On this question of Secret Service money I could say much. The miserable pittance doled out for the purpose of fighting such an enemy as the Clan-na-Gael becomes perfectly ludicrous in the light of such facts as I have quoted in connection with the monetary side of the Dynamite Campaign. Gallaher, as I have said, had no less than £1400 on his person when arrested in 1883; while, coming down to a later date, Moroney, when despatched from New York in 1887, in connection with the second stage of the Jubilee explosion plot, carried with him some £1200. How on earth can the English police and their assistants in the Secret Service hope to grapple with such heavily financed plots as this, on the miserable sums granted by Parliament for the purpose? There are, I believe, some thirty men charged with the special duty of circumventing political crime in London. All praise and honour to them for the work they have done, and the sincerest of congratulations to Chief-Inspector Littlechild, who so ably conducted the arrests of all the principals of the latter-day dynamite plots. But these policemen have succeeded more by chance than anything else; events have played into their hands, and, clever men that they are, they have been sufficiently capable to take advantage of the little that came to their knowledge, and from small clues to work out great things.
Some day, however, a big thing will happen, about which there will be no leakage beforehand, and then the affrighted and indignant British citizen will turn on his faithful band of thirty and rant and rave at them for their want of capacity and performance. The fault will be the want of a perfect system of Secret Service, properly financed. If plots are to be discovered in time—and already there are some whisperings of coming danger—they can only be discovered through information coming from those associated with them. As I have shown, the men engaged in them are very highly paid. If it is to be made worth their while to speak, then the price offered by the British Government must be higher than that of the other paymasters. There is no use in thinking that mere tools like Callan and Harkins—the men now in prison in connection with the Jubilee Explosion Plot—would be of any service. These men know nothing. It is the Millens and the Moroneys of the conspiracy who should be in Government pay, and they have no mean price. Imagine offering either of these men a retainer of £20 a month with a very odd cheque for expenses thrown in! The idea is ridiculous. I have heard it urged that the thought of Secret Service is repugnant to the British heart, wherein are instilled the purest principles of freedom. The argument has sounded strange in my ears when I remembered that London, as somebody has said, is the cesspool of Europe, the shelter of the worst ruffians of every country and clime. America is called the Land of the Free, but she could give England points in the working of the Secret Service, for there there is no stinting of men or money.
LIV.
This, then, is my story; and in it must be found the justification, if such be needed, for the part I have played. I have no apology to make for my twenty and odd years’ work in the Secret Service. I took up that work from a conscientious motive, and in a conscientious spirit I pursued it to the end. I have in no sense been an informer, as the phrase is understood. I allied myself with Fenianism in order to defeat it; I never turned from feelings of greed or gain on the men with whom I at first worked in sympathy. I never had any sympathy with Irish Revolutionists. Quite the opposite. Nor have I been an agent provocateur. Although I always voted for politic reasons on the side of the majority, even to the joining in the vote which meant dynamite, on no single occasion was I instrumental in bringing an individual to the commission of crime. True, I had to take many oaths. But what of that? By the taking of them I have saved many lives. Which counts the weightiest in the balance of life? And who is it that sneers at me for my conduct in this regard? An honest man’s criticism I can accept; but for the judgment of these double-oathed gentlemen who, having first taken the Fenian oath, then rushed to Westminster to swear allegiance to the Crown and Constitution they had aforetime sworn to destroy, I have nothing but contempt and derision. Away with such rubbish and cant as they indulge in to the regions where common-sense finds no place.
I said I have saved lives by my action as a Government agent. I hope I shall have done more by my appearance in the witness-box. To me no more satisfactory result could attend my disclosures than the realisation by the poor deluded Irish in the States of the way in which they have been tricked and humbugged in the past years. For these poor weak people, animated by the purest, if the most mistaken of patriotic motives, who give their little all in the hope and trust that the day will come in their lives when Ireland will be a land flowing with milk and honey, I have the deepest and the most sincere sympathy. To know these people, to come into contact with them, and to discuss with them the eternal subject of Irish nationality, is to respect their honesty of purpose, no matter how much we feel called upon to condemn their methods of procedure. But, for the blatant loud-voiced agitator, always bellowing forth his patriotic principles, while secretly filling his pockets with the bribe or the consequences of his theft, there can be no other feeling but that of undisguised loathing.
I speak of what I know from personal experience, when I say there is no greater fraud in this nineteenth century of ours than the modern Irish patriotic agitator in America. Gold is his god, his patriotic principles—save the mark!—his breviary and his beads, holding aloft which he stands at the corner of the market-place so that he may be seen of all men, and paid tribute to by some. By jobbery, trickery, treachery, and delusion of the meanest and most despicable type he works his way along, rising higher and higher in the ranks of his fellow-conspirators, till at last, in the position of responsibility and power, he sells the votes he can command, and pockets the funds over which he has control. Brave and blustering in speech, he advocates, in the safety of his American city, three thousand miles from the seat of danger, the most desperate of enterprises; and without the slightest pang of compunction or twinge of conscience he rushes his poor dupes across the water to their fate on the scaffold or the living death of penal servitude; while his lips unctuously mumble of the righteousness of their beloved cause, and his whisky-laden breath blasphemously calls for the blessings of Heaven upon the foul enterprise.
It has been in fighting such scoundrels as these that I have spent the last quarter of a century. From them I would fain deliver their poor dupes ere I completely efface myself from Irish affairs. I have no stronger, no sincerer wish than to see an end put once for all to the delusion which is practised upon thousands of poor Irishmen throughout the States by the men of whom I have written. With the rank and file it has assuredly been a case of “theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.” I hope it may not be so in the future. I trust that what I have penned, and what the sad murder of Cronin has writ large upon the page of history, may not be without its effect; and that to-day men may pause ere they continue in such a way as I have pictured, the mere tools of an unscrupulous faction, the miserable dupes of a reckless and improvident executive. Gallahers, Dalys, and Mackay Lomasneys there always will be—men inspired with fanatical hatred of all things English, and ready at all times to risk freedom and life in working out their designs; but, apart from them, there are thousands whose criminality reaches no further point than the paying of those subscriptions so frequently and so persistently demanded.
With such men I hope these words of mine will have weight; and if, awakening to a true sense of their situation, and realising that their combination and support help not Ireland but Ireland’s professional mendicants, they turn to a better path, and a clearer and more honest view of Irish matters as they really are, then shall I feel that I have not struggled or written in vain.