“Two millions of adult people in Great Britain either wholly or partially unemployed; wives and children beginning to hunger; industrial strife on a scale hitherto unimagined clouding the horizon; men by the million trained to kill, ready to be used by one side or the other in a class war; hate and violence the fruit of it all, and appalling suffering for all classes before one side recognizes the right of the workers to an assured and abundant life and the other side realizes that Russia’s way is not the way even for Russia. All this and more—and yet the British Government actually or tacitly encourages the troops to add Irish tens of thousands to the British millions of workless, starving, hating men and women, and is slowly but surely converting the only revolution in history which makes a point of preserving the rights of private property into something which will be akin to a class war for a Communist republic—an issue which I should deeply deplore.”
I am bound to confess that I discovered no substantial evidence that the civil war in Ireland has either a Communist basis or a Communist ideal. The utter conservatism of the Irish is the most striking thing about them. Their determination to win self-government is based almost entirely upon that conservatism, the love of the Ireland of history, the passion for the Irish tongue, the devotion to the ancient faith, their love of the soil—these things and the memory of a thousand wrongs put upon them by the alien conqueror have much more to do with Irish discontent than any desire to hold the land in common and convert the industries from private to public ownership and control; which ideas would, indeed, be repugnant to the last degree to the peasant owners of the South and West of Ireland.
Speaking on this point with some of the workingmen leaders I asked how far, in their opinion, the Communist propaganda had captured the Irish workers. “Scarcely at all,” was the quick reply. “There was fearful anger over the cruel death of Connolly. His execution did a great deal to unite the Labour Movement in Ireland with the Republican Party. It was the sheer brutality of it. The poor fellow hadn’t more than forty-eight hours to live. He had been shot in the scrimmage in Dublin, and gangrene had set in. Yet they dragged him out of his bed groaning with pain, put him on a chair and shot him—the brutes! They think it’s all in the day’s work to shoot a ‘dirty Irishman.’ But our people will never forget Connolly and the way he died. No; the Irish workers are not Communists. They just hate England and want to be quit of her.
“Ay, and there’s the case of Kevin Barry while you’re on about the killing. Do you know they tortured that poor lad to get him to tell the names of his comrades? We have his affidavit. They bruised his flesh and twisted his limbs and then they hanged him—hanged him, mind you, when the poor lad begged that he might be shot as a prisoner of war! Your Prime Minister calls it war when he wants to excuse the murders of his own hired assassins. But if so, our men are prisoners of war when they are captured. Who ever heard of a civilized nation hanging prisoners of war? But praise be to God, every time you hang a boy like Kevin Barry you make hundreds of soldiers for the Republican Army. Eighteen hundred men in Dublin joined up the day Kevin was hanged.”
The little man who thus broke in began to fill with tobacco the bowl of his small black pipe, and when he had lit it he turned on me, fiercely demanding: “Why have you come to Ireland now? Why didn’t you come before? Why don’t more of you come? How many thousands of our brave boys have got to be killed before you folks find out what your bloody troops are doing to Irish men, women, and children?” And he flung himself out of the room.
I felt sorry to have appeared indifferent for so long, and said so to the rest of the assembled company. “But to tell you the truth, I have lived all these years under the impression that Irish men and women preferred to win their own battles in their own way; that they regarded rather as an intrusion any effort of English people to help and advise them. From the first hour of my political life I have been a supporter of self-government for Ireland; but I never dreamt that you wanted me, or any of the rest of us, to come to Ireland to say so. I believed that you wanted to work out your own salvation.”
“So far as advice is concerned you were right,” said a young fellow with a large freckled face and fine eyes. “I reckon the English can’t teach us much about politics.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said very softly. “After all, you have not got what you have been fighting for during more than a hundred years, and you have not got rid of the oppression that has tormented you for several hundreds of years. Perhaps it is possible that co-operation might have done it. We can all teach each other something. Ireland has glorious lessons for us English. Perhaps you could have learnt a little of something from us.”
There was a long pause, and I continued: “It is of the first importance to carry the plain matter-of-fact people of England with you. Ordinary men and women in England have a strong sense of justice, but their imagination is weak. They find it difficult to understand what they do not endure themselves. They find it hard to believe in the wounds unless they can lay their fingers on the prints. You must admit that some of the things which are happening in Ireland are almost incredible. One thing which makes it difficult to open and keep open the minds of English people on the subject of Ireland’s wrongs is what they regard as Ireland’s wrongdoing, the killing of soldiers and police. Of course, a certain section of the newspaper press exploits this to the last degree. Why do you do it? Why use the methods so hateful in the others? Why put an argument in the mouths of the enemy? Why soil and stain a good cause?”
“Because we are at war,” was the prompt reply. “You have just heard that your Prime Minister says so. He justifies the methods of the Government because it is war. We do not like killing people; but can we be expected to sit quietly whilst our own men and women are killed and their property looted? It isn’t in human nature. Would Englishmen sit quiet under such provocation? We don’t like it. And, remember, we don’t kill innocent people like the other side. Every person executed by the Irish—executed, mark you, not murdered—is tried by the Republican Courts and found guilty on substantial evidence of traitorous conduct or brutal murder.” He folded up the copy of the Irish Bulletin he had been reading, and then proceeded: “I’m glad you came over. I wish others would come. I’m sure you’ll help Ireland. Tell your people that if it’s war they want, war they will get till every young man in Ireland is dead. Then they can begin with the old men and the women—they’ve begun with the women—and after that they’ll have to wait till the children grow up. But they’ll find them every bit as keen as their fathers. It’s in the blood of us. There are only two ways to peace, and God knows we want peace. You can either give Ireland her freedom, or you can sink the whole country in the sea. It’s the peace of the dead you’ll get if you won’t have that of the living.”