner was it
reported to him that Mr. Murphy's push for Dominion
Home Rule was making formidable progress among
Mr. Redmond's Hibernians than on February 25th,
1918, he wrote a public letter addressed to Sir Horace

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 351

Plunkett, repudiating the freedom of the Convention
to frame what Constitution it pleased " within the
Empire," and declaring categorically that the British
Government must in any event reserve Customs and
Excise, which was the quintessence of the fiscal
freedom of the Dominions.

The blow was well calculated to break up the last
hope of uniting even Mr. Redmond's majority in any
National Agreement worth the cost of printing it.
A majority for Dominion Home Rule would have
been a purely platonic performance in any case, since
* substantial agreement " even of the friendly Southern
Unionists, not to speak of the Northerns, was out of the
question ; Mr. Lloyd George's new breach of faith,
ruling Customs and Excise out of the discussion,
shattered the Hibernian block itself into smithereens,
between those who adhered to Mr. Redmond, and those
who deserted to Mr. William Martin Murphy. Lord
Midleton and his Southern Unionists were willing to
join Mr. Redmond in a compromise by which Excise
would be conceded at once to the Irish Parliament and
Customs would be temporarily reserved — a com-
promise which Mr. Lloyd George would, no doubt,
have gratefully closed with.1 Mr. Redmond's con-
clusion would seem to have been that a division in
which the Southern Unionists and the Nationalists
of every hue would be found voting together for a
large measure of freedom for an undivided Ireland
would at least be a more creditable end for a Con-
vention in any event doomed to be an abortive one,
than a catchpenny minority vote for a full Dominion
Home Rule, rejected beforehand by the Prime Minister
and frankly despised by the country. The resolution,
in which his final effort for a united decision was to be
made, substantially asked the country to go back to

1How unimportant the point in dispute was may be judged
from the official return of revenue of the Irish Free State, which
is in the proportion of £2,000,000 Customs to £14,000,000 Excise.

352 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the Policy of Conciliation from which he had been
driven, sorely against his own balanced judgment, by
the revolt of Mr. Dillon and the Freeman's Journal
against the Land Conference Settlement. But the
union of Irishmen of all schools and classes which
would have been the most practicable of practical
politics then was by this time fatally forbidden by the
uprise of the Hibernian ascendancy and by the alarms
of an armed Ulster whose worst passions that
ascendancy had kindled from ashes into a blaze.
Moreover, the moderate terms of settlement which
nearly all Irish Nationalists would have welcomed
with sincerity then, as containing the germs of Freedom
in its happiest efflorescence, had now become irre-
trievably out of date in the eyes of a young generation
who had experienced little but impotence from Irish
politicians and deception from British ones, in the
interval. The unkindest stab of all was that, in his
last stand, and in a state of health when Death was
visibly overshadowing him, the Irish leader found
himself deserted by the self-same men who had goaded
him into forsaking the Policy of 1903, and were striving
desperately now to atone for the consequences of
Hibernianism by opening a fresh chapter of deceit as
converts to a Dominion Home Rule declared by their
old idol, Mr. Lloyd George, to be a phantom. Captain
Stephen Gwynn in his book John Redmond's last years
gives a moving picture of the final scene. So does Mr.
Ronald McNeill in his Ulster's Stand for the Union.
As the description of the official historiographers on
both sides are in pretty nearly identical terms, their
narratives may henceforth be accepted as settled
history, and can be studied with profit side by side.

CAPTAIN GWYNN'S VERSION.

" I met Redmond on the night of January I4th. He
had seen no one in these ten days. He told me that
he was still uncertain what would happen, but asked

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 353

me to get one of the leading Co. Councillors to second
his motion. Next morning I came in half an hour
before the meeting to find the man I wanted. When
I met him he was full of excitement and said : * Some-
thing has gone wrong ; the men are all saying they
must vote against Redmond/ Then it was evident
that propaganda had been busy to some purpose.

" When Redmond came into his place I said :
' It's all right, Martin McDonagh will second your
motion.' He answered with a characteristic brusque-
ness : ' He needn't trouble ; I am not going to move
it, Devlin and the Bishops are voting against me.'

" He rose immediately the chairman was in hi&
place. ' The amendment which I have on the paper,'
he said, ' embodies the deliberate advice I give to the
Convention. I consulted no one, and could not do
so, being ill. It stands on record on my sole re-
sponsibility. Since entering the building I have
heard that some very important Nationalist repre-
sentatives are against this course — the Catholic
Bishops, Mr. Devlin and others. I must face the
situation, at which I am surprised, and I regret it.
If I proceeded I should probably carry my point on a
division, but the Nationalists would be divided.
Such a division would not carry out the objects I
have in view, therefore, I must avoid pressing my
motion. But I leave it standing upon the paper.
Others will give their advice. I feel that I can be of
no further service to the Convention and will, there-
fore, not move.'

" There was a pause of consternation. The
Chairman intervened and the debate proceeded and
was carried on through the week. . . . No one can
overstate the effect of this episode. Redmond's
personal ascendancy in the Convention had become
very great. . . . The Ulstermen had more than once
expressed their view that if Home Rule were sure to
mean Redmond's rule, their objection to it would be

354 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

materially lessened. Now they saw Redmond thrown
over, and by a combination in which the Clerical
ascendancy, so much distrusted by them, was
paramount."

MR. RONALD M'NEILI/S VERSION.

" For some time Mr. Redmond had given
the impression of being a tired man who had
lost his wonted driving-force. He took little
or no part in the lobbying and canvassing that
was constantly going on behind the scenes in the
Convention ; he appeared to be losing grip as a leader.
But he cannot be blamed for his anxiety to come to
terms with Lord Midleton ; and when he found, no
doubt greatly to his surprise, that a Unionist leader
was ready to abandon Unionist principle and to accept
Dominion Home Rule for Ireland, subject to a single
reservation on the subject of Customs, he naturally
jumped at it and assumed that his followers would do
the same.

" But while Mr. Redmond had been losing ground,
the influence of the Catholic Bishop of Raphoe had
been on the increase, and that able and astute prelate
was entirely opposed to the compromise on which
Mr. Redmond and Lord Midleton were agreed. On
the evening of the i4th of January it came to the
knowledge of Mr. Redmond that when the question
came up for discussion next day, he would find Mr.
Devlin, his principal lieutenant, in league with the
ecclesiastics against him. . . . There was an atmos-
phere of suppressed excitement when the Chairman
took his seat on the isth. Mr. Redmond entered a
few seconds later and took his usual place without
betraying the slightest sign of disturbed equanimity.
The Bishop of Raphoe strode past him, casting to
left and right swift challenging glances. Mr. Devlin
slipped quietly into his seat beside the leader he had

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 355

thrown over, without a word or gesture of greeting. . .
A minute or so of tense pause ensued. Then Mr.
Redmond rose, and in a perfectly even voice and his
usual measured diction, stated that he was aware that
his proposal was repudiated by many of his usual
followers, that the Bishops were against him and some
leading Nationalists, including Mr. Devlin ; that
while he believed if he persisted he would have a
majority, the result would be to split his party, a thing
he wished to avoid ; and that he had therefore decided
not to proceed with his amendment and under these
circumstances felt he could be of no further use to the
Convention in the matter. For a minute or two the
assembly could not grasp the full significance of what
had happened. Then it broke upon them that this
was the fall of a notable leader. . . . Mr. Redmond
took no further part in the work of the Convention ;
his health was failing and the members were startled
by the news of his death on the 6th of March."

John Redmond did, indeed, quit the Convention
Hall never to return. He had been suffering from an
inward disease against which, in any case, he could
not have struggled much longer. But if ever an Irish
leader died of a broken heart (as, woful to confess, is
the normal penalty attached to the distinction), it may
with truth be said that John Redmond died of Mr.
Lloyd George's " Irish Convention," composed in the
main of his own partisans, and that the tragedy is the
only practical result — so far as Ireland is concerned —
for which that ill-omened body will be remembered.
The ghastly attempt to prolong the sittings for some
weeks after his death, and to juggle with the figures
of the divisions so as to represent that something like
a sub-majority vote of the majority had been
engineered, fell absolutely flat in a country where
the Convention only escaped aversion by perishing
of contempt. " Ulster ' stood precisely where she
did, on the rock of a Partition sanctioned by Ireland's

356 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

own " Nationalist ' representatives, and these
worthies, split up between those who would have
clung to Mr. Redmond, and those who dismissed him
to his deathbed, were united only in the destruction
which overtook the entire body of 70 members of the
Convention (with one solitary exception) as soon as
their constituencies got the opportunity of settling
accounts with them at the General Elections, Parlia-
mentary and Local. Mr. Dillon, who had been all
along the masked leader, now became the responsible
leader of " The Party/' but it was only to officiate
as chief mourner at its funeral.

For Mr. Lloyd George the Convention was not so
barren of results. " Ireland might starve but great
George weighed twenty stone." Ireland was duped,
and John Redmond in his grave, but Great Britain
was throbbing with the sight of the United States
despatching her soldiers in millions to the rescue of
England. The Prime Minister had one other
memorable satisfaction. On April Qth, 1918, the
day on which the " Report " of the Convention was
submitted to the Cabinet, and without (as he con-
fessed) doing the unfortunate document the courtesy
of reading it, he announced that his word to Ireland
was to be broken again, and that Conscription was to
be imposed upon Ireland in violation of his solemn
promise to the contrary.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 357

A TRUE " NATIONAL CABINET '

THE resistance to Conscription led to the first and last
occasion on which all descriptions of Nationalists —
Parliamentary, Republican and Labourite — acted
unitedly together. One of the bribes by which
Mr. Lloyd George had secured the silence of the
Hibernian Party, while "the Home Rule Government,"
with a sweeping " Home Rule " majority was being
transformed into a Coalition dominated by Sir E.
Carson, was the promise that Ireland would be
exempted from Conscription. The promise was to
be impudently broken now when the Hibernian
Party had parted with its casting vote. By a grisly
coincidence, on the day when the Report of the Irish
Convention was submitted to the Cabinet, Mr. Lloyd
George rose in the House of Commons to propose
that the Conscription Act be extended to Ireland.
His announcement wrung from me the exclamation :
" That is a declaration of war against Ireland ! " It
also wrought the rank-and-file of the Hibernian Party
into an outburst of real indignation. Mr. Lloyd
George had, however, his answer that put to silence
the falsetto passion of their leaders. He was ready
with quotations from the late Mr. Redmond, in which
he said : " Let me state what is my personal view on
the question of compulsion. I am prepared to say
I will stick at nothing — nothing which is necessary —
in order to win this war," and from his successor, Mr.
Dillon, who added : " Like Mr. Redmond I view the
thing from the point of view of necessity and ex-
pediency. I would not hesitate to support Con-

THE IRISH REVOLUTION

scription to-morrow, if I thought it was necessary to
maintain liberty, and if there was no Conscription we
ran the risk of losing the war." The Prime Minister
had no difficulty in satisfying the condition of
" necessity " by appealing to the desperate emergency
of the moment, when " with American aid we can
save the war, but even with American help we cannot
feel secure." After which he was able to give short
shrift to the present blatant indignation of the
Hibernian leaders and to the spluttering war-cries
of their bemuddled followers.

The fit of hypocritical virtue which always accom-
panies a breach of faith with Ireland by a sanctified
assurance of rewards to come was not missing on the
present occasion. Conscription there must be, to be
enforced within two or three weeks, but, Mr. Lloyd
George sweetly warbled, it was to be washed down
with a new Home Rule Bill, which he only vaguely
adumbrated as one to be founded on the Majority
Report of the Irish Convention ; but inasmuch as he
casually mentioned that he had not yet read the
Majority Report at all, and as the Majority Report
turned out to be a make-believe, which was impartially
despised on all sides, and was, in fact, never heard of
more, the perfidy of breaking the promise Ireland
understood to have been plainly given, was only
aggravated by the accompanying dose of British
hypocrisy. It was too late, however, for the Party
who had parted with their Parliamentary power to
make any impression in Parliament. Their wry faces
made but little impression upon the serried ranks of
the Coalition. It was in Ireland, not in Westminster,
Conscription had to be encountered, and not with
words. It was to gird Ireland up to the terrific trial
to which the Conscription Act challenged her that my
own protest was principally directed :

" Whether wisely or unwisely, all parties of
politicians, both English and Irish, have done their

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 359

worst to deprive my friends and myself of any effectual
power of interfering in Irish affairs, but so long as I
retain my seat in this House at all, I shall not shrink
from the duty of making my protest, no matter how
powerless it may be, against the mad and wicked
crime which you are proposing to-night to perpetrate
upon Ireland. For forty years now Ireland has been
pleading and hungering for peace with England upon
the most moderate terms. For the last eight years
the representatives of the Irish people have had
sovereign power of life and death over this Parliament
under two successive Governments and the only fault
of the Irish people was that they trusted you too much,
and allowed their representatives in this House to use
their tremendous powers — the greatest powers that
Irishmen ever had over your Parliament — only too
feebly and with only too merciful a regard for your
interests. Even when this war broke out Ireland
could have destroyed you. One of your own states-
men then acknowledged that Ireland was the one bright
spot on your horizon. What is Ireland's reward ?
Now, when in your wild ignorance you have taken it
into your heads that the two latest Irish elections
of South Armagh and Waterford show1 that the
spirit of Sinn Fein is dying away, you have
the country disarmed and are holding it down
under Martial Law. You have your jails packed with
political prisoners whom you are treating as common
felons for the self-same offence of drilling a Volunteer
Army, for which two of the most distinguished leaders
of the Ulster Volunteers have been promoted to be
Cabinet Ministers. We have witnessed to-night an-
other exhibition of the old trick of mixing up the
promise of a milk and water Home Rule Bill which
you know will come to nothing with a proposal of
brutal military coercion by which you ask the Irish
people to shed torrents of their blood — I suppose by
way of gratitude to the Prime Minister for casting^to

1 Five Hibernians were returned.

•a

360 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the winds, as he did to-night, another solemn promise
to the Irish nation. ... If you expect co-operation
or gratitude all I can tell you is you will receive nothing
and deserve nothing but the detestation of a people
who only a few months ago were all but on their knees
proffering you their friendship and their allegiance.
I say all this with bitter regret, because you have
compelled me to renounce those dreams of a true and
permanent reconciliation between these two countries
with which I can truly say my thoughts have been
occupied night and day for the past fifteen years. . . .
I do not want on an occasion of this kind to accentuate
differences amongst Irish Nationalists. You have
perhaps by this proposal to-night done something to
lessen those differences and to ensure that however
serious our differences have been and are, on this
question of resistance to Conscription you will find
all Irish Nationalists the world over who are worth
their salt standing shoulder to shoulder against you.
I dare say you have machine guns enough to beat
down armed resistance, although you may not find it
as easy a job as the Prime Minister imagines, but even
if you succeed your troubles with Ireland shall be only
beginning. Your own experience ought to have
taught you that, in the 800 years you have spent in
trying, you have never yet completely conquered
Ireland and you never shall. What you will do, I am
afraid, will be to drive resistance into other channels
with which, with all your military power, you will
never be able to deal, and you will be digging a gulf
of hatred between the two countries which no living
man will see bridged over again. I hate to say it in
your present hour of trouble, but in my solemn belief
it is the truth. By this Bill, instead of winning soldiers
for your army, you are calling down upon your heads
the execrations of the entire Irish race in America and
Australia and Canada, as well as in every honest Irish
home, if not among the five hundred thousand men

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 361

of Irish blood in your own military camps, and you
are driving millions of the best men of our race to
turn away their eyes from this Parliament for ever."

Never was perfidy more swiftly punished. To
the demand for her best blood, coming from the
Government which had just broken its word twice
over, by the fraudulent Convention, and by the
violation of its pledge to exempt her from Conscription,
Ireland made answer that her blood would be spent
rather in resisting the decree of her oppressors, and
to the world's amaze, it was the all but unarmed
"small nationality" that succeeded, and it was the
Power counting its soldiers by millions that went down
in the encounter. The happy idea of turning that
resistance into a heavensent bond of National Unity
occurred to the Lord Mayor of Dublin (Aid. O'Neill),
who can truly be described as the only Irishman of
our time, who lived through long years of civil war,
and belonged to no Party, but gave noble service to
them all. He summoned a Mansion House Con-
ference at which the leaders of all sections met around
the same board to organize the resistance. The
Conference was so happily constituted as to deserve
the description of it given by the official organ of Sinn
Fein — The Irish Bulletin — that " it formed a National
Cabinet. " Its members were — For the Sinn Fein
Party, Mr. De Valera and Mr. Arthur Griffith ; for
the Hibernian Party — Mr. Dillon and Mr. Devlin ;
for the All-for-Ireland Party, Mr. T. M. Healy and
myself ; and for the Irish Labour Party, Messrs.
Johnston, O'Brien and Egan. The country was fused
as it was never fused before by the common danger
into a glowing National unity so complete that any
order countersigned by * the National Cabinet '
would have been obeyed without question by every
Nationalist of the race.

Its sittings gave me my first opportunities of getting
acquainted with Mr. De Valera. His transparent

362 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

sincerity, his gentleness and equability captured the
hearts of us all. His gaunt frame and sad eyes deeply
buried in their sockets had much of the Dantesque
suggestion of " the man who had been in hell." His
was that subtle blend of virility and emotion which
the Americans mean when they speak of " a magnetic
man." Even the obstinacy (and it was sometimes
trying) with which he would defend a thesis, as though
it were a point in pure mathematics, with more than
the French bigotry for logic, became tolerable enough
when, with a boyish smile, he would say : " You will
bear with me, won't you ? You know I am an old
schoolmaster." On the other hand the Memphis
Sphinx could not well have been more mute than
was Mr. Arthur Griffith during these consultations,
but his silence had something of the placid strength
and assuredness of that granitic Egyptian countenance.
Nobody acquainted with his abundant and excellent
work as a publicist will suspect that he said nothing
because he had nothing to say. So long as all went
well, he was content to listen. He raised no diffi-
culties. He gave no hint of personal preferences or
fads. Throughout our sittings, Mr. Healy was con-
siderate and conciliatory to a degree that took away
the breath of Mr. Dillon himself, and he contributed
to our proceedings in the form of an Address to
President Wilson, a statement of Ireland's historic
case which will deserve to live in our National archives
as a State paper of classic value. On the day of our
first meeting at the Mansion House, the Irish Bishops
were meeting also at Maynooth, twelve miles away.
It will always be counted among my most consolatory
memories that it was my good fortune to frame for
submission to the Bishops a resolution outlining the
form of National Resistance to be adopted. It was
Mr. De Valera who drew up the words of the Anti-
Conscription Pledge which we suggested should be
solemnly taken in every parish in the country on the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 363

following Sunday. It was, indeed, a drastic one,
and led to a logomachy between its author and Mr.
Dillon so prolonged that I had to appeal to the Lord
Mayor to force a decision, or the Bishops would have
dispersed and our deputation would arrive too late.
The necessity for haste was justified. When the
deputation reached Maynooth, the Bishops had con-
cluded their meeting with a resolution energetic
enough as a Platonic protest against Conscription but
as water unto wine compared with the specific declara-
tion of war of which our deputation were the bearers.
Fortunately their Lordships reassembled and adopted
with but few changes even of words the substance
of our recommendations " solemnly pledging the
Nation to resist Conscription by the most effectual
means at their disposal," and inaugurating the National
resistance by a Mass of Intercession in every church
in the island to be followed by the public administra-
tion of the Pledge. The Bishops, who have not
always been so fortunate in their dealings with Irish
political affairs, deserve the lasting gratitude of the
nation for the fortitude (and it was greater than persons
without intimate secret knowledge could estimate)
with which they faced all the perils of saving their
race. It was the Bishops' solemn benediction to the
resistance " by the most effectual means at the dis-
posal of the Irish people " which killed Conscription.
Next, of course, to the known determination of
the youth of the country to be worthy of their lead and
to resist unto blood. Even the appalling experiences
of the war let loose later on by Sir Hamar Greenwood
will scarcely enable posterity to realize in what a
perfect ecstacy of self-sacrifice the young men were
preparing to meet Conscription foot to foot. The
Government on its own side seemed not less resolute.
Every regiment that could be spared was hurried over
to Ireland, and Field Marshal French, fresh from the
horrors of the Flanders battlefields, was sent over as

364 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Commander-in-Chief to superintend the operations
which were to begin " in a week or two." Early on
the morning of the day on which the Mansion House
Conference was to hold its first meeting,. I was
awakened in my bedroom at the Shelbourne Hotel
by the noise of a military band escorting Field-Marshal
French on his arrival by the morning mail from
England. As he stepped out of his motor-car to
enter the Hotel, I heard him saluted by waiters,
porters and chambermaids from almost every window
of the Hotel (once the most aristocratic in the metro-
polis) with shouts of " Up, Easter Week ! ' " Up,
the rebels ! ' The outburst so impressed the new
Commander-in-Chief that he took his meals in his
bedroom, and only from the hands of his orderly.
The Head Waiter once entering his room was asked
what did the people really mean to do about Con-
scription. " Well, my lord/' was the quiet reply,
' we are seventy men in this house. We have all
made our peace with God. You may have our dead
bodies, but you'll get nothing else." Another ex-
perience of mine will help better than any wealth of
detail to an understanding of the spirit now enkindled.
General Gage, an honest-hearted Englishman, who
came over to Ireland for the first time to take command
of the Conscription campaign in the South, called
upon me to relate with an almost comical surprise
what had befallen him the previous day while he was
motoring in the neighbourhood of Mitchelstown with
the High Sheriff for the County (Mr. Philip Harold
Barry) who had himself publicly and with arm uplifted
taken the pledge to resist Conscription. They
questioned a priest whom they met riding down from
the Galtee Mountains as to how feeling ran among
the people. " I can't do better," was the reply of the
priest, ' than tell you what happened up the road
there a minute ago. I met old Darby Ryan who
complained that the jackdaws had been playing havoc

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 365

with his field of young corn. ' Father/ he said, ' I
went for the ould gun to have a shot at the divvels,
but I found I had only five cartridges left, and, Father/
he said, * I'm going to keep them for the first five
sojers that come to take away my boy/ Such was
the spirit, it must with truth be owned, which alone
could have brought the Ministers of England to repent
their breach of faith on Conscription, but " in a week
or two " it decided them to drop a campaign which
would assuredly have cost them a dozen casualties in
their own ranks at the least for every conscript they
could ever succeed in transporting whole to Flanders.

With the success of united action, as against
Conscription, came the more and more insistent cry
for an extended unity from the crowds that night and
day surged around our closed doors at the Mansion
House. They could guess but vaguely what was
going on within, but Sinn Fein, Labour and ourselves
were in an accord that was on no occasion broken.
The Labour delegates (two of whom have since become
conspicuous figures in the formation of an Irish Labour
Party in the Dail) were helpful in council and fearless
in their preparations for resistance. One of our
colleagues alone stood coldly aloof. Mr. Dillon did
not like the Conference and was with reluctance drawn
into it. He regarded every practical line of action
suggested with suspicion and alarm. Mr. De Valera's
own opinion that the young men would infinitely
prefer open fight with arms in their hands to the small
torments of passive resistance, he received with a long
face which made it clear that the innumerable applica-
tions from the country for instructions could only be
answered by the leaders of each section for themselves.
His only active concern with our affairs was the deter-
mination to retain his hold on the administration of
the vast funds contributed on our first appeal. He
was apparently obsessed with the suspicion that they
would be spent on armaments. Even were that not

366 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

so, he always held to the control of funds as the control
of the sinews of war. And as neither Mr. Healy nor
I were able to devote the necessary time to the business
of the Financial Committee he objected with energy
to any representative of the All-for-Ireland League
being substituted in our place. Mr. Devlin, while
more cautious, imitated the detachment of his
principal, if he was, indeed, any longer his principal.
Before the National Cabinet was long at work, Field
Marshal French, who had by this time become Viceroy,
Struck a blow which was excessively unworthy of an
honest soldier. On the pretence that he had dis-
covered some new and blood-curdling " German
Plot," he tore away Mr. De Valcra and Mr. Griffith
from our Conference table and shut them up with a
hundred of their chief lieutenants without any form
of trial in English prisons. The " German Plot '
was obviously, as it is now universally confessed to
have been, a villainous fabrication. When at our next
meeting, I proposed a resolution protesting to the
world against the foul blow struck at our two colleagues,
with the manifest object of breaking up the Mansion
House Conference, Mr. Dillon protested hotly : " That
is a monstrous Sinn Fein resolution ; I will have nothing
to do with it. What evidence have we before
us ? " The " evidence/' one might suppose, was
rather due from the official concocters of the Plot. It
was forthcoming only too promptly for them in the
declaration of the retiring Lord Lieutenant, Lord
Wimborne, that he had never heard of the famous
" New German Plot," and flatly disbelieved the whole
story. When long afterwards, Lord French was
forced to disgorge his only " evidence," it turned out
that " the New German Plot " was a stale rehash of
certain communications with Germany prior to the
Easter Week Insurrection of more than two years
before.

The coup d'etat did not break up the National

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 367

Cabinet. The places of the two abducted Sinn Fe*in
leaders were quietly taken by two of their colleagues — -
Prof. Eoin MacNeill and Aid. Tom Kelly. But by
this time there had occurred a new event which
rendered the hopes of any larger National Unity
darker and darker. A vacancy having occurred in
East Caran, Mr. Griffith had been put forward as a
candidate, and Mr. Dillon started an obscure local
Hibernian against him. He did something very much
more discreditable ; he refused to move the writ, and,
under cover of his technical power of obstructing an
immediate election, flooded the county with Hibernian
organizers of the old truculent type, and proposed to
carry on a campaign of bitter personal abuse and
violence against Sinn Fein until such time as the
organizers should report it safe to issue the writ. Mr.
Griffith explained what was happening in a letter
written to me a few days before his deportation to
England by Field-Marshal French :

Nationality,

6 Harcourt St., Dublin,

May nth, 1918.

Dear Mr. O'Brien, — As you will have seen from
the press Mr. Dillon has refused my offer of a
referendum of the people on the election for East
Cavan. At the same time he refuses to have the writ
moved, but he is pouring into East Cavan all the
thugs connected with his organisation. As his speech
last Sunday showed, he is determined to make this a
bitter election and to prolong it indefinitely.

Such a prolongation will be disastrous to the
constituency from the National view-point. If the
election be fought now, there will be little bitterness
left behind. If it be prolonged, as Dillon seeks to
prolong it, there will be feud and faction. -

I am advised, as by enclosed from lawyers on our
side, that two M.P.s certifying to the Speaker during

368 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the recess the death of a fellow member can force the
issue of the writ. I would be obliged, therefore, if
you would yourself or by two members of your party
have the writ issued in this fashion.

I trust Mrs. O'Brien is better.
Yours sincerely,

ARTHUR GRIFFITH."

We, of course, promptly exercised our power of
defeating the Hibernian manoeuvre to prevent an
election and were in hopes that the foul play practised
against Mr. Griffith by the inventors " of the New
German Plot " would avert all danger of the scandal
of a contested election at such a moment in Cavan.
At the next meeting of the Mansion House Conference
I pointed out what a mortal blow would be struck at
the resistance to Conscription (as to which the Govern-
ment was still anxiously calculating the chances) if
a Nationalist Constituency were to reject a man who
had just been gagged and deported by Dublin Castle
for the very reason that he was one of the chief
organizers of the resistance, and I appealed to Mr.
Dillon in the most conciliatory terms at my command
to do a signal service to National Unity, and one that
would be remembered to the credit of his Party, by
allowing Mr. Griffith to be returned unopposed *
The reply was that he had come there on an invitation
to discuss the Conscription issue, and that alone, and
would withdraw from the Conference if any other
topic was introduced. He went off to Cavan to war
upon his imprisoned colleague, flushed with the
results of the two most recent elections (in South
Armagh, the cradle of " the Mollies " and in Waterford
where Mr. Redmond's son had been returned in his
place through a humane feeling more delicate than he
had experienced from his own friends in his last visit
to the hall of the " Irish Convention ") and full of the
fatuous confidence that the triumph was going to be
repeated on a more grandiose scale in East Cavan.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 369

Here are the terms in which he saw fit to speak
during the electioneering campaign of his deported
colleague on the Mansion House Conference :

" The Sinn Fein party have elected to put forward
as a candidate for East Cavan the most offensive and
scurrilous critic of the Irish Party in their ranks.
For a long period Mr. Griffith has poured forth a
torrent of the most disgusting and infamous abuse and
calumny on the Irish Party as a whole and upon
individual members of that party and therefore it
would have been impossible to pick out a candidate
more calculated to add bitterness to that fight. In
addition to that they have started their campaign by
raising the most contentious issues that divide the
Party from Sinn Fein and by pouring out a flood of
misstatements and calumny upon the Party and its
policy."

The curious student of Mr. Dillon's speeches will
find that this " flood and torrent of disgusting and
infamous abuse ' constitutes almost word for word
his stereotyped defence to specific allegations as to his
Party's public actions which he never attempted ta
answer by going into equally concrete particulars.
The charge of " scurrility ' was a specially
ludicrous one against Mr. Griffith who, of all the
publicists of his time, was distinguished for the
measure and dignity of his words. The real point
of the Hibernian leader's vituperation was that Mr.
Griffith had given to the public in his journal the
series of secret telegrams in which the three members
for Limerick were caught soliciting a Castle Office for
one of their confederates by the most abject methods
of the parliamentary place-beggar. Mr. Griffith had
committed the still more unforgivable sin of giving
publication to a highly confidential letter of Lady
Aberdeen to " Dear Mr. Brayden " (the Editor of the
Freeman's Journal , thirteen of whose staff had already
been rewarded with handsome Government jobs) in

370 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

which the Lord Lieutenant's wife revealed a spirit
of political partisanship so undisguised that its publica-
tion necessitated her husband's resignation of the
Viceroyalty. Stern methods of political warfare, both
of them, no doubt, but both of them referring to
concerns of deep public interest, and both of them
incontestably true ; and assuredly no more deserving
the epithets of " scurrility/' or of " torrents of the
most infamous calumny," than Edmund Burke would
have deserved them for his impeachment of Warren
Hastings. Above all, the recklessness of such an
attitude at such a moment towards a colleague locked
up in an English jail on the strength of a truly 4 in-
famous calumny " which might have cost him his life !

Where he might have reaped the gratitude of a
nation, the new Hibernian leader only earned a just
humiliation. Mr. Griffith was elected by an over-
whelming majority for East Cavan, or Conscription
would have been to a certainty pressed at any cost of
bloodshed.

One last effort was made to bend Mr. Dillon.
The yearning cry still came from the country : ' Why
dissolve a National Cabinet, which has begun so well,
and whose united lead every parish in the island will
follow ? Why should not the Mansion House Con-
ference confront English Ministers with a combination
of the young men and the old, of the new weapons and
the old, in a movement in which all honest men of the
race could gladly venture their fortunes and their
lives ? ' It had become an accepted electioneering
cry on both sides that there could be only two
alternative policies for the country to choose between :
what was called " the Constitutional movement " and
what was called " the unconstitutional movement."
Nothing could be more untrue to the realities of the
case. All that had been won for Ireland in our time
was won neither by constitutional means nor by
unconstitutional means, pure and simple, but by a

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 371

judicious combination of the two, according to the
country's changing circumstances. That, indeed, had
been the history of Irish patriotism for ages. The
writer laid before the Mansion House Conference a
detailed proposal to take advantage of their unexampled
opportunity at that moment to find some wider basis
of agreement on which all Parties might co-operate in
their several ways. * If our Sinn Fein colleagues, >r
it was urged, " can only see their way to even an
experimental toleration of true Dominion Inde-
pendence (which differs little except in name from
Sovereign Independence) no substantial divergence
would remain between Nationalists of any school,
and it could be affirmed, not altogether without know-
ledge, that, in England's present critical situation.
Dominion Independence would become practical
politics. Should, however, Dominion Independence
by agreement be found impossible during the war,
all Nationalists would in that event be in agreement
to press for the only remaining alternative — viz.,
representation for Ireland at the Peace Congress —
and would, I take it, be agreed also in breaking off
all connection with the Westminister Parliament in
the meantime. "

Was it still practicable to weld " constitutionalists ""
and " unconstitutionalists ' ' together in a movement
as circumspect as ParnelFs and as daring as Easter
Week ? It was not possible to answer dogmatically
in the affirmative. But the omens were almost all
auspicious. The representatives of Sinn F&n,
although cordially sympathetic, had no authority to
bind their body without anxious and complicated
consultations. But there were as yet none of the
obstacles that proved afterwards all but insur-
mountable. There were no commitments to an
Irish Republic, beyond Mr. De Valera's speeches in
Clare ; there was no oath to trouble the consciences
of the young men. Most of the Sinn Fe"in leaders

372 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

were in prison and their newspapers suppressed, and
those who remained were face to face with the ruthless
military repression just announced by Lord French.
Even in the electoral sense, Sinn Fein still only counted
as 5 in a Nationalist representation of 81. The
representatives of Labour would assuredly have closed
with the proposition. The Bishops, fresh from the
triumph of their perilous stand against Conscription,
were not likely to miss the opportunity of doing
another magnificent service to the nation. Mr.
Devlin, though he hesitated to separate himself from
Mr. Dillon so soon after he had separated himself
from Mr. Redmond, was evincing unmistakeable
signs of tractability. Only one voice was raised to
forbid even a discussion of the project. Mr. Dillon
could not find it in the bond. He once more pro-
tested that he was brought there on the invitation
of the Lord Mayor to discuss one solitary issue —
Conscription — and would not stand the introduction
of any other proposition ; and as it had been the
somewhat improvident rule of the Conference to
press no decision that was not to be an unanimous
one, there was an end.

An end, also, of the last hope of rehabilitating any

' constitutional ' movement capable of purification

or of purchasing Ireland's freedom otherwise than by

the shedding of streams of Ireland's best blood. The

* National Cabinet/' like so many other projects of

high promise for the nation, fell to pieces at the touch

of one unlucky hand.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 3?3

CHAPTER XXIV

WAS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO RECONSTRUCT THE
PARLIAMENTARY MOVEMENT ?

FOR six months before the Convention came into
being, the question whether the Parliamentary Move-
ment could be preserved or was worth preserving
had been agitating the minds of my colleagues and
myself.

When the constancy of Cork — unique, so far as
I know, in the electoral history of any country —
compelled me to return to public life, against all my
natural cravings to be once for all free from those
little villainies of politics which no party and no
country can hope altogether to shake off, I pledged
myself not to withdraw again so long as Cork might
want me. Events now succeeded each other which
might well seem to absolve me from the pledge, and
to show that the suppression of free speech by physical
violence and in the newspapers which had drowned
my voice in the rest of the country was beginning to
invade the free field still left to me within the broad
boundaries of the county and city of Cork. The City
Municipal elections, the Co. Council elections, even
the Parliamentary elections were beginning to go
against the All-for-Ireland League. These petty
choppings and changings never disturbed in its depths
the almost mystic bond between the masses of the
people and myself, which indeed survives all permuta-
tions and revolutions to this hour, if a thousand tender
indications are not deceptive. An unpopularity which
had to be laboriously organized and subsidised to
make the slightest show and which in all these years

374 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

did not succeed in seducing half a dozen renagadoes
from our ranks whose names are worth recalling from
oblivion was, for those who knew,' a matter of infinitely
small concern in itself. It, however, achieved two or
three local successes sufficiently boisterous to enable
malice, with some show of reason, to persuade the
opportunists of Britain that the hali-a-million of pur
sang Nationalists of the South who had hitherto stood
fast by the policy of " Conference, Conciliation and
Consent" against a world of discouragements, were
at long last deserting their standard.

How lying was the pretence, I took the first
opportunity of putting to the test. Owing to
intricacies of corrupt ward politics too scurvy for
explanation here, the All-f or- Ireland majority of the
Corporation of Cork was displaced at the Municipal
Elections in the beginning of 1914 and the victors in
their intoxication boasted that Cork had gone over to
the Hibernians and challenged me, in language of
incredible scurrility to resign my seat and test at the
polls whether the confidence of the people of Cork in
me was not gone for ever. Under ordinary conditions,
of course, the challenge would be dismissed with a
smile. So effectual, however, had become for years
the obstruction of the ordinary channels of public
opinion that no means short of the figures at a con-
tested election, or the verdict of a jury in an action for
libel, were open to me to establish, in the eyes of the
country at large, the falsehood of any specific accusa-
tion amongst the imputations and insinuations daily
showered upon my head. My readiness to avail
myself ot the most Democratic of all tests — that of an
appeal to my constituents, since no other was left to
me — actually came to be imputed as the most heinous
item in my table of sins. This time, however, their
tipsy insolence betrayed my adversaries into being
themselves the challengers, and there was but one
answer. I resigned my seat and presented myself

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 375

for re-election on a programme expressly reiterating
in every particular our proposals for the appeasement
of Ulster. The vaunting challengers of a week before
crept abjectly back into their burrows, and the great
constituency of Cork — the largest and (perhaps not
on that account alone) the most coveted in the country
— re-elected me without an opposing voice.

In the summer of the same year followed the
elections for the Co. Councils and the District Councils
— that is to say a few weeks after the representatives
of Ireland had by their votes accepted the Amending
Bill for the separation of the Six Counties and the
All-for-Ireland group had made the one solitary
protest that was heard from Ireland. Any one
acquainted with all that the Irish people now know
might suppose that it would be those who had just
finally voted for Partition who would appear before
their countrymen in sackcloth and ashes, and those
whose protest had at least saved for the future Ireland's
honour as a nation who would be greeted with the
nation's gratitude. In the country's dire ignorance
of what happened, it was the other way about. It was
" The Party " redhanded from the crime of Partition
who were acclaimed as the saviours of the country ;
it was on the strength of the diabolical lie that we had
" voted against Home Rule ' ' that some six hundred
of our friends in the Co. Councils and District Councils
of the South were arraigned as " fact ion ists ' and
" traitors " ; and to the shame of Irish gullibility it
was this outrageous electoral fraud that carried the
day. The cry was only raised at the last moment
when it was too late to make the bewildered electors
aware of the truth, and by a verdict which the universal
Irish race would now remorsefully recant, it was the
mutilators of Ireland who were held justified, and it
was the candidates of the group who alone had lifted
a voice against the infamy who were borne down as
traitors. The success of the Hibernians was of the

2B

376 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

narrowest, and could not have been achieved at all
without the countenance of some half-a-dozen power-
ful Catholic dignitaries who must have been sufficiently
punished if they discovered the practices of the corrupt
secret tyranny of which they made themselves the
unconscious ministers.1 But the mischief was done
of persuading the rest of Ireland and the watchful
politicians at Westminster that the last fortresses,
hitherto immune from the power of the Board of
Erin, had fallen. By no matter how narrow a majority,
the local government of vast regions of the South was
placed for the next seven years at the mercy of men
who refused the smallest honour or office which their
votes could deny to their brother Nationalists and
more mischievously still, deprived the 30,000 Pro-
testants of Cork of their solitary representative on the
Co. Council — an All-for-Irelander of much local
usefulness — who was ejected to the cry of " Crom-
wellian Spawn ! " and " Orange Dog ! ' The saddest
thought of all was that results like this were a wicked
libel upon the mass of the Southern Catholics who
were, and are, kindliness and religious tolerance
incarnate.

Our Parliamentary strongholds remained im-
pregnable, but were not to remain so long. Our
band at Westminster, thin as were its ranks, had all
the advantages that compactness, mutual loyalty, and
self abnegation could give it. Ours was a blithe and
dauntless company whose beadroll it will always be a
comfort to tell — the two Healys, Tim and Maurice,
Parliament men of the first rank, who need play second

1 One of our foremost candidates was tempted — in vain — by
the offer of a Resident Magistracy. Another, who was rewarded
with a Coronership, made this jaunty excuse for turning his coat :
"|Of course, O'Brien is right, but he has no jobs to give." A
third — a prosperous merchant, and one of the most upright of
men — was sought to be intimidated by the awful threat (none
the less shocking that it proved a telum imbelle sine ictu) that
•' the grass would be made to grow opposite the door of his shop."

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 377

to no living men, Irish or English, on the benches of
the House of Commons — the one for brilliancy and
the other for solidity ; Captain D. D. Sheehan, one
who had turned more farmers into proprietors than
the whole Hibernian Party put together, and had been
one of the prime movers in the settlement of 50,000
labourers in cosy cottages and allotments ; James
Gilhooly, of Bantry, who represented the finest
traditions of the old Fenian days, and had a place in
the hearts of his constituents from which it used to
be truly said, all the united power of Parneil and his
captains could not dislodge him, had they ever chosen
to try ; Eugene Crean, in whom the bitterest of our
adversaries was ready to recognise " the heart's blood
of an honest man," one with the tenderheartedness
of a child and the fearlessness of a Nemean lion ;
John Walsh, a merchant of eminence, with an un-
surpassable knowledge of the people and of their
affairs ; and " Paddy " Guiney, who brought into the
movement the rough-rider breeziness and * pep '
of American Democracy. Among the non-parliamen-
tarians as well we were able to count upon towers
of strength — Father Richard Barrett, the foremost
of our clerical friends in mind and heart, who was
untimely stricken with blindness, but to the day of
his death remained for us a sort of sanctuary lamp
whose internal light was one not to be extinguished ;
Alderman J. C. Forde, who for twenty years had been
the mainstay of Nationality in Cork in its successive
phases — in arms or in the broadest spirit of Con-
ciliation— and in all its phases was the organizer of
victory, who never advertised, and the unshakeable
friend, who was as constant when the heavens frowned
as when the sun was at its meridian ; Jerry Howard
and William McDonald, in turn chairmen of County
Council, who were the real rulers of a province and were
governing its affairs with a wisdom and geniality full
of joyous promise for the new race of native owners

378 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

who were beginning to be the possessors of the land ;
Mr. Joseph Hosford, the typical Protestant All-for-
Irelander, whose steadfastness justified my warmest
faith in our Protestant countrymen, had they only
imitated his outspokenness in the acceptable time ;
Mr. Laurence Casey, the founder of the National
Insurance Association in Dublin, reliable as his
ancestral " Boys of Wexford," who made the name
of 'Ninety-Eight immortal and straight as the pike-
staffs twelve feet long with which they drove home
their thrusts ; Mr. Dan O 'Donovan of Limerick,
afterwards barbarously murdered by the Black-and-
Tans — where am I to stop in a gazette that can only
contain one out of as many thousands of devoted
friends, the bare echo of whose names makes my
pulses still tingle ?

So long as, with such auxiliaries as these, our title
to speak for the fairest region of Nationalist Ireland —
that which had been the focus of all previous struggles
and was to be again the focus of the struggle that
followed — could not be disputed, it was a duty to
labour on against all odds until the remainder of the
country could have an opportunity of understanding.
In the midst of our own camp that title was now to be
seriously compromised. The deaths of two of our
members created vacancies during the critical months
that followed our reverses at the County and District
elections. In the first of these constituencies, none
but an Ail-for-Irelander had any prospect of being
elected ; but the evil Hibernian habit of regarding
seats in Parliament as hereditary possessions had so
far eaten its way into our own ranks, that the candidate
returned, although an All-for-Irelander like his de-
ceased brother, represented not so much a principle
as the predominance of " a long-tailed family." A
more calamitous breach was to follow before many
months, and — a wayward fate would have it — as the
result of the death of the member for West Cork,

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 379

James Gilhooly, who was a friend as true as ever poet,
sang of, and, like the old Fenian hero that he was,
would have given his blood drop by drop rather than
that the scramble for his seat should add to our
thickening troubles. The absurd thing was that
the chief disturber was a medical student from a
Mental Hospital in Birmingham, who was an All-for-
Irelander more orthodox than myself, and in that
infallible faith proceeded to split the All-forlreland
vote by standing motu proprio as a candidate himself.
This, as the son of a doctor of much popularity in
one of our most solid voting places (Schull), he was
unfortunately in a position to do.

The candidature of the crank from the Birmingham
Mental Hospital was only one of the multiple signs of
the demoralization and decomposition of the Parlia-
mentary movement which the West Cork election was
to exhibit. To the crazy rival candidate from Bir-
mingham, more Catholic than the Pope — more All-
for-Irelander than the All-for-Ireland League — was
added a local Hibernian solicitor, who in defiance of
Mr. Redmond 's expressed public orders, persisted
in profiting by the Split for parochial purposes of his
own ; an Orange Sinn Feiner from Belfast, without
any authority from Sinn Fein, who a couple of months
afterwards reverted to the bitterest Orangeism ; and,
to complete the incredible catalogue, a Bishop, more
Redmondite than Mr. Redmond, who issued a mani-
festo insisting that Mr. Redmond had not yet received
a sufficiently blind trust from the country, but shortly
after the election turned a violent Sinn Feiner himself,
and from a violent Sinn Feiner reacted to denounce
Sinn Fein more violently still and within the next
few years was destined to undergo half a dozen new
transmigrations — "everything by turns and nothing
long " — from Sinn Fein to Anti- Sinn-Fein and back
again in an equally nonsensical manner. To his
Lordship belongs the triste glory of striking the last
blow at the existence of the Parliamentary movement.

380 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

It was Bishop Coholan's ill-advised intervention
on the eve of the polling that turned a scale already
heavily weighted enough against us. His electioneering
harangue was all the more indefensible that it was
delivered on the peculiarly solemn day of his Con-
secration, and on the occasion of a purely religious
presentation to him, by a deputation more than half
of whom — had he, an eminent Maynooth scholiarch,
unversed in the ways of the world or of politics, only
known it — were enthusiastic All-for-Irelanders as well
as fervid Catholics. How distressing the episode was
may be judged from the fact that the Bishop's own
elder brother — a Canon of the Diocese and Parish
Priest of Bantry — who had been and remained one
of the foremost friends of the All-for-Ireland League
in West Cork, felt it his duty to quit the assembly
while the glorification of an utterly discredited
Hibernianism was in progress. The pronounce-
ment of the new Bishop, however, had its effect upon
a number of the younger priests who were making
up their minds to forsake the falling fortunes of
Hibernianism.

Our candidate was Mr. Frank Healy, a barrister
still interned in England, who was chosen because
he seemed to combine the conciliatory spirit of an
All-for-Irelander with something of the romantic
charm of Sinn Fein. He had been snapped up in the
wild orgy of Martial Law that followed the Rising of
Easter Week, although everybody except the Court-
martial knew that with that enterprise he had no
relations, overt or secret. He was still under the
restrictions of a conditional internment in Bourne-
mouth, and his attempt to obtain leave to visit the
constituency before the election gave rise to a stroke
of governmental foul-play, which was the crowning
disgrace of the foul practices from all sides of which
we were the victims. That crafty financier, Mr.
Herbert Samuel, who had fobbed off the fearful and

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 381

wonderful finances of the Home Rule Bill on the
Hibernian Party, was guilty of a piece of execrably
bad taste in an endeavour to compensate them. In
collusion with a questioner from the Hibernian
benches, he insinuated that, in his application to him,
as Home Secretary, for permission to vist West Cork
for the election campaign, Mr. Frank Healy had
really been putting in an abject petition for mercy,
and the calumny was emphasized in scare headings
in the Board of Erin Press and placarded at every
cross-roads in the constituency. Finally, in this most
topsy-turvy of contests, it fell out that the Protestant
farmers and their clergymen, who formed a con-
siderable element of the constituency, voted against
Mr. Frank Healy because he was a Sinn Feiner and
the Sinn Fein priests because he was not.

" For a* that, an* a' that " — the Bishop's unseemly
intervention, an' a* that — the votes actually cast for
All-for-Ireland were 2,120 as against 1,868 for the
candidate of the Board of Erin, being an All-for-
Ireland majority of 252. But 370 of the All-for-
Ireland votes having been thrown away upon the
candidate of the Birmingham Mental Hospital, the
Hibernian was enabled to succeed, as a minority
member, by a majority of 118. Mr. Redmond (who
had deprecated the contest in West Cork) was so
transported by this sorry triumph as to brag in England
that " there was no longer any alternative policy before
the country, nor even an alternative leader " ; Mr.
Dillon, with the perspicacity that never failed him,
saw in the return of the minority member the first
flush of a second spring of popularity for " The
Party." My own reading of the event, in my remarks
at the declaration of the poll in Bantry, if less poetic,
was to be more tragically justified :

" They (All-for-Irelanders) had done their part
by Ireland so long as even the stump of a sword was
left in their hands against a combination of influences

382 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

from the Extreme Right to the Extreme Left such as
might well have discouraged the stoutest hearts. . . .
It would be idle to minimise the gravity of the decision
of yesterday, although, as the figures proved it was
only come to by a minority of the electors who voted,
and although it was due to influences which they all
understood in Ireland but which would be fatally
misunderstood in England. All he could hope was
that the result would not mark the end of any honest
constitutional movement for our time, and that those
electors of West Cork who had done the mischief
would not have reason to lament their work for many
a bitter year to come."

The West Cork election turned out to be, truly,
the death-blow of the Parliamentary movement. It
was the last time the chaste war-cry of the Hibernians :
1 Up, the Mollies ! " was ever heard in triumph in
the South. A week or two afterwards, Mr. Asquith
after long fumbling threw down the reins of power.
That extraordinary mtnage a trots — Mr. Lloyd George,
Mr. Bonar Law and Sir E. Carson — were installed
in his room without a protesting voice from the
Hibernian benches. The Home Rule of the Glad-
stone tradition was at an end for ever. It will always
be open to debate, whether, had the result in West
Cork gone the other way, it might not have been still
possible to regenerate what was loosely called " the
constitutional movement ' by a combination of the
principles of Conciliation as between creeds and
classes, which was before long to carry all before it
in the minds of all enlightened Irishmen, with the
young energy and purity of purpose represented by
Sinn Fein. The Irish Republic was still unheard of,
save for its meteor flight in Easter Week. While the
Sinn Fein internees in the English prisons sternly
resented any aid from the Parliamentarians whose
leader had ' expressed his horror and detestation '
of the rebels awaiting their doom at the hands of Sir

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 383

John Maxwell's Courts-martial, I received, while the
West Cork campaign was still in progress, two letters
signed by the leaders of the 600 internees at Frongoch
(among the signatories being those of Mr. Richard J.
Mulcahy, the subsequent Minister of Defence in the
Republican Cabinet and of the " Head Campleader,"
Mr. Michael Staines, afterwards one of the members
for Dublin in Ddil Eireanri) invoking my aid in the
exposure of their prison treatment. When one or
two Republican madcaps in Cork secretly confederated
with the Hibernians in wrecking the candidature of
their brother-internee, Mr. Frank Healy, one of the
earliest pioneers of Sinn Fein, I received a message from
Mr. Arthur Griffith, the future President of the Irish
Provisional Government, dated from Reading Jail,
where a large body of Sinn Fein prisoners were de-
tained, expressing on behalf of all his brother-prisoners,
with one exception, their reprobation of these unholy
intrigues.

" Re our friend Frank Healy," Mr. Griffith said,
1 I think the whole business has been hideously mis-
managed by our friends Pirn,1 Tom Curtin and others.
Tom Curtin's pronouncement was an entirely un-
authorised statement and has caused considerable
annoyance among us. I think Sinn Fein should have
remained absolutely aloof and I fear that not doing so
will be the cause of lamentable confusion and mischief.
What I have said concerning Tom Curtin's pronounce-
ment you may convey to all whom it may concern."

Even the hotheads who were ready for any com-
bination against Parliamentarianism were so far from
being animated by any personal hostility to myself,
that they defended their wrecking morals upon the
queer ground that I was the only man of the old school
sufficiently respected to give Parliamentarianism an-

1 The Orange Sinn Feiner who was in a few weeks to relapse
into the faith of an Orange Anti-Sinn Feiner, more virulent than
ever. «

384 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

other chance with honest Irishmen. As a matter of
fact, the young men of the West Cork Division paid
no heed to their whispers and remained pathetically
true to our beaten side. But looking back more coolly
now upon the chaos and distraction of the public mind
against which we were contending, one is forced to
recognize that the canker had eaten too deeply into
Irish public life to be cured except by some sharper
surgery than it was any longer in our power to apply.
Everywhere the most level-headed of the old believers
in Conciliation began to report to us that nothing could
prevent their sons from becoming Sinn Feiners, adding
as often as not : " And, to tell you the truth, we are
becoming a sort of Sinn Feiners ourselves." And
so it was everywhere. The youth of the country felt
the sap of a glorious springtime fermenting within
them. West Cork, which even at that late date would
have stood fast by a policy of peaceful conciliation,
had not the appointed ministers of peace aimed the
last blow at it, gave up the hope to dream of the
Republic, even if it had to be sought by meeting
England in battle array. The fact tells its own tale
that, in the desperate insurrectionary years that were
to follow, West Cork was the headquarters of a re-
sistance to the Black-and-Tans and all their bloody
aiders and abettors, perhaps more widespread and
more unconquerable than in any other district in the
country. Mr. Herbert Samuel and his wise brother
Ministers crushed the All-for-Ireland League only
to be obliged to sue for peace to Michael Collins —
himself a West Corkman and a West Cork Deputy —
and make him Prime Minister of the country they set
out to whip into subjection.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 385

CHAPTER XXV

THE GENERAL ELECTION AND THE GENERAL JUDGMENT.

THE General Election which the war had enabled the
Hibernian Party to evade for three years beyond the
normal term smote them at last in November, 1918.
The determination of my colleagues and myself had
been formed as the result of the West Cork election
of two years before, and only awaited the approaching
Dissolution to be put into execution. Our conclusion
was not to allow ourselves to be nominated for re-
election to the English Parliament. In the words of
my own address to my constituents : " The Irish
people in general, in tragic ignorance of what they were
being led to do, remained silent while I was being
deprived of all power of interfering with effect in Irish
affairs. ... So far as the platform and the newspaper
press were concerned, my position has long been that
of a man buried alive and striving in vain to make his
voice reach the ears of his countrymen/' In these
circumstances, there was nothing for it but frankly to
recognize " that our efforts to reform the Parliamentary
movement upon an honest basis must — under present
conditions, at all events — be abandoned, and that
those who have saved (and who alone could have
saved) the country from Partition, from Conscription
and from political corruption ought now to have a full
and sympathetic trial for their own plans for enforcing
the Irish nation's right of Self-determination." Mr.
T. M. Healy in endorsing this conclusion, quoted :
' two sentences in your exposure of the debauch-
ment of the Parliamentary movement which strike me

386 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

as setting a datum line by which the general body of
Nationalists may guide their course. You say : * We
cannot subscribe to a programme of armed resistance
in the field, or even of permanent withdrawal from
Westminster, but to the spirit of Sinn Fein, as distinct
from its abstract programme, the great mass of inde-
pendent and single-minded Irishmen have been won
over/ Of the * ruined politicians ' still clinging to
power, and their policies, you foretell that * their
successors cannot by any conceivable possibility do

worse.' '

That was why we could not conscientiously throw
ourselves into the Sinn Fein ranks. It was not
Parliamentary methods, but rotten Parliamentary
methods, that had broken down. That was also
why we conceived it a duty to remove all obstacle on
our part to the mandate of the country, as between
the disgraced Hibernians and the only force in the
country capable of coping with them, being as decisive
as that which in 1884 empowered Parnell to overthrow
a Parliamentary majority less baleful. Before the
World-War, the rawest schoolboy would have laughed
at the suggestion of an armed struggle with the might
of England. The Sinn Fein movement, so long as it
was directed by Mr. Arthur Griffith, never contem-
plated a rising in arms. Even its own programme of
a pacific withdrawal from Westminster failed to
command on its merits the approval of a single con-
stituency. It was Sir E. Carson's example in drilling
and arming with impunity a vast Ulster army to resist
the law of Parliament which first inspired the young
men of the South with the emulation to go and do
likewise. But it was President Wilson's promulgation
of the doctrine of the sovereign right of the small
nationalities to shape their own future on the principle
of Self-determination — above all, it was the necessity
imposed upon Mr. Lloyd George to welcome that
principle with seeming enthusiasm in order to ensure

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 387

the entrance of the United States into the war — which
once for all fixed in the mind of the youth of Ireland
the feasibleness as well as the dignity of a demand for
liberty arms in hand, in contrast with Parliamentary
methods which had become a byword for failure and
degradation.

It must be owned that none of us measured truly
the growth of the new spirit until the Rising of Easter
Week revealed as in a lightning flash how dauntless
it was, and how deeply it had entered into possession
of the nation's soul. The original literature of Sinn
Fein was contributed by half a dozen poets and
journalists who readily accepted the description of
1 intellectuals " accorded to them by admiring English
prints. They were not content with comtemning
the poor work-a-day politicians who transferred the
land to the people and three times over forced their
way to the very last rampart between Ireland and
Home Rule. They went to the ludicrous length of
despising because it was " intelligible " the poetry of
Thomas Davis, which was so grossly " intelligible J
that it has roused the hearts of two generations of
Irishmen like a burst of trumpets. They actually
proposed the De — Davisisation of Ireland (the phrase
is that of the intellectuals) as an adventure of the
highest literary distinction. The insincerity of these
pftcieux and consequently their futility may be illus-
trated by a story of perhaps the most distinguished
of their number, the ill-fated poet Synge, as related
by another and more delicate dreamer, Mr. W. B.
Yeats : "I once asked him : * Do you write from
hatred of Ireland or for love of her ?' and he answered :
* That is just what I often ask myself.' '

With the single exception of Mr. Griffith, always
a man of sound sense as well as high purpose, the
intellectuals were frondeurs who found a superior
virtue in disclaiming any part in the hard battles which
had restored the ownership of the soil to the people

388 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

and given them the command of the whole machinery
of local government, and which threw open the road
to every victory that has followed since.1 They only
succeeded in limiting an influence which might have
been widespread to their own small circle in Dublin.
They had discredited Sinn Fein in the eyes of common
men with such fatal effect that the movement had all
but ceased to exist when by a bizarre blunder of
English pressmen, it found its name of Sinn Fein
transferred to the wholly different armed organization
which had its baptism of fire in Easter Week. These
distressingly ineffectual writings were not of a kind to
dispel the discouraging conviction which was creeping
over my once sanguine self that, in the rank demoraliza-
tion in which the placeman and the place beggar throve
apace, there was no longer to be found a body of Irish-
men who really thought Ireland worth dying for. To
the amaze of the older generation, it turned out that
such men were to be counted by the thousand, and of
the very flower of the race — men for whom patriotism
was a holy religion — who were as eager for death for the
" Little Black Rose ' in the firing line or on the
gallows as were the Christian Martyrs for the embrace
of the beasts in the Colosseum. We had not kept
pace with the newer school of the Pearses and the
O'Rahillys and MacDonaghs who had replaced the
dilettanti, and who in half a dozen obscure sheets were
inditing a new testament of which self-immolation
for Ireland was the chief of the beatitudes, and in the
very wilderness where all noble purpose seemed to
have perished were raising up a generation whose
disinterestedness, whose sobriety of character, whose
almost incredible gift for combining action with

luThe task of William O'Brien's generation was well and
bravely done. Had it not been so the work men are carrying
out in this generation would have been impossible. In that
great work none of Parnell s lieutenants did so much as Mr.
William O'Brien." — Arthur Griffith in Young Ireland, June, 1920.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 389

idealism were to sweeten the air with the efflorescence
of a divine springtime of the Gael. Not alone had the
coal of fire of the prophet touched their tongues ; in the
administrative work of the country which, in spite of
the brutalities of Martial Law was steadily falling into
their hands, they were developing a capacity and an
impartiality of outlook which put their elderly critics
of the old order to shame.

Aimlessly to stand in the way of such a reformation
would have been to dash the country's last hope.
Nobody doubted that, had it come to a series of tri-
angular battles, we should have in more than one
instance outpaced both the Sinn Fein candidate and
the Hibernian, or, indeed, induced the Sinn Feiners
to desist from opposition to our re-election ; but
vainglory apart the only result would have been to
confuse the public mind and probably enable the
Hibernians to return in numbers that would have
paralysed the power of reform for the term of another
Parliament. It is not perhaps excessive to claim that
it was in a large degree the self-effacement of the All-
for-Irelanders which put it in the power of the country,
upon the straightest of issues, to return a verdict which
was an unmistakeable and an overpowering one.
The unopposed return on the first day for nomination
of Sinn Feiners for each of the seven Divisions of the
vast county of Cork, followed by the defeat, by a
majority of more than 13,000, of the Hibernian can-
didates who were rash enough to await the polling
in the City, let loose an avalanche underneath which
the whole fabric of the Board of Erin tyranny lay
buried when the elections were over. The Party
which went to the country 73 strong came back 7,
which, by an ironical coincidence, happened to be one
less than the number of the All-for-Ireland group they
had so often rallied on its littleness. The measure of
their defeat did not stop there. Only two of the
seven survivors were elected by the free votes of Irish

390 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

constituencies : Captain Redmond, who was re-
elected in Waterford as a tribute of respect for his
father's memory and Mr. Devlin, whose power in the
Hibernian district of West Belfast was still considerable.
Of the remaining five, one (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) was
elected for an English constituency, and the four others
only succeeded in virtue of a compromise insisted upon
by the Ulster Bishops by which, in certain doubtful
constituencies, there was an exchange of seats between
Sinn Feiners and Hibernians in order to avoid the
success of the Orangemen in triangular contests.

The completeness of the overthrow was variously
accounted for. The Hibernian theory that it was the
shooting of twenty of the rebel leaders by Sir John
Maxwell that turned over a whole people from fanatical
allegiance to the Board of Erin before the Rebellion
to fanatical allegiance to Sinn Fein after its defeat was
of a piece with the rest of the foolish miscalculations
of the doomed Party. The claim of Sinn Fein
that the General Election meant a conscious and
deliberate establishment of the Irish Republic by
the main body of the voters was, I think, a
greatly exaggerated one, also. The Sinn F6in
candidates put forward no rigid Republican pro-
gramme— in fact, put forward no programme at
all. I can answer for the half-a-million All-for-
Irelanders, who turned the scale in the South that the
issue for or against a Republic did not even cross their
minds as a supreme decision binding them for the
future. For the overwhelming mass of Irish opinion
it was a choice between a Party corrupted, demoralized
and effete, who had misused in the interest of an
English Party the most irresistible power ever held by
Irish hands — who, for the sake of establishing for
themselves a boundless monopoly of patronage in
Dublin, had conspired to separate nearly a fourth of
the country into an Orange Free State — between a
Party who to the cries of " Trust Asquith ! " " Trust

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 391

Redmond ! " and " Up, the Mollies ! " had for years
led the most ignorant and credulous of the masses
shamefully astray, and had held the most enlightened
part of public opinion powerless to express itself by
an unheard of tyranny of violence, bribery and Press
manipulation — and on the other hand a band of
enthusiasts, young, gallant and clean of heart, of whom
all they knew was that whatever mistakes they might
make would be those of a too passionate love of Ireland,
and who would at the least clear the road of the future
by disencumbering it of a Parliamentary imposture
which was ending in putrefaction. The country did
not opt for any particular form of government, but
did unquestionably transfer its confidence to the new
men who were to frame it.

" The Party M was as dead as Julius Caesar, but
even in their ashes lived their wonted incapacity
to understand wholesome Irish feeling. Captain
Redmond, intoxicated by his family success in Water-
ford, blithely undertook from the hustings that he
and Mr. Devlin were about to proceed on a pilgrimage
from constituency to constituency throughout the
island to reclaim the erring ones from their heresy,
but no more was heard of the crusade of the twin
Peters the Hermits. A defeated candidate in Ros-
common — one Mr. Hayden — founded a brand new
Home Rule Association of his own with thrilling
proclamations through the Freeman that it was about
to sweep the country ; but after three meetings the
Association and the speeches in the Freeman expired.
Mr. Dillon had no sooner pulled himself together
after his monumental overthrow in East Mayo than
the ex-M.P. addressed an encyclical to some ghostly
Branch raised from the dead for the occasion pre-
dicting that " before six months " the country would
have returned to its allegiance to " The Party " and
the rightful King would have come by his own again.
He ought not indeed to have needed the reminder
how sadly his prophetic stock had fallen on the National

2C

392 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

discount market for he must have received thousands
of such reminders from the unpurchased tenants and
the beggared shareholders of the Freeman who were
beginning to haunt his doorstep. He had foretold
that the Purchase Act of 1903 would land the country
in bankruptcy and lo ! the Freeman office was the only
conspicuous venue the bankruptcy messenger had
visited, while the tenants he had forbidden to purchase
were now putting forth sighs from broken hearts for
the opportunity of purchasing which was no longer
available.1 He had predicted that if the Act of 1903
were permitted to work there would be an end of the
National movement in six months and behold ! among
the heroes of the rebellion thirteen years afterwards
the sons of the new occupying owners were among
the foremost. He now added a new prophecy with
the advantage that it was one calculated to fulfil itself.
It was that Sinn Fein had destroyed for ever the
sympathy of America with Ireland and the shaft was
barbed by reference to an incident much paraded in
the anti-Irish press, in the course of which some
children in a western village wishing to tear down a
British flag carried by the children of local British
recruits by accident tore down also a Stars and Stripes,
whose folds were mingled with those of the Union
Jack. The unworthy appeal to American prejudice
was so little heeded that American funds poured into
the Sinn Fein exchequer in greater volume than had
been subscribed in all the years since the Land League
put together.

If there was anything wanting to complete the
contempt for Parliamentary methods, it was the
insignificance of the surviving Seven in the succeeding
Parliament, when the Coalition passed Mr. Lloyd
George's Partition Act of 1920 formally establishing
the two rival Parliaments of " Northern Ireland '

1 As this book goes to Press the Free State Ministry have sum-
moned a new Land Conference of landlords and tenants to try to
resuscitate Land Purchase, destroyed by the Hibernian Act of 1909.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 393

and " Southern Ireland." With the whole force of
the Labour Party and the remnant of the " Wee
Free " Liberal Party saved from the shipwreck at
their backs, they might have offered an all but
irresistible opposition to that infamous measure,
forced upon Ireland without the sanction of a single
Irish vote, Northern or Southern. The trouble was
that Mr. Devlin denouncing Partition was in the
position of Arius denouncing Arianism. If he now
affected to hold out for " an undivided Ireland " he
was met with the retort that the Partition Act was only
the formal enactment of the " Headings of Agree-
ment " he and his late Party and his late Liberal Prime
Minister had collectively bargained for; if he pro-
tested (as he now plaintively did) his conversion to the
doctrine of an Irish settlement by the commingling of
Irishmen of all racial and religious origins, he laid
himself open to the taunts of the tardiness of his
conversion since the days when shouts of " our here-
ditary enemies !" and " Black-blooded Cromwellians ! >3
were hurled at every Irish Protestant Unionist
who extended a fraternal hand, and of his own
special recipe of * ordering the police and military
to stand aside and make a ring," while he was disposing
of the Ulster difficulty in the streets of Belfast.
Accordingly he and his Liberal friends could think
of nothing better than majestically to withdraw
altogether from the Committee stage of the Partition
Bill and by that stroke of genius left Sir E. Carson
free to gerrymander at his sweet will Mr. Devlin's
own constituency of West Belfast, in such a manner
that the Nationalist Division of the Falls Road was
swamped by the addition of two undiluted Orange
Divisions. When he and his brother withdrawers
came back to register a last impassioned demand for
" an Undivided Ireland J> on the Third Reading, it
was to find that he had been effectually gerrymandered
out of the Imperial Parliament for life, and the last nail
driven in the coffin of the Board of Erin Ascendancy.

394 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XXVI

PEACEFUL SELF-DETERMINATION

APOLOGISTS for the infamies perpetrated by " the
Black and Tans/' under the instructions of British
Ministers, have striven hard to represent these as
' reprisals ' for provocations more infamous still.
The men they warred upon were a " murder gang '
who began by the wholesale assassination of defence-
less police men and soldiers, and the amiable guardians
of the peace whom Sir Hamar Greenwood picked out
from the offscourings of a demobilised army only came
to the rescue of society by " taking the assassins by
the throat." It would not be easy for impudence to
invent a grosser reversal of the true sequence of events.
" The murder gang " was a nation engaged in putting
bloodlessly in practice the right of " self-determination
for the small nations/' by the promulgation of which
England had won the war, and it was the British
statesmen who had just rewarded with their liberty
the revolted subjects of Austria for throwing off their
allegiance, who started a war of brute force against
their Irish subjects for following the example.

There were two distinct phases in the warfare
which ended in the surrender of Mr. Lloyd George
and Sir Hamar Greenwood ; and in both it was
England which was the aggressor. In the first phase
(19 1 7-' 1 8) they were dealing with a nation peacefully
exercising the right of self-determination ; in the
second (igiS-'ai) with an Irish Republican Army
whom they had deliberately goaded and forced into
action. From the time when the General Election
had invested Sinn Fein with unchallenged authority
as the spokesmen of their nation, they proceeded, as

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 395

was their indisputable right under the new law of
nations, to supersede English rule by inducing the
local governing bodies to renounce any connection
with Dublin Castle and by organizing a volunteer
police force and Arbitration Courts to enforce a law
and order and a system of public justice of their own,
leaving the garrisons and Royal Irish Constabulary
of England in isolated impotence within their barrack
walls. It was a scheme of " peaceful penetration "
of singular daring, and by reason of its very blood-
lessness was succeeding with a celerity which drove
the choleric soldiers and bureaucrats of Dublin Castle
to distraction. The insufferable offence was that the
Royal Irish Constabulary was mysteriously melting
away under their eyes by voluntary resignation.

The shrewdest blow aimed at English rule by the
Sinn Fein leaders was the disorganization of that
redoubtable force. The Constabulary were the nerve-
track by which Dublin Castle transmitted its orders
to and received its information from the remotest
parishes in the country ; the network of espionage
that penetrated every household ; the army which
had its detachment ready in every village to lay its
heavy hand on the first stirrings of disaffection. It
was assuredly the break-up of these village garrisons
that eventually deprived the central government of
its eyes and ears and hands, and the regular army
forces which replaced them, irresistible though they
were against armed opposition in the field, could but
stagger about blindly in dealing with the hidden local
forces respecting which the Constabulary could once
have put them in possession of the most accurate
particulars of place and persons. But it is a per-
version of the truth to pretend that it was by violence
and assassination the Royal Irish Constabulary was
broken up. What dismayed the Castle authorities
most was that, on the contrary, the process was
throughout the years 1917 and 1918 a bloodless one.

396 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

working within the body like some obscure epidemic ;
it sprang largely from the fact that the enthusiasm
with which the rest of their countrymen were inflamed
was infecting the younger and more generous-hearted
of the Force, and no doubt, also, from the sharp
pressure of local opinion upon their relatives in the
country, and of those relatives themselves for whom
it became an intolerable disgrace that men of their
blood should stand in the way of the universal National
uprising. It will be found that, long before the cruel
individual assassinations that subsequently nearly
decimated the Royal Irish Constabulary, some 2,500
of its best men had voluntarily resigned their con-
nection with a service that had become hateful, and
it was the dread that thousands more were on the point
of imitating their example that drove the advisers of
Sir Hamar Greenwood to endeavour to stop the
degringolade by flooding the Irish Force with the
infamous " Black and Tans," and thereby involved
the Constabulary in the hell of barbarities and re-
prisals through which the rest of their countrymen
were forced to pass. History will establish it as one
of the fundamental truths of those awful times that
it was not the assassinations which brought the Black
and Tans, but the Black and Tans who gave the signal
for the assassinations, and that, of course, even the
Black and Tans were less culpable than their pay-
masters.

There was another motive, baser still, for hastening
to kill the process of peaceful self-determination before
it was completed. In 1918 the General Election was
pending. Sinn Fein was busy with its arrangements
for a trial of strength on whose upshot it would depend
whether or not Sinn Fein could speak as the authorized
fiduciary of the nation. The old Hibernian Party
was still no less busy, and was little less sanguine of
its chances. The Hibernian successes in West Cork,.
Waterford and Armagh — the last that visited their

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 397

banners — had filled them with the most extravagant
hopes. One need not assume that Mr. Dillon, who
still retained some portion of the influence which
had made him the principal adviser of the Castle
before the Easter Week rebellion, had anything to say
to the measures now taken by the official wirepullers.
But the Hibernians still held 74 seats, and anything
might happen at the polls. Accordingly, the Sinn
Fein Director of Electioneering was snapped up,
some of his principal assistants in the provinces were
arrested and their confidential documents confiscated,
and the most dreaded of the Sinn Fein candidates
and organizers were kidnapped and shut up in In-
ternment Camps. The General Election might still
be saved, if the Sinn Fein election arrangements could
be sufficiently dislocated and the electors properly
overawed. It all turned out, as anybody except the
Tapers and Tadpoles of politics might have known.
It did not alter the fate of the Hibernians at the
General Election, but it did help to cripple the pacifi-
cators in their way of working out self-determination
and it made the war spirits of the I.R.A. the masters
of the situation.

The revolution by which the Royal Irish Con-
stabulary was silently falling to pieces and their places
taken by a Volunteer police, under wrhose protection
new Courts of Justice were administering impartial
fair play to Unionist and Nationalist alike, and the local
government of the country carried on with astonishing
efficiency and with absolute incorruptibility, was in
reality only the legitimate application of those principles
of self-determination which England and her Allies
had consecrated in the Treaty of Versailles, and it was,
the knowledge that the Government of the country
was slipping away from them, without armed rebellion,
by the mere organized enforcement of the people's
will, that impelled the bureaucrats of Dublin Castle,
since the crimeless will of the people was proving too

398 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

strong for them, to make the people's will itself the
worst of crimes and let loose the dogs of war to put
it down with bloody tooth and claw.

In May 1918 Lord Wimborne was succeeded by
Lord French as Viceroy and Sir Edward Duke by Mr.
Shortt as Chief Secretary. It was not until January
in the following year that the first shot was fired in
what came to be known as the " murder campaign '
against the R.I.C, when two constables escorting a
waggon of gelignite were killed near Tipperary. The
only pretext for first launching the new policy of blood
and iron was one which is now known to be, at the
best, a mare's nest, and at the worst a wicked invention
— viz., the fresh " German Plot " of 1918 which Field
Marshal French proclaimed to England he had dis-
covered, and on the strength of which the terrors of
Martial Law were intensified and Mr. De Valera and
Mr. Griffith deported to England from their seats at
the Mansion House Conference against Conscription.
The late Lord Lieutenant (Lord Wimborne) had
never heard of " the Plot " ; Sir Bryan Marion, the
Commander-in-Chief, we know on the authority of
Colonel Repington's book told the new Viceroy (Lord
French) he flatly disbelieved the story ; when, after
two years' refusal to produce the evidence on which
it was based, the documents at last saw the light, they
turned out to be a " crambe repetita " of negotiations
which had taken place before the Rising of 1916 with
some sham " German Irish Society ' in Berlin.
Under cover of this bogus alarm, without a shadow
of evidence to connect Messrs. De Valera and Griffith
with these antiquated treasons, they were deported
to England without any form of trial, with many
hundreds of the more responsible Sinn Fein leaders
as well ; newspapers were suppressed, public meetings
broken up, and an endless series of prosecutions,
followed by savage sentences, were instituted upon
charges none of which involved bloodshed or armed

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 399

hostilities of any kind — charges of wearing green
uniforms, drilling, singing " The Soldier's Song,"
being found in possession of photographs of the Rebel
leaders, taking part in the Arbitration Courts, either
as Arbitrators, solicitors or clients and the like. The
campaign was originally undertaken while Field-
Marshal French's military operations for the enforce-
ment of Conscription were complete, and in the
fatuous hope that the removal of Messrs. De Valera
and Griffith would break the back of the opposition.
It was directed not against crime in any ordinary
acceptation of the term, but against an intangible and
omnipresent expression of the National will, which,
however awkward for English military calculations,
was directly authorized by President Wilson's charter
of democratic liberty which enabled England to win
the war. Cruel deeds of violence will never be entirely
missing from ebullitions of the most fervid passions
of men in resistance to unscrupulous oppression ; but
in general it was the very peacefulness of the revolution
which was silently superseding English Government
in all its functions, dissolving its police, transforming
its Courts of Justice, baffling its Conscription Act
and rallying the allegiance of the people with one
consent to a new National Government — this was
the phenomenon which roused the ire of the
Courtsmartial, and prompted the blunder-headed
soldier at the Viceregal Lodge to strike harder
and harder as he found his wild sabre-strokes against
the will of a nation were in vain. The point to be
retained is that it was many months after Sinn Fein
had been deprived of its leaders and harried by a
thousand persecutions of mere opinion and sentiment
now confessed by England to be irrepressible, before
the civic side of Sinn Fein was overborne, and the
Irish Republican Army gradually allowed themselves
to be goaded into a war of guerillas.

A tremendous bribe of doubled and in some

400 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

categories trebled pay staunched the flow of resignations
in the Royal Irish Constabulary and stimulated the
zeal of those who remained to earn promotion by the
least reputable services against their countrymen.
Nevertheless, although the Sinn Fein leaders were
now driven more fixedly than ever to the conclusion
that in striking at the R.I.C. they were striking at the
brain and life-centre of English rule, the first months
of the guerilla war were still free from the stain of
individual assassinations, arsons and barbarities in
which both sides were before long vicing. Con-
siderable bodies of policemen and military who were
captured in ambushes and in attacks upon police
barracks were treated with soldierly courtesy, and
their wives and children rescued from positions of
danger. The members of the Dublin Metropolitan
Police had no sooner refused to go about armed than
they were left free from molestation throughout all
the subsequent wars. It was not until an officer in
high command made a round of the country Con-
stabulary stations, and harangued the younger men
in terms which had their first practical" repercussion
in the Thurles district of Tipperary, where constables
maddened with drink dragged local Sinn Feiners from
their beds and murdered them and set fire to their
homes, that the Thurles police " reprisals " following
the two murders near Tipperary began to be avenged
by ' * counter-reprisals ' ' no less savage on the other
side. The mass of the rank and file, however, con-
tinued to be Irishmen of too humane and Godfearing
a character to be trusted as the executioners of
atrocities like these upon men of their own blood
and creed. The ferocity on both sides only reached
a pitch never witnessed in Ireland before when Sir
Hamar Greenwood hit upon the expedient of importing
* the Black and Tans " to take the places of the re-
signing R.I.C. and to infect with their own villainy
the most evil elements left behind in the Irish Force.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 401

These unemployables of the demobilised army
were in general desperadoes of the vilest type, ready
for any deed of blood which their free license from
Dublin Castle might present to them, and so true to
their depraved origin that, not content with their
wages of a guinea a day, they were not above snatching
the purse of the wife of General Strickland, the Military
Governor of Cork, in the principal street of that City.
Whenever the detailed record of their operations comes
to be drawn up, it will constitute a more ignoble
chapter of murder, devastation, robbery and cruelty —
mostly against defenceless elders, women and children
— than all the black generations of Carews,Cromwells
and Carhamptons had been able to contribute in the
course of seven centuries to England's annals in
Ireland.

To pile up evidence of the atrocities brought home
to the military forces of the Crown would be to harrow
the feelings of the humane to an insufferable degree
and perhaps to do the English nation in general the
injustice of imputing to them complicity in horrors
which shall however long live to the shame of their
responsible Ministers. It must suffice to give one
sample out of thousands upon an authority that cannot
be impeached. It is taken from the considered judg-
ment of Judge Bodkin, who had been for fourteen
years the respected Co. Court Judge of Clare, and
whose fearless judicial calm, in face of armed force and
baser official threats, forms one of the brightest records
of that dire time :

" It was proved before me, on sworn evidence in
open Court, that on the night of September 22nd, the
town of Lahinch was attacked by a large body of armed
forces of the Government. Rifle shots were fired
apparently at random in the streets and a very large
number of houses and shops were broken into, set on
fire, and their contents looted or destroyed. The
inhabitants, most of them in their night clothes, men»

402 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

women and children, invalids, old people over eighty,
and children in arms, were compelled, at a moment's
notice and at peril of their lives, to fly through back
doors and windows to the sandhills in the neighbour-
hood of the town where they remained during the
night, returning in the morning to find their homes
completely destroyed. In the course of this attack
a man, named Joseph Sammon, was shot dead. There
were in all before me 38 claims for the criminal injuries
committed on that occasion, and after full consideration
of the claims I awarded a total sum of over £65,000.

* On the same night the town of Ennistymon was
similarly invaded by the armed forces of the Govern-
ment, shots were fired in the streets, the town hall
and a large number of houses and shops were broken
into, set on fire, and, with their contents, destroyed.
As in Lahinch, the inhabitants were compelled to
fly for their lives. A young married man, named
Connole, was seized in the street, by a party of men
under command of an officer. His wife, who was with
him, pleaded on her knees with the officer for the life
of her husband, but he was taken away a short distance,
shot, and his charred remains were found next morning
in his own house, which had been burnt. Another
young man, named Linnane, was shot dead in the
streets while attempting to extinguish the flames.
For the criminal injuries committed in the progress
of this attack there were 13 claims, and I awarded
upwards of £39,000 compensation.

" On the same night the town of Miltown Malbay
was similarly invaded by the armed forces of the
Government. A large number of houses and shops
were broken into, set on fire and destroyed, the in-
habitants escaping with difficulty and danger. An
old woman named Lynch proved that during the
course of this raid, just before the burning of her
house, her husband (an old man of 75), while standing
beside her at her own doorway, was shot dead by a

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 403

soldier in uniform, distant about ten yards. She
made no claim for the murder of her husband. I
awarded £414 for the destruction of her home and
property. It is right to add that in this town some
of the Military and Police endeavoured to extinguish
the flames. There were before me in respect of the
raid of Miltown Malbay 28 claims, and I awarded
upwards of £45,000.

" A farmer named Daniel Egan applied to me for
compensation for the alleged murder of his son. It
was proved that a number of men arrested his son^
and three other men, at his residence on the shores of
Lough Derg, bound them with ropes and carried them
away in a boat. The next the father heard of his son
was a telegram from the police informing him that he
had been shot on the bridge at Killaloe, and directing
him to come to Killaloe for the corpse. On going to
the police station he found his son's dead body in a
coffin. There was a number of military and police
present, but the only one he knew was District
Inspector Gwynne. I allowed the case to stand for
a week for the production of the District Inspector.
The District Inspector did not appear, and I adjourned
the case to next Sessions."

The reply of the Chief Secretary to Judge Bodkin's
Report was to have him served in Court by the Co.
Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary with the
following notice :

" To His Honor Judge Bodkin.

" Sir, I have been directed by the Commander of
the Forces to prohibit Courts of Justice dealing with
claims for compensation involving allegations against
the Crown forces or police in this area."

And the Judge's observation is :

" On taking my place on the Bench I observed a
large armed force in the Court, apparently for the
purpose of enforcing the prohibition. I adjourned
to next Sessions all cases in which it was alleged that

404 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

the criminal injuries were committed by the armed
forces of the Government."

But the guilt of the scurvy rogues now let loose
upon Ireland was a small matter when measured with
that of their Ministerial paymasters. What the
Government sanctimoniously called " reprisals " were,
as we have seen, their way of avenging themselves for
the collapse of Conscription and the realization of
Self-Determination without their leave. They de-
liberately resolved to treat this phenomenon of National
self-liberation by the mere force of natural justice as
the crime of a murder-gang and to stamp it out by
unloosing the worst ruffians they could hire upon the
country at free quarters and to turn a blind eye to
their enormities or deny them altogether until their
hellish work was done. It is not necessary to assume
that Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Hamar Greenwood
acquainted themselves fully with the character of the
agents they were employing ; their culpability was
that they did not inquire for themselves until the
experiment failed and their boasts that they " had
Sinn Fein on the run " and " had the murder-gang
by the throat " were turned to their ridicule as prophets
as well as to their confusion in the eyes of a conscience-
stricken England. One small piece of evidence would
be in itself sufficient to stain Mr. Lloyd George with
responsibility for the deeds of the Black and Tans.
It was a newspaper photograph representing an in-
spection by the Prime Minister of a contingent of
these worthies at a time when their ill-fame was at
its worst and when Ireland was supposed to be
cowering in terror under their bloody lash. The
smirk of admiration on Mr. Lloyd George's face as he
surveyed their ruffian ranks gives as damning testimony
of his feelings as if he had shouted to them through a
megaphone : " You are the boys for my money. Go
in and win ! '

Sir Hamar Greenwood's ignorance of a country

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 405

where he had never trod until he came to crucify her
might in some degree excuse his original employment
of the Black and Tans : the most indulgent historian
will look in vain for any palliation of the mendacity
which he made his principal instrument of government,
so long as it was possible to cover up their crimes.
The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtin, was
visited at midnight by one of those black bands,
summoned out of bed and foully murdered in the sight
of his wife and children. Sir Hamar Greenwood
blandly assured the House of Commons on the
authority of the assassins that the Lord Mayor was
murdered by his own Sinn Fein associates, and the
fact that he was as consistent a hater of foul play in
any shape as he was ever the first to risk his life for his
principles was actually quoted in support of the
atrocious suggestion that it was for his moderation the
Lord Mayor was slaughtered by his own comrades.
The citizens who had murdered their own beloved
Lord Mayor gave him a public funeral which was a
spectacle of universal mourning the most impressive
that was ever beheld there and raised a subscription
of £23,000 for his widow and children. Still Sir
Hamar Greenwood never blenched.

Later on when the Curfew was sternly enforced,
and nobody in the streets except the Army of Occupa-
tion, the most valuable warehouses in the main
thoroughfare of Cork, Patrick St., were set on fire
with petroleum by five separate gangs of incendiaries,
the houses burned to the ground with carefully
organized efficiency, and hundreds of thousands of
pounds worth of property destroyed or looted. At
the same time, in another part of the city, the Town
Hall was invaded by the petroleurs and given to the
flames, and the Carnegie Free Library adjoining was
added to the holocaust. Once more Sir Hamar
Greenwood, with forehead of brass, arose in the
House of Commons to declare that it was the Sinn

406 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Feiners themselves who had burned the fairest part
of their city and razed to the ground the headquarters
of their local government. In order to give some air
of verisimilitude to his theory that the latter incident
was an accidental one, he explained that the flames
from the Sinn Feiners' operations in Patrick St. had
extended to the Municipal Buildings before the area
of conflagration could be limited. The truth was that
the Town Hall and the Free Library were situate
nearly a mile away from Patrick St., with a river and
a dense network of untouched streets between them
and the burnt area of Patrick St. from which the
Chief Secretary represented they had caught fire.
The lie, gross as a mountain, was good enough for the
House of Commons and was never cleared up nor
apologised for. The origin of the attempt to burn
down Cork was indeed ordered to be investigated at
a secret military inquiry by General Strickland, the
Governor of the City. All demands for the publica-
tion of the text of the Strickland report, or even of its
conclusions, were resisted by Sir Hamar Greenwood.
To this hour an ignorant England accepts the legend
that it was the miscreant Sinn Feiners themselves who
murdered their Lord Mayor, burnt down their Town
Hall, plundered and gave to the flames the wealthiest
region of their city, and all because the Report of the
Military Governor on these infamies was successfully
suppressed, if it was not itself committed to the flames
as well by England's highest ministers. What in-
ference the Black and Tans themselves drew from
their Chief Secretary's intrepidity in covering up
their wildest falsifications as his own may be judged
from the fact that the men well known to have been
the incendiaries were no sooner removed from Cork,
as the one concession made to General Strickland's
expostulations than they in cold blood murdered
Canon Magner, the parish priest of Dunmanway —
perhaps the least politically-minded man of his race-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 407

and went within an ace of murdering a Resident
Magistrate, Mr. Brady, R.M., who happened to be
an inconvenient witness of the butchery. Two
successive Mayors of Limerick — Mr. O'Callaghan
and Mr. Clancy — were, like their colleague in Cork
shot dead in their homes in presence of their horrified
wives ; once again, the cynic in the Irish Office adopted
from the assassins their loathsome plea that the
slaughter of the Mayors of Limerick was the work of
their brother Sinn Feiners, and that it was because of
their very nobleness of character their fellow-citizens
had slain them. It was not even lying reduced to a fine
art : it was lying naked, boisterous and unashamed.

These are not isolated instances of the Greenwood
method of government ; they are samples of a system
widely practised and unblushingly persisted in. If
he had been impeached for crimes against public
liberty no less heinous than Warren Hastings was
summoned to answer for, the verdict could scarcely
have been otherwise than that his audacity in con-
cealing and perverting the truth carried with it a
deeper shame than the worst enormities of the poor
hirelings, whom it must be bluntly stated, he stimulated
by his incitements and sheltered by his unlimited
lying. The first and the worst offence of the Black
and Tans in the eyes of Mr. Lloyd George or of Sir
Hamar Greenwood was that they failed. No pit of
official ignorance in which these personages may take
refuge is deep enough to bury the ugly fact out of
sight.

2 D

4o8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XXVII

A PEACE OFFER THAT WAS SPURNED

WE have now seen the two successive modes of
aggression upon Sinn Fein — that of pinpricks under
Mr. Shortt and Mr. Macpherson, and that of un-
controlled ferocity under Sir Hamar Greenwood —
in operation. While his faith in the virtues of the
Black and Tans was still strong, Mr. Lloyd George
resolved to extract one permanent result from the
White Terror, and to make his old project for the
division of Ireland into two provinces an accomplished
fact. This he achieved by his Government of
Ireland Act of 1920. It was carried without the
support of a single vote from any section of repre-
sentatives of the country of which it was to be the Act
of Liberation stipulated for in President Wilson's
Fourteen Points. The Act was equally detestable
to North and South and was imposed upon both
by main force. But to Sir Edward Carson it gave the
satisfaction of a legislative acknowledgment once for
all of the Two-Nations theory and to the Parlia-
mentarians of the old Hibernian school it was enough
to answer that the Act did precisely what they had
themselves covenanted to do by their Headings of
Agreement in 1916 — namely, to separate the Six
Counties from Nationalist Ireland.

The six Hibernian members of Parliament saved
by the Northern Bishops from the wreckage of the
General Election did everything that feeble inefficiency
could do in the new Parliament to justify the Irish
revolt against Parliamentary action. Their first
master-stroke, having just been ruined by their

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 409

enslavement to one English Party, was formally to
enslave themselves to another — the English Labour
Party, and to throw over the remnant of the un-
fortunate Liberals, because they were only a remnant.
But under a leader of capacity, they might still have
mustered a formidable opposition of Labourites,
4< Wee Frees," gallant democratic friends of freedom
like Commander Kenworthy and Captain Wedgwood
Benn, and young Conservatives such as Lord George
Bentinck, Mr. Aubrey Herbert, Mr. Moseley,
and in a growing degree Lord Robert Cecil,
who might have kept the House of Commons
ringing with the atrocities in Ireland and obstructed,
if not finally baffled, the Bill for the Partition of their
nation. Parnell did such things as one of a group as
small and without the support of half a dozen English-
men. It was not merelv that a Parnell of the first

tf

rate or of the fifth rate was missing. The trouble was
that the sins of their days of power were haunting the
Hibernians. What was Mr. Devlin to say in serious
protest against a Bill which enacted that very surrender
of the Six Counties to which his Party had solemnly
consented, and which he in person, at the Belfast
Convention, had thrust down the throats of the
hypnotised Nationalists of the Six Counties them-
selves ? That feat of inconsistency, however, would
not have in itself overtasked his powers. He took a
course in reference to the Bill as fatal to his reputation
as a tactician as to his loyalty to principle. He with-
drew himself and his Labour and Liberal friends from
the Committee stage of the Bill, where they might
have had their best chance of thwarting it, and only
returned for the harmless formality of the Third
Reading to declare in a speech of threadbare high
heroics — he, the high priest of the Belfast Convention
— that " they were face to face with a grave attempt to
destroy the unity of their motherland, but they would
meet that danger with courage and with incomparable

4io THE IRISH REVOLUTION

resolution. They stood for freedom for Ireland,
undivided and indivisible/' " Partition," he finally
described as " midsummer madness — rotten before
it was born." In the meantime he was to find that
in his absence and that of his friends, the more terre
a terre Covenanters to whom he had handed over the
Six Counties, had in Committee gerrymandered the
constituencies of North East Ulster to their sweet
will, and added two Orange Wards to his own con-
stituency of the Falls Road, thereby ensuring his
ejection from the Imperial Parliament at the General
Election. In the last stage of his decadence
the paladin, who had once summoned the police
and military to make a ring for him in Belfast
for a fight to a finish with the Orangemen,
quitted Belfast as soon as he was taken at his word,
and his constituents were falling by the hundred under
the bullets of the unloosed Orangemen, and he subsided
thenceforth into the poor role of " asking questions,"
feebler and ever feebler at Westminster. The only
personage of any consequence in the group, Mr.
T. P. O'Connor, confined his attention to the atrocities
of the Black-and-Tans of Turkey in Armenia and with
tears in his voice gave to that interesting people the
eloquence he would once have devoted to the Bashi-
bazouks of Sir Hamar Greenwood.

We may be fairly challenged to name our own
exploits in the emergency. Frankly, they were none.
Unlike the Hibernian leaders who on the morrow of
their overthrow at the polls predicted that " before
six months " there would come a Reaction which
would re-establish their power, the All-for-Ireland
League, as a corporate power, had definitely ceased
to exist before the General Election. For fifteen
years, we had fought the losing battle against the ever
growing power of a corrupt Hibernian ascendancy to
prevent the majority of our countrymen from hearing
anything except the most fantastic misrepresentations

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 411

of our views and actions. We had an unshaken con-
viction that time was bound to vindicate, as the only
stable basis of a benign National settlement, an agree-
ment by consent of ever}7 element of strength, Gaelic
or Norman or British, Catholic or Protestant, Demo-
cratic or Conservative, which constituted the actual
Irish nation, such as History had bequeathed it to us,
as opposed to the destructive programme of everlasting
enmity towards " our hereditary enemies," " the
black-blooded Cromwellians," "the Orange dogs," and
" the rotten Protestants," in pursuance of which a
majority of the constituencies tragically ignorant of
what they were being led to do, had repulsed every
conciliatory advance from far-sighted Protestant Irish-
men and forced a million of their countrymen to hail
Sir E. Carson as their deliverer. The vindication
of our measures for allaying the fears of the Protestant
minority and our unconquerable aversion to Partition
had, indeed, come already, and was to be within a few
years acknowledged by every school and section of
Irish Nationalists, including our most bitter maligners
and by every English Party as well, who eventually
found salvation around the conference-table of which
we had set them the example fifteen years before at
the Land Conference. We had lived to receive the
admission of the Prime Minister that we were " funda-
mentally right," and were presently to hear the head
of the new Revolutionary movement, Mr. De Valera,
protest as passionately as ourselves his devotion to the
rights of ' our hereditary enemies " who had given
us our Grattans and Wolfe Tones and Emmets, and
to find the President of the new " Irish Free State, "Mr.
Arthur Griffith, in his first proclamation, publish our
doctrines of unwearying conciliation of the Protestant
minority as the foundation-stone of his Government.
We were to have the consolation such as it was of
finding the Irish Hierarchy publishing in 1922 (eight
years too late, alas !) their solemn judgment that " the

4i2 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

deadly effect of Partition has been to ruin Ireland " — -
the Partition which was unanimously consented to by
the Hibernian Parliamentary Party, and for making
the sole protest against which (while there was still
time to avert the catastrophe) we were anathematised
as traitors.

But we had no longer any power to hasten the
consummation of the enlightened principles soon to
be crowned with universal assent. Nay, it was certain
that our disappearance would be the surest means of
removing the last obstacle to their triumph, by re-
moving all pretext for the old jealousies, and leaving
the new generation unfettered to follow up the good
work in the plenitude of their fresh energies and
springtime hopes. Sic vos non vobis seems to pro-
nounce irrevocably the fate of the pioneers and we
cheerfully bowed to the decree. On the other hand,
even if our collaboration had been invited (and it never
was) we should have shrunk from the responsibility
of flinging our young countrymen all but weaponless,
against the colossal armaments of England under
conditions of which we knew nothing. All the more,,
that we were still persuaded, Parliamentary methods
had proved ineffective, not because they were the
Parliamentary methods of Parnell, but because they
were not, but were the methods of corrupt bargain
and sale which had sacrificed the interests of the nation
to those of an English Party. But the new men were
the solitary hope of redeeming the country from a state
of political rottenness which moved Mr. T. P.
O'Connor himself to cry out that the place-hunting
members of Parliament " were making a commonage '
of Mr. Birrell's room in the House of Commons, and
if they were to be trusted at all must be armed with
all the undivided strength the nation could give them.
To the new men, consequently, it became our cardinal
principle to secure the same generous mandate which
had been given to Parnell against the less degenerate

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 413

followers of Butt and under no circumstances to say
or do aught that could enfeeble their arm.

On two occasions only, up to the date of the Truce,
was our silence broken. The first was when a protest
in the Times was wrung from me by the devastation
of our own little town of Mallow. In the rage of the
Crown forces under a defeat which was a perfectly
legitimate act of war, they turned a place which had
been a sylvan Arcadia of peace and mutual tolerance
into a furnace of vengeful passions on both sides in
which the nights grew horrid around us with the
rattle of gunfire, the crash of bridges blown into the
air and the glare of burning mansions and of burning
cabins. My only other intervention was one that
seemed to be forced upon me as an elementary duty
of humanity as well as patriotism. While the war
was already furiously raging and spreading, but before
it had yet nearly reached its climax, I received a
communication from one of Mr. De Valera's most
intimate confidants — although not, so far as I know
at his desire, or, perhaps, even with his knowledge —
which could leave no room for doubt that peace might
at that moment be had on terms which would have
spared the country two years of appalling bloodshed
and sufferings and which Mr. Lloyd George would
have paid a kingdom's ransom two years later if he
could go back to. The substance of that communica-
tion I took the responsibility of communicating to the
Prime Minister in a correspondence which will speak
for itself, and which there is no longer any reason for
withholding :

Confidential and Secret.

July 5, 1919.
Dear Mr. Loyd George, —

Enclosed extract may be relied upon as indicating
what the attitude of Sinn Fein will be towards any
definite offer of Dominion Home Rule. For that

414 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

reason, and because I can guarantee the writer's good
faith and very special sources of information, I con-
sider it a duty to send it to you. From his report it
may be deduced with certainty that Sinn Fein will
not block the way of any offer of New Zealand or
Newfoundland Home Rule provided (i) that it comes
from the Government itself, (2) with a guarantee that
if accepted by an Irish Referendum it will be put into
operation and (3) that neither the Times nor Sir H.
Plunkett is allowed to exploit the concession to the
prejudice of the elected representatives of Ireland,
whose concurrence (tacit if not active) will be essential
if any practicable settlement is to be effected within
my time or even within yours. I will not waste
your time adding another pebble to your mountain
of glory : there is only one triumph more amazing
and more blessed you could have and it would be in
Ireland.

Sincerely yours,

WILLIAM O'BRIEN.

The Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P.,
Prime Minister.

(Enclosed Extract).

Confidential and Secret.

' I have had an opportunity of seeing , who is

a really fast friend of ours and is the right-hand man of
Mr. De V. I have also met a large number of leading
people in Dublin and the country and I'm quite
convinced that 99 per cent, of the Sinn Fein body
would gladly accept Dominion Home Rule as a settle-
ment, but will have nothing to do with Plunkett's

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 415

scheme or with any other scheme of the same nature
until such time as the Government place all their cards
on the table.

" I am agreeably surprised at the good sense dis-
played by the people, and the most determined of the
young men as well as the more experienced. There
is more common sense and more resolution than was
ever before known in our history. Every person I met
was willing to close with an honest Dominion Settle-
ment, including all but a handful of the extremist
Volunteers, but all are determined not to give way one
inch until something concrete is before the country.

There was near being a serious split in the S.F.
camp a few weeks ago . It was learned that the Govern-
ment intended to suppress by force any meeting
of the Sinn Fein M .P.s The leaders agreed to abandon
any public meeting for the present. To this the
Volunteers strongly objected, stating their men were
prepared to make any sacrifice in defence of the right
of the Dail to meet in public. However the matter
was got over through the influence of Mr. De Valera
with the extreme men.

4 I asked would the Volunteers give the same
trouble if Mr. De Valera accepted Dominion Home
Rule. He assured me they most certainly would not,
but on the contrary would be perfectly reasonable.
But they must first be sure the Government mean
business and that there would be no more foolery either
at home or in America. Failing that confidence they
are ready for anything and so is the country. Dillon
and his crowd are dead and gone.

" If the country had only shown the same sense
a few years ago, all would have been so different.
However, it is a consolation to know they have at long
last learned a sound lesson in the school of experience.
If they are honestly dealt with, all will be well, but
God help the Government that will try any further
tricks on them."

416 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

Private and Confidential.

CRICCIETH,

i4th July, 1919.
Dear Mr. O'Brien,—

I thank you for sending me the interesting extract
on the attitude of Sinn Fein towards Dominion Home
Rule. There is nothing I would like better than to
carry through any measure which would terminate
the long, dreary and baffling feud between Britain and
Ireland. Frankly, I am not in a very hopeful mood.
I have made two or three attempts, and when they
seemed to be on the point of success — accomplishment
eluded one. That seems to me to have been the
experience of almost every man who has striven to
settle the Irish question. I think you were funda-
mentally right when you sought an agreement amongst
all sections, creeds and classes of Irishmen. I am
afraid settlement is impossible until that has been
achieved. All parties in Britain, Liberal, Unionist*
Labour, are equally pledged through their leaders not
to coerce LTlster into the acceptance of any measure
of autonomy which would have to be forced on the
population of that Province. On the other hand,.
Irish Nationalists are equally pledged not to accept
any settlement which would not put Ulster into the
same position as Munster or Connaught. How are
you to reconcile these inconsistent positions ? Home
Rule is within the reach of Nationalist Ireland the
moment it extends its hand, but if Nationalist Ireland
says she will not have Home Rule unless she can have
Ulster, with or without her will, then I am afraid a
settlement is remote.

The Sinn Fein attitude during the war has not
made matters easier. No British Statesman could
coerce LTlster in order to place it forcibly under the
control of De Valera and the men who were un-
doubtedly intriguing with the Germans to stab Britaia

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 417

in the back at the very moment when Germany was
making a special effort to overwhelm her armies in
France. I very much regret having to say this for I
have always been a consistent supporter of every
Home Rule Bill introduced into the House of Com-
mons during the past 30 years. But it is no use
ignoring facts. I know you to be a man of supreme
courage and therefore prepared to face unpalatable
truths.

Ever sincerely,

LLOYD GEORGE.
William O'Brien, Esq.

Private arid Confidential. July 19, 1919.

Dear Mr. Lloyd George, —

Before you finally make up your mind to the most
lamentable decision to which you are tending, there
are a few considerations which I would ask you tx>
weigh well.

1. If I was " fundamentally right " in struggling
for the conciliation of " Ulster," it is not wise to forget
that these efforts were steadily ignored by a Liberal
Home Rule Government while Sir E. Carson's men
were declaring in the House of Commons that it was
still possible to win the consent of Ulster. No con-
cession of any kind was offered, until at the last and
under threat of rebellion there was offered the one
inadmissible and impossible concession — that of Par-
tition and the whole object of the Home Rule Bill
sacrificed.

2. That Partition was offered with the con-
currence of the late Irish Party is no argument
against the Irish people, who, the moment they got
the chance, and mainly on account of their acceptance
of Partition, annihilated that Party at the polls.

3. Irish resentment is only exasperated by the
allegation that " the Irish Convention failed to agree
to a settlement." As you may possibly remember, I

4i8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

pointed out to you at the time, 90 out of 100 members
of the Convention were pledged to Partition (which
only for the Sinn Fein victories of East Clare and
Kilkenny they would certainly have fallen back upon).
The Convention represented everybody except the
Irish people, as is proved by the fact that not three
Nationalist members of the Convention could obtain
election by any constituency in the country. On the
other hand, you have only to refer to the class of
names I suggested for a Conference of ten or twelve
known friends of peace to make sure they would
have come to an agreement, and that, on a Refer-
endum, their agreement would have been accepted
by as large a majority as it is possible for any country
to show upon any contested issue. That way, and
that way alone, a settlement still lies.

4. The argument as to Sinn Fein having
"" stabbed England in the back ' is only worthy of
Sir E. Carson, whose preparations for his own
rebellion were far more responsible for England's
troubles with Germany. It must be remembered
that the Easter Week Rising was a reaction from the
failure of forty years of earnest petitioning for peace
on the part of the Irish people, culminating with the
proposal of Partition, which is as intolerable to
Ireland as a proposal of peace would be to France
on condition of the alienation of one-fourth of her
territory. If Sinn Fein had stooped to a real policy
of treachery, they would have flooded your army
with Irish recruits, and by wholesale desertion in
battle have imitated the desertions from the Austrian
Army of her Bohemian, Croatian, Rumanian, and
Italian subjects, to whom you have given liberty as
their reward for their rebellions.

5. Nationalists are not pledged to a policy of
" putting Ulster in the same position as Minister or
Connaught." On the contrary, they are ready with
one voice now to concede to Ulster the special terms

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 419

my friends and myself struggled for all along —
terms which would secure her all but half the votes
in an Irish Parliament. They would probably accept,
further, some such exceptional appeal to the Imperial
Parliament for a limited time as we proposed six
years ago. Any conceivable danger of oppression
would now be met by an appeal to the League of
Nations, who will have a jurisdiction in the affairs
of minorities much larger than the " Ulster '
minorities who have been incorporated in the new
States of Poland, Bohemia, Servia, and the Italian
Tyrol.

6. If the offer of unqualified Dominion Home
Rule for all Ireland were propounded even now on
the responsibility of the Government and accepted
by an overwhelming majority — even in Ulster itself —
on Referendum, it is not conceivable, especially if the
verdict of Great Britain were obtained at a General
Election, that physical force would be necessary to
obtain obedience to the law.

I am too old to be any longer of much account,
but it would be a wrong to the two countries to
conceal from you my conviction that if the reason-
ableness of the most influential leaders of Sinn Fein
be now spurned and nothing done, so long as Sir
E. Carson bars the way, you will leave many millions
of the new generation of Irishmen at home and in
America and Australia with no alternative but to
place their hopes in England's difficulties either
through perilous rivalries with America or in some
Socialist revolution at home in some paralysis of
English trade. You will not, I hope, complain if I
have been free spoken in offering advice of a sort
which up to the present has not often turned out to
be astray in the affairs of Ireland.

" Sincerely yours,

" WILLIAM O'BRIEN.
" Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P.,
Prime Minister."

420 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

" If they are honestly dealt with, all will be well,
but God help the Government that will try any
further tricks on them ! ' It was the complete
manual of wisdom in the matter, but the manual
was placed under the eyes of the blind. Plainly, it
was the incorrigible British fault all over again :
Mr. Lloyd George read the first hint of good will on
Mr. De Valera's part as a sign that he was a beaten
man. As likely as not, he concluded that he had
caught Mr. De Valera and myself in a conspiracy to
balk him of the victory already in the hands of the
Black and Tans. Here was the small smartness
which so often marred his imaginative greatness as a
statesman. Had he at that time honestly opened
negotiations for peace, he would have avoided most
of the difficulties which were later to imperil every-
thing when the Irish Republic had to be dealt with
as an accomplished fact. The Dail had not yet been
formally called together : its members had not yet
sworn the solemn oath of allegiance to the Irish
Republic which it thenceforth became the principal
difficulty of delicate minds to recall. It seems certain
that Mr. De Valera's scruples about arranging the
terms of an " external association " with the Empire
would never have assumed their subsequent serious-
ness, and that the vast bulk of the nation would
have welcomed peace in ecstacy. Nevertheless, in
the very letter in which he acknowledges that I was
'" fundamentally right " (and consequently he himself
fundamentally wrong) in the advice I had for years
been tendering, the Prime Minister once more rejects
my counsels, will talk of nothing except the old
bitterness of Easter Week, and the failure of his
own precious specific of " The Irish Convention,"
and obviously dismisses the subject with the
comfortable feeling that his own policy of the Black
Hand was winning.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 421

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE BLACK AND TANS

FORCED by England's deliberate plan from its quiet
administration of Corporations and Co. Councils,
its Arbitration Courts and peaceful picketing of the
Royal Irish Constabulary, to fight for its life, Sinn
Fein at last stood on its guard and fought. Since
young David took up his sling to tackle Goliath never
seemed there so unequal a match. Between regulars,
policemen and naval ratings, England disposed of an
army of 100,000 of the best equipped troops in the
world, being at least one armed soldier for every able-
bodied man of the population in the eight or ten
counties to which the burden of the battle was confined.
Against this host there was arrayed no visible force of
any kind except bands of half-drilled youngsters,
without so much as a field piece, with the scantiest
equipment even of rifles, with no really serviceable
weapons at all except revolvers to confront the heavy
artillery, the tanks and armoured cars massed against
them under famous generals fresh from their victory
over German armies counted by millions. Before
the revolution which the World-War made in methods
of warfare as in the whole structure of civilization,
no Irishman outside a padded-cell could have dreamed
of pitting these parcels of raw youths in the open
field against the ironclad might of England. By a
curious irony it was a war in which the armaments of
England surpassed tenfold any in her history that
caused Ireland, Egypt and India to laugh at her
colossal military power, and it was after the war, on
its great fields, had been triumphantly concluded that

422 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

her armies were covered with disgrace and shame by
a Young Ireland furnished with weapons little more
dangerous than blackthorns. It was, of course, solely
because the principle of the sacredness of the liberties
of the small nationalities on which she had been forced
to fight the war, if she were to obtain the aid of America,
now interposed its veto against the annihilation of
Ireland by her militarist armies, and the fine chivalry
with which she had egged on or rewarded with their
National Freedom the rebels of the Austrian, the
Russian and the Turkish empires, was now retorted
upon herself and withered her arm when she came to
deal with the Poles, and Tcheco-Slovaques and Jougo-
Slaves of her own Empire.

Mr. Lloyd George, however, stripped England of
all the credit she might have had if she had of her own
motion added Ireland to the constellation of free nations
it was her boast to have set shining by the Treaty of
Versailles. He took a course which digged a new
gulf of hatred between the two islands, he tore open
centuried wounds which were all but healed. He
tortured the patient nation-builders of the original
Sinn Fein programme out of their peacefulness and
he supplanted them with the Irish Republican Army.
He affected to mistake a world-wide race for a murder-
gang, and never gave up the policy of " frightfulness '
and insult by which he calculated upon cowing them,
until he had kindled them into a war of liberty which
was the admiration of the world, and until the beaten
bully was reduced to suing for a visit to his Cabinet
Room at Downing St. from the most noted of the
murder-gang. It was not, however, until he had first
compelled the tortured nation for two years to undergo
a sweat of blood. This is not the place to relate the
history of events, quorum pars minima fui — which I
was compelled to witness in blank and helpless inaction
and of which the recital must be left to those with a
better title to write from first hand information. Two

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 423

things it may safely be affirmed will appear with more
certainty the more searchingly the investigations
hitherto forbidden are pushed home — there will be
found no page in England's story more shameful than
the War of the Black and Tans, and none in which the
fortitude of the youth of Ireland and their idealism
as lofty if sometimes also as cloudy as our Irish skies
will figure more proudly in the eyes of their posterity.

The Irish Republican Army could not hold the
open field for an hour against ten thousand regular
troops ; they nevertheless succeeded in worrying an
army of a hundred thousand out of the country.
Battalions without end poured into the remotest
villages, without any visible resistance to their
armoured cars and great artillery ; but the practical
results of their occupation vanished as promptly as
the fortifications built by children on the foreshore,
to be quietly swallowed up by the next tide. Not
less unchainable was the ocean that swelled around
their barrack-walls, for its ebb and flow was moved
by the two primeval attractive forces that agitate the
soul of the multitudinous Irish race — the Spirit of
Liberty and the Spirit of Religion. The nation was
seized by a holy fire such as inflamed the first Cru-
saders at the call of Peter the Hermit. The Republican
army into which the young men flocked was not more
truly an army than a great religious Confraternity as
fanatical as the processions of the White Penitents which
traversed Europe in the Middle Ages. They went into
fire or mounted the scaffold with the placid conscience
of those who have received Extreme Unction and are
about to step straight into Heaven. Not only had death
no terrors for the finest among them ; they courted it
and insisted upon it as the most precious of honours,
and that with the modesty of true heroes. Kevin
Barry, a medical student of 16, who was hanged for
an attack on a military lorry in one of the streets of
Dublin, was a perfectly fair specimen of the Republican

2E

424 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

recruit. Two days before his execution, the boy met
some of his comrades in the prison-yard at Mountjoy,
and was permitted to shake hands with them. As
they parted, his dying speech was : " Well, good bye,
boys : I'm off on Monday ! >: — that and nothing more.
Death, even under what might well seem to the young
soldier ignominious conditions, was too much a matter
of course to waste words about. Against happy
warriors such as he — who recited their Rosaries or
sang their " Soldier 's-Song ' with equal fervour —
who appeared and disappeared on the track of the
British troops with the mysterious facility of Ariel—who
accepted sentence of penal servitude or death without
answering a word in recognition of England's Courts-
martial — who even in the depths of the English
prisons where they were emtombed carried on the
war as stoutly as ever, raised barricades and engaged
their torturers with bare fists, escaped over the prison
walls under the eyes of their jailors, died of hunger by
inches, rather than acknowledge any criminal taint, held
their dances in the intervals of their ambushes in their
mountain bivouacs and in all these wild years never
laid an irreverent hand upon a woman, or tasted
intoxicating drink, or bred a single informer in their
ranks — against the spirit often thousand Kevin Barrys,
the garrisons of the armoured cars might as well dis-
charge their great guns against the heavens.

More amazing even than the fanaticism of the
Republican Army was the genius with which their
operations were conducted. Nobody knew who were
the men in command. Nobody knows for certain
even yet. The young clerks and schoolmasters and
artisans like Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha, Richard
Mulcahy and Major General McKeown, " the black-
smith of Ballinalee," who are now the legendary heroes
of the fights were at that time unknown even by name
outside their secret council-chambers. But General
Macready and the most acute of his staff officers were

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 425

the first to recognise the military genius of the anony-
mous captains who lay in wait for them and baffled
them — the accuracy with which their plans were
worked out to their smallest particular — the versatility
with which, as soon as one mode of attack was ex-
ploded, they turned to another and a more provokingly
ingenious one — the ruthless punctuality with which
they answered " reprisals " by " counter reprisals " —
the methodical precision with which the account for
the hanging of six soldiers of the Republic in one
morning in Cork was squared by the shooting of six
soldiers of England the same evening in the same city —
and the cheerfulness with which they took their
punishment whenever even native wits like theirs were
no match for the overpowering army against which
their revolvers and shot guns were pitted. As the
plot thickened, savage crimes began to dog the march
of the Republicans as well as of the Black-and-Tans.
A la guerre comme a la guerre \ was spoken by the most
chivalric of the war-nations ; war is always and every-
where a hideous and bloodguilty thing obeying its law of
nature which is to beat the enemy into subjection by
whatever brutalies it may. But these were only the rare
blots upon a guerilla war which would have been the
admiring wonder of England and the enthusiastic
theme of her poets had it been waged against any
power in the world except her own — a guerilla war as
gallant as that which drove the French out of Spain more
effectually than Wellington's Army — waged against far
more terrific odds than that of the Greeks which excited
Byron's lyric raptures — and perhaps with more scru-
pulous weapons than those employed against Austria
by Mazzini whom, as these lines are written, Mr.
Lloyd George has been extolling as " the greatest name
in the history of Italy " — the name of Dante himself
being forgotten, if ever heard of.

The Black-and-Tans for their part, if they were
less resourceful in wit, made up for their inferiority

426 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

by a brutality run mad. Whatever atrocities the jack-
booted Germans committed in the first weeks of their
occupation of Belgium, the Black-and-Tans com-
mitted and improved upon for a year and a half during
their Satanic reign in Ireland. They roamed through
the country by night in their armoured cars bellowing
with drunken fury in search of vengeance for some
successful ambush or captured barrack : set fire to
defenceless villages or blew them up with bombs;
flogged, tortured and murdered without ceremony the
men whenever they could find them, under conditions
too loathsome to be particularized ; whenever the
men were missing, they extorted their last penny from
the terror of the women, outraged them with drunken
obscenities more hateful than their flourished revolvers,
and left with a whole generation of Irish children
memories of their midnight devilries more horrible
than any Dante could imagine for his Inferno. For
the bare offence of being found in possession of re-
volvers men were hanged, and the statesmen who
hanged them were shocked to find that the hangings
were followed by vengeances no less drastic. A trick
more cunning than crude barbarities like these was
the systematic destruction of the people's means of
living by the burning down or blowing up of the
factories, like those at Balbriggan and Mallow, upon
which half the working population depended for
employment. Even the blameless rustic creameries
to which many thousands of farmers trusted for a
market for their milk were given wholesale to the
flames ; and the only comment of the Prime Minister
upon this pretty employment for the arms of England
was his sneer at the influence of Sir Horace Plunkett
as a peacemaker, that " he could no longer depend even
upon the support of his creameries."

And the ineffectualness of all this gigantic apparatus
of " frightfulness ! ' The only people at all terrorized
were the old folks, the sick, the mothers and their

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 427

babies trembling in their cabins, or driven to fly to the
mountains or the graveyards for refuge from their
midnight invaders. The young men who were the
real quarry of the terrorists — even those who had
hitherto kept aloof from the Revolution — were left no
alternative but to swell the ranks of the Republican
Army in their fastnesses in the hills, whence they
swooped down in their own good time with a vengeance
too often as savage as that of their antagonists and far
more sure. The young women defied bullets and the
courts-martial $ven more bravely than their brothers
or sweethearts. After twelve months while this lex
talionis was the only law of the land, the Irish Re-
publican Army had so far got the better of the ap-
parently irresistible forces opposed to them, that even
in the cities no military lorry from which the muzzles
of the rifles protruded could pass through the streets
in open day without a bomb hurtling in the ears of its
garrison, and in the country the railways were made
impassable, the bridges blown up and the roads
trenched and barricaded, and their most confidential
despatches intercepted until their armoured cars no
longer durst venture outside their garages and the
Black-and-Tans found themselves cooped up in their
guard-rooms, with no other resource left to relieve the
tedium except the proceeds of their raids for whiskey
and their quarrels — sometimes with revolvers as well
as with fists — with the more clean-lived of the old
Royal Irish Constabulary who were still condemned to
keep their obscene company. They had turned against
them the most timid man in the country, Unionist, as
well as Nationalist, who was not within range of their
rifles. As for the nation in general, who had smarted
under the taunt that Irishmen fought bravely for every
country except their own ; who were humiliated to
remember that for nearly a century they could only
quote the three Manchester Martyrs and a very few
others who had thought it worth while to offer up

428 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

their lives for Ireland — who remembered with a certain
self-reproach, how lately it was that the country
seemed to be sunk in shameless political corruption
and self-seeking — they were open-eyed in wonder
and delight to discover that a generation had arisen
ready in thousands and in tens of thousands to die for
Ireland with a mystic love-light in their eyes, and most
wonderful of all that they were striking all the hosts of
England with paralysis behind their fortresses and
big guns. Every Irishman worth his salt the world
over began to glow with pride in the young soldiers
of his nation.

Sir Hamar Greenwood might go on undauntedly
bragging and lying, but England was awakening to
horrid glimpses of the truth. English men and
women, who came over to see for themselves, were
going back with stories that turned honest cheeks
aflame ; and Mr. Lloyd George, excellent opportunist
that he was, was beginning to ask himself whether in
place of " having Sinn Fein on the run " and " holding
the murder-gang by the throat, " it was not perhaps the
murder-gang who were having the best of it and
whether it was not about time for him to " go on the
run himself."

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 429

CHAPTER XXIX

THE TRUCE OF IITH JULY, 1 92 1

ONE of the worst consequences of Mr. Lloyd George's
mistaking reasonableness in the Sinn Fein leaders for
weakness was to accentuate the demand for a Republic.
Up to that time, the talk of a Republic arose largely
from the habit of putting demands higher than ex-
pectations, which the shiftiness of English party
politicians had encouraged. In his interview with me
in August 1922, Mr.De Valera made a statement which
throws a flood of light upon the secret processes by
which the Irish Revolution was turned from peaceful
action to arms. " He said " (I quote from my own note
of our conversation) " he had spent the last four years
trying to keep the peace between Cathal Brugha, on
what he might call the old Fenian side, and Arthur
Griffith, representing the Constitutional Sinn Feiners.
They were really two separate movements, and nothing
except the pressure of the Black-and-Tan terror kept
them together so long." That I believe to be pro-
foundly the historic truth of the matter. Parnell
had the same nearly superhuman task as between the
two wings of his own movement ; but not only did
Parnell possess a supreme genius for command, but
the captains he attracted from the old Fenian host
were men of as weighty a political judgment as his
own, and the actual physical force movement had
declined into a small and beaten sect, while the original
Sinn Fein intellectual group had almost disappeared
when the men of the Easter Week Rising by an absurd
accident were forced to inherit their name, and the
ferocity with which Dublin Castle persecuted every

430 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

form of open and advised action every month increased
the secret predominance of the men of action.

Mr. Lloyd George's unlucky response perforce
threw Mr. De Valera more and more into the hands
of the more revolutionary of his counsellors. The
Dail was secretly assembled and the Republic solemnly
proclaimed. A more serious matter still, the members
were made to take an oath of allegiance to the Republic,
and the difficulty of getting the young idealists who
were the flower of the movement to break the oath by
which they were thus consecrated to the service of the
Republic as an organized reality became the most
insurmountable of all the obstacles in the peace negotia-
tions later on. When I commented to Mr. De Valera
upon the unwisdom of thus prejudicing the ultimate
issue by an engagement so notoriously sacred in Irish
eyes, he answered (I again quote from my precis of
our conversation), " that he was from the beginning
opposed to any oath of any kind being taken. It was
while he was in prison the first Dail began by swearing
allegiance to the Republic, and at the second Dail
they had to follow the precedent/'

I did not myself take too tragic a view of Mr.
Lloyd George's non possumus. It was impossible to
know him without counting upon his readiness with
a new set of opinions whenever the old set proved
unworkable. I construed his letter as an order that
the war must go on — until further orders. One of
the brainiest of the Republican leaders, who after-
wards became a Minister in the Cabinet of the First
Dail (Mr. Austin Stack) has more than once reminded
me of my prognostication at the time : " If you can
hold out for six months longer, you'll have a sporting
offer from Lloyd George," and his own amused reply :
" If you're a true prophet, that's all right ; we can hold
out for two years longer against man or devil."

Before the six months were over, the Prime
Minister was wobbling, and the " sporting offer '

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 431

if it had not already come was on the way. In the
meantime, Sir Hamar Greenwood's desperadoes grew
more frantic than ever. Fresh regiments were poured
across from England, it was made death to be in
possession of firearms (two men were actually hanged
for the offence) and the war of reprisals from both
sides month by month assumed a more bloody and
inhuman aspect, while a third party to the quarrel
made its appearance in the shape of bands of high-
waymen (mostly demobilised soldiers of the British
Army) who roamed the country, plundering individuals
and Banks with impartial pistols. It is curious to
remark that, for the Bank robbery campaign, as for
the substitution of assassination for persuasion in
the case of the Constabulary, it was the Black Cabinet
in Dublin Castle who set the example. They directed
one of their Resident Magistrates, Mr. Alan Bell, to
hold a Star Chamber inquisition at the Castle, at
which he took forcible possession of the most confi-
dential books of the Munster and Leinster Bank and
laid hands on £20,000 of their funds on the suspicion
that they belonged to Sinn Fein depositors. The
unfortunate magistrate was promptly taken out of a
tramcar on his way to the Castle, and shot dead on the
roadside, and the Bank robbery initiated by the
Government was copied with interest on the other
side, until armed raids on the Banks became every-
where a common incident in the anarchy.

If women's purses (even that of General Strick-
land's wife) were snatched in the public streets by
the Black-and-Tans, still less were the ministers of
religion spared, and the higher their station the more
ferocious was the relish with which they were perse-
cuted and murdered. Dr. Fogarty, the Bishop of
Killaloe, was the only one of the Irish Bishops, since
the death of Dr. O'Dwyer, who openly took his stand
with Sinn Fein in its time of agony, but he was none
the less an innocuous politician who had been up to a

432 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

quite recent date a fervid admirer of the Parliamentary
Party. The Bishop's palace at Ennis was raided in
the middle of the night by an armed gang whose
object, it can be charged upon unanswerable evidence ,
was to murder him. It came to my knowledge, upon
the testimony of an actual eye-witness, that the In-
spector of Constabulary, who commanded the Raiders>
was shortly afterwards summoned to Dublin Castle
to give a report of his expedition to his principal in
chief command of the Auxiliaries. He related, with
somewhat bumptious pride, the perfection of his
arrangements, but " cursed his rotten luck that the
old fox had given him the slip," and attributed to
" some damned Catholic Peeler " the warning which
had saved the Bishop's life. My information (which
comes from a quarter not open to doubt) is that the
Commandant, far from rebuking his subaltern's
murderous zeal, followed him to the door when he
was leaving, and took him by both hands with this
shocking parting message : " Good bye, old chap.
God bless you ! Better luck next time ! ' And
for months afterwards the hunted Bishop was ' * on
the run " for his life in the mountains of Clare, like
the most persecuted of his predecessors of the Penal
Days.

Two other strokes of " frightfulness ' which it
was counted would mark the final subjugation of Sinn
Fein, in reality put an end to the last possibility of
breaking its spirit. One was the capture by a British
warship on the high seas of Most Rev. Dr. Mannix,
Archbishop of Melbourne, on his way to pay a last
visit to his aged mother in his native country. The
deportation to England of the Archbishop (admittedly
the most powerful man in the Australian Common-
wealth next to, if even next to, its Prime Minister,
Mr. Hughes), and the paltry insolence of refusing him
a last interview with his old Irish mother had the
double effect of exhibiting the realities of the Irish

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 43$

situation to all civilized mankind in a way there could
be no suppressing or falsifying, and of stirring up the
spirit of resistance in Ireland to a pitch incomparably
more passionate than could have been roused by the
few public speeches it was the poor strategy of the
British kidnappers to strangle.

A still more stupid offence against humanity was
the slow torture to death of the young Lord Mayor of
Cork, Terence Mac Swiney. He was seized during
the ceremony of his inauguration in succession to his
predecessor, Tomas Mac Curtain, who was called out
of his bed at midnight by a band of Auxiliaries and
murdered in the presence of his wife and children,,
and who, Sir Hamar Greenwood with a face of brass
assured the House of Commons had been assassinated
by his brother Sinn Feiners. Young Mac Swiney,.
once in the toils of these monsters of lying and foul-
play, made the last protest that was open to him against
the iniquity of his imprisonment by devoting himself
to the slow torments of death by hunger. Day by
day, week after week, the world kept watch outside
Brixton Jail while the Irish idealist lay calmly looking
into the eyes of death every hour of the day and of the
night with a steadfastness outlasting that of Mutius
Scaevola, whom History has made immortal for
plunging only an arm into the flames. His jailors,
were as inexorable as Death, but, as the clumsiest
experimentalist in human nature might have antici-
pated, it was the dead idealist who left Brixton Jail
the victor, and not they. Sir Hamar Greenwood
himself began to understand when an Archbishop and
six Bishops with their mitres and croziers and in their
purple robes, tramped through the streets of Cork
before the coffin of Terence Mac Swiney.

By this time the sea-change was beginning to work
in the Prime Minister. As the Commission of In-
quiry from the Labour Party and the foremost
publicists of the American and French Press swarmed

434 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

over to see for themselves and published their ex-
periences to a horrified world, Sir Hamar Greenwood's
early manner as a professor of able-bodied mendacity
could no longer yield much comfort to his Chief.
The first indignant denial that there had ever been
reprisals had to be given up for shambling admissions
that reprisals — and no doubt reprehensible reprisals-
there had been ; the stories that the Mayors of Cork
and Limerick had been murdered and a hundred towns
and villages given to the flames by the Sinn Feiners
themselves could no longer be got to pass the lying
lips of the mythomaniacs, although they have never
to this hour been honestly apologized for. But at
least the reprisals, it was promised, were henceforth
to be " official reprisals " carried out under responsible
military authority. The more barbaric vengeances of
the Black-and-Tans were without doubt discouraged , in-
stead of being instigated, by humane and gallant soldiers
like Sir Nevill Macready. It was not possible for
such men to come to close quarters with those mis-
creants without being obliged to report that they had
placed themselves outside the pale of civilization and
that their deeds, far from diminishing the power of
Sinn Fein, had maddened the country into a system
of resistance so irresistible, so omnipresent and so ably
conducted that no army could put it down without
a general massacre of unarmed old men, women and
children, which would make the name of England an
astonishment and a hissing among civilized men.

By the spring of 1920 the Prime Minister who in
July 1919 had mistaken for the white flag of a beaten
man Mr. De Valera's offer of peace while he had still
an undisputed power to enforce it, was casting about
for negotiations upon more ignominious terms with
Archbishop dune, an Australian Prelate who, with
the usual clumsiness of England's dealings with
Ireland, was eagerly welcomed to Dublin Castle by
way of administering another snub to his more authori-

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 435

tative colleague of Melbourne, all this time held in
oose custody in London, far from his native land and
from consultation with the Sinn Fein chiefs with whom
his word was law. Was the voice of Wisdom, which
sitteth by the throne, to be heard even then ?
The concessions announced to Archbishop Clune
were, it is certain, the same in substance as
those embodied in the Treaty signed in Downing
Street in December, 1921, after eighteen further
months of official brutalities which were wholly
unavailing except that they most dangerously increased
the power of the military chiefs of the I.R.A. as the
arbiters between peace and war. It was to be
" Canadian Home Rule ' under precisely the same
conditions of a Canada robbed of its richest province
and coerced into an Imperial tribute, which was the
best Mr. Griffith and General Collins could obtain
for Ireland in the Treaty of Downing Street. The
one difference of any moment between the two offers
was that Mr. Lloyd George still held out for the
surrender of their arms by the I.R.A. as an indis-
pensable preliminary. For the sake of saving Sir
Hamar Greenwood's face by this paltry satisfaction,
the chance of an agreement then and there which the
pur sang Republicans were not yet strong enough to
forbid was once more madly sacrificed. Sir Hamar
Greenwood's face was not saved, because the con-
dition then insisted upon was after another year of
wanton bloodshed ignominiously dropped. The only
result British statesmanship had to show for itself was
that it arrayed the entire Irish race at the back of the
Irish Republican Army in their refusal to surrender
the arms by which they had brought Mr. Lloyd
George to reason, and by which alone they could
make sure he would not undergo a further sea-change
before the bargain was honestly through, if he found
himself negotiating with a disarmed nation. Another
of the few remaining books of the Cumaean Sibyl was
cast to the winds.

436 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

On went the war with immeasurable loss of blood
and credit on both sides, and with ever multiplying
obstacles to that enduring peace which Ireland had
gone on petitioning for until her soul was sick. It
was the unsurrendered arms that in the long run did
it. It would, of course, be nonsense to say the English
armies were driven out of the country by the phantom
levies of the I.R.A. The guerilla bands were no-
where able to meet in battle-array the exultant legions
just returned from their dazzling victories on the
Continent, but it is no less true that the I.R.A. achieved
the still more amazing military feat of cutting up that
tremendous English army of a hundred thousand men
into helpless fragments, isolating them, torturing them
and getting upon their nerves in small surprises by
night and day until it grew to be the one desperate long-
ing of that host of heroes to get their orders for England.

Heaven defend me from doing any wilful injustice
to Mr. Lloyd George, if only because he is a cousin
Celt in qualities and defects alike, and there is a call
of the blood which thrilled the whole Celtic breed
with pride at the sight of the dauntless little Welsh
-country practitioner bestriding the narrow world like
a Colossus, as for memorable years he did. It will
not do to dismiss him as * a turncoat from Home
Rule," as did one of the Hibernian leaders who had
been for years swinging an abject censer before his
altar. If Mr. Lloyd George swopped Home Rule
for Partition, so did Mr. Asquith and the rest of his
" Home Rule Cabinet " ; so did the Hibernian Party
themselves, without a single exception. They were
"turncoats" all, or none. My own conviction has
been already avowed that had he occupied Mr.
AsquitrTs place, with Mr. Asquith's majority, and
did Parneirs spirit still animate the Irish Party, Mr.
Lloyd George would have developed the clear sighted-
ness and imagination to carry a great Home Rule
Act without any serious dissent from Ulster. He

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 437

would have understood the Irish aversion to Partition
as he would have died on the slopes of shadowy Snow-
don rather than submit, had the since Disestablished
Church of Wales (a minority proportionately more
considerable than that of Unionist Ulster in Ireland)
proposed by way of compromise to cut up his own
high-spirited little country into two provinces of
Church-goers and Chapel-goers at eternal enmity.
But now that " the Act on the Statute-book " with
Ireland's own privity, was changed from a Home
Rule Act to a Partition Act, Mr. Lloyd George, for
whom there was no absolute truth in politics, but only
a relative truth adjustable according to the reports of
his Party whips, felt it a duty to try whether, as he
was noisily assured from Dublin Castle, a Black-and-
Tan settlement on that basis might not be the line of
least resistance. The Black-and-Tans, the Whips
now began to report, were not a success either in
dragooning Ireland or in comforting the conscience
of England, and the Prime Minister who had a faible
for pushing his admiration for brave enemies to the
length of despising friends down on their luck, frankly
threw over his disreputable auxiliaries in Ireland and
began to see an unexampled opportunity opening up
before him of seeking an Irish victory in a precisely
opposite direction, which was very likely more welcome
to his heart of hearts.

If he could not (in the pretty Black-and-Tan
jargon of the day) " do in " Sinn Fein, he must e'en
parley with it, and for that he had advantages un-
known to any of his predecessors. To begin with,
a King (it would be churlish to forget) whose yearning
for an Irish appeasement was a factor of the first
importance in mollifying the most ingrained English
prejudices. Next, both Mr. Bonar Law and Sir E.
Carson, who had made him Prime Minister, and made
him their prisoner, were now removed from the active
scene. That co-operation of English Parties, for

438 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

which Gladstone sighed to no purpose was ready to
his hand. Not altogether — may it sans immodesty
be hinted ? — without a share of influence from labours
of our own for many an unregarded year, the hesita-
tions of the Unionist Party in particular — of fine
Elder Statesmen of the stamp of Mr. Walter Long,
as well as of the rising hopes and brains-carriers
of the Party like Mr. Austen Chamberlain and Mr.
F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead) and Lord Robert
Cecil himself — had given way to bolder notions of
Irish liberty. None but a pathetic handful of ancient
Tory impossibilists any longer stood in the way.

On the Liberal side, Mr. Asquith, again at the
head of his " Wee Free " following in the House of
Commons, was arraigning the atrocity-mongers in
Ireland with the noble eloquence which was always
his, and was advocating, as with a father's pride, a
most opulent measure of that Dominion Home Rule
which he had quite overlooked in the days of his
Premiership. The Labour Party were to a man for
Ireland's deliverance, the more complete the better.
The Irish Unionists outside the Six Counties, who
might have been a political force of the first magnitude,
had they asserted themselves before they were deserted
by Sir E. Carson and contemptuously ignored by the
Parliament of England, did at last find voice to claim
kinship with the aspirations of their countrymen.
The Anti-Partition organisations of Irish Conservatives
of capacity and high integrity like Lord Midleton and
Sir Horace Plunkett, late comers though they were
into the vineyard, did bring a substantial accession of
strength to Mr. Lloyd George in the daring change of
front he was meditating.

That he did not enlist the aid of Sir James Craig
as well was the capital mistake of the Prime Minister
in his new peace negotiations. The Ulster leader
was never an incorrigible enemy of a modus vivendi
with his Southern countrymen. Like so many of the

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 439

higher Orange type, if he was an irresponsible being
for half a dozen mad " anniversary " days, he was for
all the rest of the year a kindly neighbour, a fast friend,
more honest of heart than complex in the convolutions
of his brain matter, but in all things, flattering or other-
wise, as irredeemably Irish as the granite ribs of Cave
Hill. At this moment, Sir E. Carson had gone off
to the House of Lords, throwing the squalling baby
Parliament in Belfast on his hands under circumstances
which could scarcely fail to try the temper of the
deserted Covenanters. Sir James Craig had besides
been mellowing down into a popular officer of the
King's Household, and would, we may be sure, have
found more congenial work in gratifying the King's
dearest desire than he had ever found in qualifying
to be one of His Majesty's Rebels. It would not have
been difficult, with his good will, to enlarge the
" National Council " of the Act of 1920 into some
real bond of National Unity, such as would have made
it the pride of Ulster to be represented in the National
Parliament, while retaining in any desired measure
the local liberties she enjoys in her Belfast assembly.
That no objection would have come from the Sinn
Fein side is made clear by President Cosgrave, who
declares that had Ulster accepted the Treaty of
Downing Street as it stood she would still be in
possession of her particularist privileges in as ample
a measure as the All-for-Ireland League had ever
proposed.1 Sir James Craig had already given proof

1 " It is not generally understood," President Cosgrave said
in the Dail, " by the man in the street that had the Northerns
elected to remain with us they would be guaranteed in perpetuity
every acre ot territory that for the moment is under their control.
They would have retained their Parliament of the Six Counties
and their separate judiciary and their Governor, according to
their pleasure .... and would have had under the Constitution
of the Free State, a representation of 51 members in the Free
State Parliament, instead of 13 members who now represent
them at Westminster."

2F

440 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

by his perfectly courteous conversations with Mr.
De Valera and Mr. Griffith that he was not averse to
those more cordial understandings that nearly always
follow personal contact.

To leave such a man out in the cold while " the
murder gang ' were being welcomed to Downing
Street was to invite suspicion among Sir J. Craig's
touchy lieges and indeed to give it full justification.
Yet this was what actually happened. The Minis-
terial plan of campaign, I am afraid it will be found,
was first to favour Sinn F&n by cheating " Ulster,"
and next when that portion of the programme broke
down to cheat Sinn F&n by calling in " Ulster."
While the Treaty of Downing Street was under dis-
cussion at the Dail there was held a secret sitting at
which full shorthand notes of the conversations
between the British Ministers and the Sinn Fein
delegates were communicated to the members under
the strictest precautions as to secrecy. Members
were not only specially pledged to regard the informa-
tion as confidential, on pain of an instant renewal of
hostilities by England, but measures were taken to
prevent any written notes on the subject from being
conveyed out of the chamber. Until the full official
record, which must be still somewhere preserved,
sees the light, the truth as to the most important Irish
transaction for a century must still remain obscure
and any enlightened judgment regarding the re-
sponsibilities for the Treaty and for the Civil War
that followed must be postponed until the secret
part of the story comes to be divulged. My own
information on tne subject — derived though it is from
three separate participants in the Secret Session — can
only be made public under every reserve.

There are some details, however, which are not
to be doubted. The first is that the Ministerialists
contrived to shift the discussions at the Conference
from the straight issue of the Integrity of Ireland

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 441

by leading the representatives of Sinn Fein to believe
that the same end was to be more astutely attained by
means of a Boundary Commission. That, I think,
will be found to have been the cardinal error of the
capable but inexperienced Irishmen who found them-
selves pitted against the most subtle intellects the
Empire could select. They allowed the debates to be
diverted from the supreme rights of Ireland as one
indivisible Nation, on which nothing could defeat
them, to paltrier controversies as to whether this or
that county, barony or parish might not be swopped
from the Protestant to the Catholic side of the frontier
and so ensuring that what remained of * Northern
Ireland " must in the nature of things follow. The
notion came (my information goes) from the in-
genious brain of Mr. Winston Churchill whose position
as Colonial Secretary gave him a more commanding
influence than ever in his ill-fated incursions into the
affairs of Ireland. He, with the express authority
of Mr. Lloyd George, conveyed to the Irish delegates
an assurance that the Boundary Commission would
be so arranged as to ensure the transfer to the Irish
Free State of the counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh,
the City of Deny and the important town of Newry,
and that " Northern Ireland " thus virtually restricted
to three counties, would find itself compelled to throw
in its fortunes with the Free State. In one of his
impulsive moments General Collins blurted out in
a public speech the announcement upon Mr.
Churchill's authority that, under the Boundary Com-
mission stipulated for in the Treaty " vast territories "
would be transferred from the Six Counties to the
Free State. This was the first news of the arrange-
ment which reached Sir James Craig. He promptly
and indignantly announced that with a Boundary
Commission of such a character he would have nothing
to do. Mr. Churchill, when brought to book by a
question in the House of Commons, denied that he

442 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

had ever promised " to Mr. Michael Collins ' the
transfer of " vast territories " by means of the Boun-
dary Commission. The reply was technically true,
but was essentially false. It was not " to Mr. Michael
Collins ' he had given the promise ; it was to Mr.
Michael Collins' intermediary. How responsible
Ministers could ever have hoped that such a trans-
action could be secretly carried through, behind the
back pf Sir James Craig, in violation of the solemn
pledge given to him by the Imperial Parliament of
the integrity of his territory under the Act of the
previous year, passes comprehension ; but, unless
three different testimonies which have reached me
from trustworthy sources are to be discredited, the
promise was undoubtedly given, and was only violated
when General Collins' incautious disclosure roused
Ulster up in arms against the chicanery.

Two of the five Irish signatories of the Treaty
declared they only signed it under duress. The
duress was, it is true, gross and unwarrantable. They
were threatened that unless they signed before a
particular hour of the night of 5-6 December, without
being allowed time to communicate with their princi-
pals in Dublin, the dogs of war would be instantly let
loose in Ireland and the order passed to the Black-and-
Tans to set on. The threat was reinforced by the
melodramatic announcement that a Destroyer had
steam up to carry the news of the signing or of the
break-off on the same night to Sir James Craig in
Belfast — the Sir James Craig who had been kept for
a month in total darkness as to how the negotiations
were going. It is impossible to believe that men of the
superb courage of General Collins* and Arthur Griffith
were daunted by stage craft of this kind. They must
have known that, even had these particular negotiations
for a Treaty broken down, the Truce would still be in ex-
istence, and could only be denounced after full time for
deliberation in England and after every resource of

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 443

diplomacy for negotiations in some new form had been
exhausted. Terrific as was the risk of replunging
Ireland into a sea of blood and terror, the very nature
of the intimidation employed against them would
have placed the sympathies of all civilized men on
the side of Ireland if they declined to be hustled by
such methods into consenting to part with one-fourth
of the population and one-fifth of the territory of their
nation.

It is more creditable to the moral courage of the
Irish delegates, and I believe, truer to the facts, to
conclude that their signatures were obtained, not so
much under pressure of the threats of the Govern-
ment, shameful though they were, as in reliance upon
the promise of Mr. Winston Churchill and the Prime
Minister that the Boundary Commission would result
in the inevitable merger of the Six Counties in the
Free State of Ireland. As it turned out, that promise
had to be broken and the Boundary Commission
reduced to a parochial business, if it is to be heard of
any more ; and the first violation of the Treaty, in
its spirit if not in its letter, had to be charged against
England. The root cause of thinking Irishmen's
repugnance to the Treaty of Downing Street went
deeper than the pedantic difference between genuine
Canadian Home Rule and a Republic. Had the Sinn
Fein leaders — those who unwisely remained in Dublin,
as well as those who shouldered the responsibility
in London — taken their stand from the start upon the
impregnable rock of the integrity of their country,
and all their efforts been bent to overcoming the
apprehensions of Ulster, nothing could have resisted
the tide of thanksgiving which would have borne
the Treaty to victory in a country blent together with
the high mission and inspiration of National Re-
generation. Even if these particular negotiations
had to be broken off upon the clear issue of " Ireland
a Nation, and not two hostile States," we should have

444 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

had a justification in the eyes of civilized mankind
against which Black-and-Tan methods could never
again have raised their blood-guilty hands.

For, whatever else may be doubtful, Black-and-
Tannery was flatly and for ever beaten to the earth as
an instrument of human government. And that, as
I have already insisted, not by the valour of the young
soldiers of Ireland alone, but by noble and enlightened
co-operation from British lovers of freedom. A race
of natural kindliness akin to weakness might, indeed,
have been almost too effusive in forgetting all but the
cheerfulness with which Mr. Lloyd George and his
Ministers themselves gave up their prejudices and
boasts of only a few months before, were it not that
their change of heart was made manifest only after
it became clear that the savagery of the Black-and-
Tans was a failure as well as a crime — if not a crime
because it was a failure. The game was up, at all
events, in Ireland. The surrender of arms, on which
the conversations with Archbishop Clune were broken
off, had to be meekly given up. The Truce was
proclaimed for the nth July, 1921, as between two
armies on an equal footing.

The last engagement of the war was a characteristic
one. The Truce was to come into force at noon on
July nth. At twenty minutes before noon a detach-
ment of Black-and-Tans passing in caged lorries
through the village of Castleisland, County Kerry,
was attacked by a company of the I.R.A. and a fierce,
and, I am sorry to say, deadly conflict ensued, in the
brief war-minutes still remaining. When at twelve
o'clock the first stroke of the Angelus Bell sounded
from the village church-tower, the I.R.A. took off
their caps and put up their guns. Not another shot
was fired after the appointed hour in Castleisland or
anywhere else through the country. That afternoon
" the boys " scampered down from the hills into the
towns " on a fortnight's furlough," as they modestly

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 445

calculated, and celebrated their holiday in the half-
schoolboy, half-fanatic spirit in which they had for
two years maintained their war against an Empire
still inebriated with the greatest military triumph in
its history. They had their devout Requiem Masses
for the fallen, their vast processions for the removal
of the bodies of their dead comrades from the resting
places in the bogs and mountains where they had
found their temporary graves ; they ordered the
closing of the public houses with as stern a discipline
as ever ; but in the sweet summer evenings sang their
" Soldier's Song " and danced their jigs around the
bonfires with their sweethearts with the same frolic
welcome with which they had for many a month of
danger hailed the thunder or the sunshine — the
ghastly wounds or the shouts of victory.

446 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XXX

AND AFTER ?

HERE a book specially designed to trace " How the
Irish Revolution Came About " might well come to
its rightful end. From untold depths of degradation
the young men of the Sinn Fein cycle had raised the
Irish cause to a pinnacle at which the most powerful
empire on the earth, its Coercion Ministers, its iron
captains, and both Houses of its Imperial Parliament
solicited almost on bended knees Ireland's acceptance
of a Treaty, which to a more down-trodden generation
might have seemed fabulously favorable. The first
phase of the Revolution finished in all but unspotted
glory with the Truce of July nth, 1921. The Truce
which was the work of the soldiers marked the truly
memorable date rather than the Treaty of December
5-6, 1921, which was the work of the politicians.
For, to the humiliation of English statesmanship and
of Irish " Constitutional ' methods as well, be it
recorded, the Treaty could never have come up for
discussion at all were it not for the heroic fortitude
and the sheer military genius with which the Truce
was first achieved by a host of unknown striplings,
flinging themselves unterrified against the seeming
omnipotence of English militarism in its most barbaric
mood and in its most intoxicated hour of triumpru
It was the last of the soldiers' part of a gallant and
united war.

Would there not however be a certain heartless-
ness in concluding without some endeavour with the
best skill at one's command to lift a corner of the black
curtain behind which the dread drama of the future is

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 447

in preparation ? In all the revolutions of men success
brings its sacrifices of broken friendships, which
passed through the fire and were not burnt, of illusions
that seemed certitudes, of dreams that were divine.
The faith, that wrought miracles in the obscurity of
the Catacombs, showed a less holy flame when the
miracle-workers marched out to fame and power in
the Golden House of the Caesars. Cue la Republique
ttait belle — sous F Empire ! has its meaning for others
than the cynics of the Third Republic. The mere
ugliness which is everywhere apt to overspread the
first radiant face of armed Revolution was not to be
avoided in Ireland. Of poisoned words and vindictive
passions — of deeds on both sides to make honest Irish
blood run cold- there was enough and to spare, but
of greed or self-seeking as little as may consort with
the motives of mortals. Taunts of " place hunting '
against unfortunate Ministers every day or night of
whose lives might be their last, in their efforts to
preserve what they regarded as the only semblance of
settled government left to the country, were not more
absurdly unjust than the counter-charge that the many
thousands of outlaws hunted and maligned who were
couching in the winter hills wasted with hunger and
exposure were simply pursuing a lucrative means of
livelihood as they trod an unregarded Calvary for their
Idea.

The rudimentary facts of the case are not so simple
as they are too often taken to be. The divine right
of the Provisional Government rested on the following
proposition : " The outstanding fact is that the Free
State Government is the Government selected by the
will of the people of Ireland and consequently it is
the lawful government." That is the very claim on
which the case for unquestioning submission to the
Free State Government topples over. There is no
such " outstanding fact." There was no such pro-
nouncement of the clear will of the people of Ireland —

4*8 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

not even of " Southern Ireland," which alone was
permitted any voice.

A Treaty which was only sanctioned by a majority
of one, of its five Irish signatories, and by a majority
of seven in the Dail even under the dishonest threat of
the return of the Black-and-Tans, can hardly be said
to carry in itself the sacredness of an irrevocable
decree by a nation. The Provisional Government
which was the outcome of that narrow vote based all
its authority upon the claim that it represented the
vote of an overpowering majority of the Irish people —
it was put as high as 95 and even 99 per cent. — at the
General Election of June, 1922. That claim is how-
ever a notoriously untenable one. True majority
rule was represented at the General Election by the
Collins-De Valera Pact solemnly recommended to the
country by the unanimous resolutions of the Dail
and of the Ard-Fheis — that is to say of the men who
alone had made any Treaty possible. The painful
violation of that Pact at the last moment all but com-
pletely mystified and nullified the vote of " Southern
Ireland ' at the General Election, sending back a
^decreased number of Free Staters as well as a more
largely decreased number of Republicans and sub-
stituting for the defeated candidates of both sides a
new body of Labourites and nondescript Inde-
pendents, whose appearance was the only genuine
resultant of the General Election. The General
Election was in reality a stalemate. Those who
stirred up the repudiation on the eve of the polls of
the modus vivendi unanimously endorsed by the Dail
and by the Ard-Fheis were the men who set the
Civil War, with all its horrors, going.

It was idle to claim any divine right for a Govern-
ment proceeding from a confusion such as this — a
Government which although forming the largest
group was in matter of fact a minority Government,
since even in an expurgated Dail from which the 34

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 449

elected Republicans were excluded the Government
thus apotheosised could only command a majority
•of 4 on a Vote of Censure upon an issue so vital as
their policy of reprisals and must have been promptly
turned out of office had the Republicans been admitted
to the Division Lobby. When a Government
with this precarious title began — even before
summoning the newly elected representatives of the
people at all to ask their sanction — by bombarding
the Four Courts and starting the Civil War the
night after receiving something like an insolent order
from Mr. Churchill it is not difficult to understand,
why the claim of such a Government to a sanction
from on high in the name of " Majority Rule ! " was
scouted by the young soldiers of Ireland who were old
enough to remember that the same cry of " Majority
Rule ! ' raised largely by the same people was re-
sponsible for all the disasters of Ireland in the previous
fifteen years — the killing of Land Purchase, the
Partition of the country and the universal shipwreck
from which nothing but the Revolution now anathe-
matised could have saved the Irish cause.

The ease with which Mr. Winston Churchill's
heavy artillery enabled the Free State Generals to
dispose of military operations on the grand scale, led
the Irish and the English papers to form a ridiculously
erroneous estimate of the insignificance of the resis-
tance before them. Months after the capture of the
4t last rebel stronghold " and of another last and still
another last had been proclaimed until men's hearts were
sick of the boast, the Generals of the Free State found
themselves in the same position in which General
Macready had been twelve months before: every town
and village was theirs ;and their foe was more unseiazble
than ever. They were cutting unresisting waters
with an irresistible sword, but the waters were not
dispersed. When President Cosgrave assured the
English public through the Times that he was only

450 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

dealing with " a handful of boys andTof neurotic
women," he was making a boast whichf only the
isolation from public opinion in which he^and|his
government were compelled to live could excuse.
The " handful ' multiplied to above ten thousand
men in the Free State jails and still enough of the
" handful " remained outside to make the task of an
army of fifty thousand trained men a heartbreaking
and futile one. If the Free State Ministry could
succeed in drowning resistance in a river of young
Irish blood, their troubles would be only thickening.
It is no less true that the proceedings of the
Republicans or of those who disguise themselves
in their garb have often reached a pitch of folly that
might well be mistaken for dementia. Their
criminal recklessness of the life and limbs of non-
combatants, their forced levies, their bomb-throwings
and burnings and railway raids in every form of blind
destructiveness that could imperil the people's means
of communication, their sources of employment and
even their daily food — shook the foundations of morals
and civilisation to their base and might well seem to
justify the sacred fury with which any suggestion of a
truce with such men on any terms short of uncon-
ditional subjection or extermination was denounced
as treason to the first principles of society. Recrimina-
tions are natural enough in the first heat of hasty and
uninformed judgments on both sides. But recrimina-
tions are a poor game when it has become a question
of splitting Ireland from top to bottom by new chasms
of hatred among her sons, which generations may
labour in vain to reclose. A cause capable of inspiring
a hundred thousand young Irishmen to the most
amazing and tenacious sacrifices, month after month,
in the face of overpowering odds, cannot be a wholly
guilty one, and assuredly is not to be disposed of by
words of wrath anymore than by the volleys of the fir*
ing platoons to which the official reprisals were entrusted^

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 451

The Civil War began as soon as the General Election,
which was neutralised by the violation of the Collins-
De Valera Pact was over, and is dragging along ever
since. It is to be lamented that every effort of honest
public opinion to stop the war before the mischief
should be irreparable, was overbearingly and even
flippantly stamped out. " These peace resolutions
are all moonshine ! ' were the first words of the
Democratic President of the Free State in a manifesto
waving aside a long series of conciliatory resolutions
beginning with the unanimous appeal of the Senate,
which he had himself just nominated as the Second
House of his own Parliament, and followed by the
resolutions of all the National Corporations and most
of the County Councils in " Southern Ireland " ;
and there were other jibes and threats still more un-
worthy of his high station. " The Bulletin " which
is supposed to be the official organ of Mr. De Valera
responded with the no less irrational ultimatum
" Ireland shall not enter into the British Empire so
long as there is a man of us left alive."

To stand up against stiff-necked unreason on both
sides such as this, the only friends of peace who have
hitherto presented themselves with a dog's chanee of
being listened to are " The Old I.R.A. Association "
of men who fought in the Anglo-Irish War, up to the
Truce of July 1 1 th, 1921 , and since the Civil War broke
out have refused to imbrue their hands in brothers*
blood on either side. As I write, their claims, too, to
interfere are being insidiously counterworked and
that largely by those who were never militants in the
united Sinn Fein movement and would not be too
disconsolate to see it going to pieces through intensified
dissensions. Whether " The Old I, R.A. Association "
may not fail of a hearing as sadly as all that went before
them have failed who shall dare to think unlikely ? They
have at least the advantage that in no other direction
can any prospect of an enduring National Pacification

452 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

be now discerned. They are believed to represent
the cream of the fighters who were ready for any feat
for Freedom's sake except fratricide ; and they if
any have the commission to carry their appeal at need
from the half a dozen men on each side who forbid
negotiations to the overwhelming majority of a people,
who abhor a war of partisans and can see nothing but
bankruptcy and red ruin before the country unless it
can be stopped.

What are the definite proposals which press for a
solemn reconsideration by all thinking Irishmen ?

The first is that an Irishman is not necessarily
an hostis humani generis who looks for the revision
of a Treaty which substitutes for Ireland a Nation a
State shorn of Ireland's richest province, laden with
a liability of unknown extent for England's National
Debt of seven thousands of millions, and forbidden
any thought of National Independence with bullies'
threats which no other Dominion would brook.

The next is that to make a Truce possible at all it
must be an Unconditional Truce. Standing upon the
punctilio that the Republicans must first surrender
their arms is to condemn the country to the last
extremities of an unforgivable blood feud in order to
gratify militarist vanity in an infinitely paltry matter*
There is no answer to the argument that if Mr. Lloyd
George had been equally strait-laced in his first demand
for the surrender of arms there could have been no
Truce and consequently no Treaty to put the Free
State Ministers in power.

If to such an accomodation the existing Ministry
interpose an irrevocable Veto there seems to be no
alternative but the obvious one of a change of Ministry,
accompanied, as it must be, with the corresponding re-
signations of such of the Republican leaders as may be
found to be on opposite grounds equally irreconcileable.
The two sets of changes would not involve more than a
dozen individuals all told, and of these none but

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 453,

General Mulcahy on the one side, and Mr. De Valera on
the other were personally known even by name to the
mass] of the Irish people up to a few months ago.
A hard saying it may be and disagreeable for many.
' All things are hard " quoth Heavenly Wisdom itself.
There is an undoubted element of cruelty in the
proposition, but it demands no greater measure of
self-sacrifice and for the highest patriotic motives
than their past and even present sufferings of mind
and body must exact. In the last resort public opinion
" must be cruel only to be kind " if the nation is not
to slip down from danger to destruction. The decree
sic vos non vobis would simply come to their turn as
it did to all others who went before them.

And it is not as if a change of Ministry might
imply a rupture with England, as might have happened
before the Treaty was the established law of both
countries. It can only be altered by slow and
deliberate negotiations, English and Irish. The
choice of Ministers is a purely domestic concern
with which a man of Mr. Bonar Law's shrewd
sense would not think of meddling. Indeed
the fact that it is Mr. Bonar Law and not Mr.
Lloyd George or Mr. Winston Churchill who is now
to be dealt with is a sufficient reminder that every one
of the five British signatories to the Treaty has since
been dismissed from office without causing the smallest
jar in the relations between the two countries.

Both parties to the Civil War have suffered so
atrociously without any compensating results that,
the blessings of peace and good fellowship once re-
stored, it is not conceivable that men with a spark of
patriotism or human reason should replunge the
country into the abyss of fratricide. Undoubtedly
other problems will arise with the Truce. The fact
has to be faced that there cannot be any tolerable
peace until it is made possible for the Republicans
freely to re-enter the public life of the country, and

454 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

this will only be practicable if the oath of allegiance
which at present shuts them out from the Parliament
of the Twenty- Six Counties is abolished.

You and I may here again insist upon the pettiness
of the point in dispute and argue that sworn allegiance
to a regime " as by law established ' does not
forfeit men's freedom to work for a very different one
" as by law disestablished/' and did not prevent the
sworn lieges of Charles I. and James II. from taking
away their crowns — in one case "with a head in it."
What matters is that the Republicans do not regard
it as a petty point, but, from quite respectable scruples
of conscience, would no more take the oath than they
would surrender their fire arms. But again the
difficulty is not so insurmountable as it may look.
Mr. Bonar Law is too frank and fearless a statesman not
to perceive that the only link left between the two
countries and the strongest of all links is the laws of
Nature, which continue to bind the two nations to-
gether in the most vital of their material interests,
with stronger than hoops of steel, and if there was no
other difficulty about getting the Republicans to
labour for their ideals in the Dail with all the comely
arts of persuasion, he would not I think waste much
energy in holding on by a form of oath already watered
down to a consistency almost contemptuous of the
royal personages whom it was framed to honour.

An emergency will arise at once in which the Free
Staters, Republicans and Socialists among whom the
Irish Parliament of the future must be divided would
find an ample field for united action. The Boundary
Commission is foredoomed to failure. It cannot
give effect to Mr. Winston Churchill's undertaking
to transfer "vast territories" from "Northern Ire-
land " to " Southern Ireland," in virtue of which the
Treaty was really signed. The failure will constitute
an essential breach of the Treaty on the part of
England, and all Irish parties will be equally keen in

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 455

resenting and resisting it. In claiming satisfaction
and a revision of the Treaty by friendly negotiation
with England, and if needs be by an appeal to the
League of Nations where it will henceforth meet
England on an equal footing, the Free State will run
no risk of a break with England, much less of a war
for the reconquest of the country, such as demoralised
the timorous and the war-sick in their first judgment
of the Treaty of Downing Street.

There can be no finality in the paltry expedients
of politicians for human government. The original
constitution of Canada — even the broader one sug-
gested by Lord Durham — had to be altered from the
first clause to the last before it reached its present
glorious evolution. The first step was that the
province of Quebec once separated as " Northern
Ireland" is now separated had to be restored.
The far scattered legislatures of Australia were
federated into the Commonwealth without friction
not to speak of war despatches from the Colonial
Office. The breakdown of the English machinery
for working the Treaty as between North and South
would justify and indeed necessitate its amendment,
and not in reference to the breach of the Churchill
agreement alone, but in the direction of making Ire-
land's freedom from compulsory Imperial contribu-
tions as complete as Canada's own.

England cannot long stand over a state of things
in Ulster in which the Catholic and Sinn Fein minority
are left without a single representative in the Belfast
Parliament and have been shamefully gerrymandered
out of the Corporations, County Councils and District
Councils even in counties where they have been
proved to be a majority of the taxpayers and rate
payers ; in which Cardinal Logue cannot cross the
frontier for a visitation of his archdiocese without
being held up and offensively searched, and is for-
bidden liberty to say his midnight Mass at Christmas

90

456 THE IRISH REVOLUTION

in the Cathedral of St. Patrick ; and in which
Republican soldiers are secretly flogged with the
cat o' nine tails in the prisons of the Partitionists.
The sternness with which the Provisional Government
have endeavoured to enforce the Treaty to its last
letter at the cost of the most drastic severities against
their late comrades of the I.R.A. gives them an un-
answerable claim for the assistance of England in
revising the more insufferable parts of the Treaty.

There would be no need of invoking the inter-
vention of the League of Nations in any spirit of
hostility, nor, if the two Nations are wise, of invoking
it at all. If the demand of Ireland took the form of
a Referendum of all Ireland on the simple issue :
Partition or No Partition ? it is not easy to imagine
how a British Prime Minister of wisdom is going to
resist it. Alsace-Lorraine is no more populous and
is very much less wealthy than Ulster. It forms less
than one-eighth of the area of France, while Ulster
covers more than a fourth of the area of Ireland and
has for unnumbered centuries contributed the richest
pages of her history. England which did not grudge
two millions of British lives to restore Alsace-Lorraine
to France, has at the same moment quadrusected
Ireland in affecting to restore her freedom. This cannot
be. No British statesman in his senses can be under
the delusion that an Ireland admitted to the Comity
of Nations can ever submit to be ravished of her
Alsace-Lorraine without an outbreak of Irish
Irredentism which will command the universal sym-
pathy of mankind. No Prime Minister could fail to
understand that British opinion alone would promptly
square accounts with him, if he set out upon a bar-
barous reconquest of Ireland by conscripting an
army of not less than 200,000 men and at a cost of
not less than £300,000,000 to be added to the financial
burdens under which the most patient taxpayers of
Britain are already bowed to the earth.

AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT 457

Provided always that Irish statesmen are large
minded as well as unshakeable. Provided always
that they give up once for all the urchins' joy of
twisting the British Lion's tail, and that in their
dealings with their Northern fellow countrymen they
weary not of proving to them that the National Fra-
ternity to which they invite them is the heart's desire
of a generous and noble Nation, and that they abate
not a jot of the special rights and guarantees every-
body is now willing enough to concede if they are to be
the means of assuaging the forebodings of Ulster.
Upon these conditions a Referendum — " Partition
or No Partition ? " — to be voted upon by the entire
population of Ireland — (which it must be remembered
has never yet been tried) — would to all human certainty
yield such a majority for National Unity — even within
the Ulster borders — as must conclude all further
controversy on the matter for civilised men. An
Ireland thus re-united in the plenitude of her all-
embracing liberties would not be long in healing her
wounds and might fare forward to the future without
an enemy in the world to dim the lustre of her aspira-
tions as " a Nation once Again."

MALLOW,

January loth, 1923.

APPENDIX

MY WITHDRAWAL FROM PARLIAMENT IN 1903

THE following letters, throwing some light upon the circumstances
under which I withdrew from Parliament in 1903, it was not found
possible to insert at length in the body of the narrative : —

i. O'BRIEN to BISHOP OF RAPHOE.

MALLOW COTTAGE, WESTPORT,
January i, 1903.

MY DEAR LORD, — Your letter has just reached me here. With
the spirit that prompted it, I am heartily in accord. I had a long
chat with John Dillon, who states no objection to the tenants'
terms, but objects to any Conference and apparently to any re-
sponsibility in connection with the settlement of the Land question.
He will not, of course, however, do or say anything to resist the
judgment of the country — his attitude so far as I could understand
being an entirely passive one. As for our friend, Mr. Davitt, we
had three hours and a half together on Tuesday, but in his present
mood there would not be the smallest use in reasoning with him.
The best plan is to avoid any unnecessary reference to him and
let time do its work. Unfortunately it would not be possible,
without wrecking the whole scheme, to allow these incoherent and
mischievous newspaper controversies go on without reply. Your
Lordship must recollect that the whole scheme depends upon a
Treasury Contribution of about twenty millions. That money
would be forthcoming if the Government were certain it would
purchase peace, but of course it would be madness for any Govern-
ment to ask England for such a sum if they were told by the Freeman
and its correspondents that we are unable to guarantee peace and
that, in fact, the Bill would create more discontent than ever
The only way of putting an end to that danger is to prove that the
country is with us, and that the country is doing for itself mag-
nificently, in spite of all weak or irresponsible suggestions.

I, of course, heartily agree with your Lordship that the real
question for the country is not whether it would accept our terms,
but whether it will get them or anything like them. We most
certainly wont unless the Government is convinced that the people
have no share in Mr. Davitt's agitation. The present discussion
is all sheer loss, and the curious thing is that the people who are

460 APPENDIX

now so eager to wreck a mighty settlement will be by and by the
last to help us to fight a bad Bill if a bad Bill should be the result
of their efforts.

However, I have still every hope that the splendid fidelity of
the country will persuade Wyndham that he has a real chance of
peace, and of course your Lordship may rest assured that Mr.
Redmond and myself are keenly alive to the necessity for working
cordially with men like Mr. Dillon and Mr. Davitt, as I have a
strong confidence that we will succeed in doing. You will be
yourself, I am certain, a powerful influence in that direction.

Believe me, my dear Lord Bishop,

Most cordially and devotedly Yours,

WILLIAM O'BRIEN.
MOST REV. DR. O'DONNELL,

Lord Bishop of Raphoe.

2. REDMOND to O'BRIEN.

1 8 WYNNSTAY GARDENS,

MY DEAR O'BRIEN, — I am to speak in Edinburgh on Saturday.
Of course, I was not surprised at Davitt's letter. It will do no
harm. What about Dillon's views ? He has not said a word to
me about the Conference ! — Very truly Yours,

January 14, 1903. J. E. REDMOND.

3. O'BRIEN to DILLON.

February *jth, 1903.

MY DEAR JOHN, — I intended to call over yesterday afternoon.
Various callers made it impossible for me to get out before six
o'clock, and it was then too late to call, especially as I knew Redmond
had called and told you all about our interview.1 In any event,
I am afraid, differing as we unfortunately widely do upon questions
of National policy, nothing could begained by discussions which
could lead to nothing except irritating differences as to our points
of view. The situation was been rendered infinitely more difficult
than it was a week or two ago by the Freeman agitation, but we
have only to do our best and if we break down give the fullest
fairplay to those who may be able to do better. — Always Yours,

JOHN DILLON, Esq., M.P. WILLIAM O'BRIEN.

1 The interview of Mr. Redmond and myself with the Under Secretary
Sir Anthony McDonnell, to which Mr. Dillon and Mr. Davitt also had
been invited, and at which the Treasury Bonus was successfully insisted
upon.

APPENDIX 461

4. DILLON to O'BRIEN.

2 NORTH GREAT GEORGE'S STREET,

DUBLIN,
February n//r, 1903.

MY DEAR WILLIAM, — I should of course have been glad to see
you if you had been able to call on Friday, but I agree with you
that so long as the dominant question is the policy and results of
the Conference there is not much to be gained by discussions
between us. When the Government Bill is produced I hope we
may find ourselves more in accord.

I do not know whether I ought to say anything about your
allusion to the Freeman. — There again we differ — I think you
exaggerate immensely the evil effects — (from your point of view)
of anything the Freeman has done — Redmond, Harrington and you
are at all events in a position to say that you have received from the
country an absolutely overwhelming vote of confidence so far as
your Conference proceedings go — and as you have alluded to the
Freeman in writing to me — I am bound to say that you have been
in a position to exercise and have exercised for the past two years
infinitely more influence in the Freeman office than I have. — Yours,

JOHN DILLON.

5. REDMOND to O'BRIEN.

1 8 WYNNSTAY GARDENS,

KENSINGTON.

MY DEAR O'BRIEN, — Ginnell sent me a resolution of which
notice had been given to the Directory by Father O'Connor of
Newtownbutler, Co. Cavan (a prominent supporter of Mr. Dillon),
asking Dr. O'Donnell (Bishop of Raphoe) to preside at the National
Convention instead of me and inviting Sexton and Dillon to speak.
Whatever may be the motive, and whatever view our friends might
take of this resolution, it would certainly be hailed by our enemies
as some sort of an expression of want of confidence. Much as I
would like to be saved the worry, I still think the President of the
League for the time being is the proper person to preside at the
Convention.

I am to see Wyndham on Saturday and hope to cross that night
and see you on Sunday. — Very truly Yours,

J. E. REDMOND.
February 10, 1903.

P.S. — I saw Blake. He is quite friendly tho' he does not under-
stand the situation.

462 APPENDIX

6. REDMOND to O'BRIEN.

MY DEAR O'BRIFN,— I have a letter from Dillon saying he won't
be back before ist May ! So he does not mean to attend the
National Convention !

I see the Archbishop and Davitt now seem to make out that
they always thought a Bonus would be given !

I doubt very much if our resolution will have any effect on
either them or the Freeman. — Very truly Yours,

J. E. REDMOND.
March i, 1903.

7. " WILLIE " REDMOND to O'BRIEN.

Friday. —

25 PALACE MANSIONS,

KENSINGTON, W.

MY DEAR WILLIAM,-— There is no need for me to say how much
I regret, in common with every one, your resignation. What I
want to say to you now is that I am really bewildered by what you
say in your last letter. I had not the faintest idea that anything of
the kind you mention was going on in the way of a " revolt " against
the Party. I knew of course that there were strong differences of
opinion as to " prices," but beyond that I must say I knew nothing
and I am certain this is the position of a great number of the Party.
It is all very disheartening and deplorable, and I cannot imagine
what is going to happen. If there i« to be a renewal of the split,
as I fear, then a great number of members will resign as well as
yourself. After your last letter it seems useless to ask you to change
your decision, and no one knows what to do or say, except to join,
as I do most sincerely in the general expressions of pain and sorrow
which are being uttered all round. — Yours veiy truly,

WILLIE REDMOND.

DA

960

034,

O'Brien, William

The Irish Revolution and
how it came about

UNIVL.