Outside in the lobby sat a man who had used all the resources of an ingenious and well-trained mind backed by a tenacious will to wreck every endeavour to reach agreement—Mr. Erskine Childers, a man whose slight figure, whose kindly, refined and intellectual countenance, whose calm and courteous demeanour offered no clue to the fierce passions which raged inside his breast. At every crucial point in the negotiations he played a sinister part. He was clearly Mr. de Valera's emissary, and faithfully did he fulfil the trust reposed in him by that visionary. Every draft that emanated from his pen—and all the first drafts were written by him—challenged every fundamental position to which the British delegates were irrevocably committed. He was one of those men who by temperament are incapable of compromise. Brave and resolute he undoubtedly was, but unhappily for himself he was also rigid and fanatical. When we walked out of the room where we had sat for hours together, worn with tense and anxious labour, but all happy that our great task of reconciliation had been achieved, we met Mr. Erskine Childers outside sullen with disappointment and compressed wrath at what he conceived to be the surrender of principles he had fought for.
I never saw him after that morning. Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith I met repeatedly after the signature of the treaty, to discuss the many obstacles that surged up in the way of its execution, and I acquired for both a great affection. Poor Collins was shot by one of his own countrymen on a bleak Irish roadside, whilst he was engaged in restoring to the country he had loved so well the order and good government which alone enables nations to enjoy the blessings of freedom. Arthur Griffith died worn out by anxiety and toil in the cause he had done so much to carry to the summit of victory. Erskine Childers was shot at dawn for rebellion against the liberties he had helped to win.
Truly the path of Irish freedom right up to the goal is paved with tragedy. But the bloodstained wilderness is almost through, the verdant plains of freedom are stretched before the eyes of this tortured nation. Ireland will soon honour the name of the Green Isle, and I am proud to have had a hand in erecting the pillar which will for ever mark the boundary between the squalor of the past and the hope of the future.
London, December 16th, 1922.
XXX PROHIBITION
Four years ago the United States of America, by a two-thirds majority, voted prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquors. The British House of Commons have just voted down a bill for the same purpose by a majority of 236 to 14. America treats prohibition as one of its greatest moral triumphs. Britain treats it as a joke.
What accounts for this remarkable disparity in the attitude of the two great English-speaking communities towards one of the most baffling and elusive problems civilisation has to deal with? It cannot be a fundamental difference in temperament or in moral outlook. The men who engineered prohibition in America are of our own race and kind, bred in the Puritan traditions that came originally from our shores.
If the evils of excessive drinking had been more apparent in America than in Britain I could understand the States of the Union deciding to take more drastic action than has been thought necessary in our country. But the facts are exactly the reverse. The consumption of alcohol in the United Kingdom some years before the war per head of the population was higher than that of the United States. The poverty, disease, and squalor caused by alcohol was much greater in Britain than in America.