The island of anarchy: A fragment of history in the 20th century

by Elizabeth Waterhouse

But a change was coming.

I am not going here to write the history of the great Irish revolution which followed the separation of that country from England. It is well known how terrible that time was, and how, when all men were wearied out and sick to death of the horrors of civil war, there followed a great swing of the pendulum towards order and high-handed government; they entreated for a king of the Royal Family of England, and a strongly Conservative Cabinet in Dublin banished in large numbers all who remained of the disaffected party.

These were the men who next landed in Meliora. They had been maddened with rage against their own Church in consequence of the wise part taken by the Pope and the Irish bishops against the revolutionary party. Hence they were enemies of all creeds and forms of religion, and they were also of course filled with the old bitterness against all of English race.

At the same time a great number of German and Belgian Socialists of the most violent kind were also landed on the Island, and they found no difficulty in making friends at once with the Irish company, the German system of education having made them as perfect in the use of foreign tongues as it left them ignorant of the first principles of moral law and of all sound theories of government and political economy.

These new-comers settled themselves in the southeast of the Island, where there were large forests of Coco-palms, Bananas, and Bread-fruit trees, which they began at once to fell in order to use the timber for their houses, and this in so wasteful a way that they cut down those trees which were valuable for fruit, but of slight use as timber, quite as freely as the others. Indeed, for such houses as they wanted much smaller wood was sufficient. The abundant Hybiscus would have supplied all their material in that climate, where solid and substantial dwellings are entirely needless.

Not content with a reckless destruction in their own district, they did not scruple to begin cutting wood from the coco-bearing reef which fringed the Lagoon far to the westward of their settlement.

A gentle remonstrance from those whom I will name the Western party called forth feelings of anger and unreason in these men of violent ideas, and there arose among them, it is scarcely known how, an idea of building ships in which they might go out and subdue some neighbouring islands. At the same time they had a scheme for constructing defences on their own shore against the attacks they might in this manner provoke. And, later, they showed signs of erecting a sort of stockade which, with the abrupt line of the great mountain and its outlying ridges of broken crater, would separate them from the Western settlement. At first, as has been said, the scheme which led to their cutting down the forest was chiefly one for shipbuilding. To this the Western party strongly opposed themselves.

What indeed was the use of such a project? All the islands of the South Pacific, in which signs of their great future were already foreshadowing, were members of the British Federation. To land on any one of them could only mean a defiance of the whole power of that Federation, some fresh laws of repression, and possibly the presence of troops in the island.

And this, a mean and futile struggle with the laws of a strong country instead of the peaceful future for which the Island might have looked—a future not of conflict, but of freedom and peace, so the Western enthusiasts believed—a future in which every man should be a law to himself, in which each should willingly work for all—a future from which the old world, with its worn-out notions, should learn this lesson—that to be without laws was not to be lawless, and that freedom from forms of external government did not mean slavery to selfishness and passion.

Such counsels of perfection were hardly fitted for the wilder notions of the Southern and Eastern settlers. The remonstrances of the West were met with many an angry cry. From the Irish that they had not come round the world to submit again to English rule; from the Russians that they would not be governed by priests; from the Germans every possible argument with no possible ground.