Six days of the Irish Republic / A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics

by L. G. Redmond-Howard

The danger of this hate campaign which may be all very well when it is intended to rouse the somewhat lethargic Briton to fight against a race of which he knows next to nothing otherwise; but was doubly dangerous when applied to one's fellow-countrymen in the name of a party, and were it employed, say, against Wales or Scotland would soon prove disastrous, for Scotchmen and Welshmen would rise in protest to a man—which is just what Irishmen did at the "hate" wave.

Yet there was another reason—viz. the veracity and moderation of the British Press—at stake: the Press on whose veracity and moderation Irishmen depended for their motives for going away to fight for England, and this excess tended, so to speak, to tear down every recruiting poster in the country.

Now, had the British censor refused to allow any mention of the rising at all in the English Press, it might have been unjust to Ireland, but it would have been far juster to England. Much the same applies to the English Churchmen and their Church. When the Rev. R. J. Campbell, in a Sunday illustrated, discovered that Holy Writ had already long before the rising declared in favour of Castle government and conscription for Ireland, Irish sinners felt inclined to say: "So much the worse for Holy Writ." And when the Rev. Lord William Cecil, preaching at Hatfield, summed up the ethical situation in a confusion between the meaning of pride and patriotism, Dublin wits thanked him for the phrase, and remarked that indeed it had long been so, but ne'er so well expressed, and amplified the cynical aphorism to "whenever Irishmen are patriotic it is in reality nothing but pride, yet whenever Englishmen are overproud it is nothing but the height of patriotism."

None, in fact, could have damaged the English cause in this crisis more than the English did themselves, in spite of all the Irish Nationalists were doing to help them out of the difficulty; for, as one wit remarked, the whole catastrophe had been precipitated not by English Tories so much as Irish Unionists—men, who it is difficult to say whether they misrepresent England more to Irishmen than they do Irishmen to the English, and a class which has ever got England into all Irish crises and never got her out of a single one.

For the main point about the rebellion that struck Nationalists, who, after all, were the vast majority of the Irishmen who at all mattered, was not so much the incidental crime or heroism as the utter folly of the enterprise. "Separatism" was, and will ever be probably, an economic, racial, and Imperial impossibility; yet it was just this point that was forgotten in the heat of the combat by Englishmen, with a few noble exceptions, of course.

Instead of expounding the folly of the undertaking, they preferred to dilate upon the criminality of methods and the character of the Sinn Feiners, which is just where they fell into the most fatal mistake of all and made the aftermath what it has been since—a far more complicated problem to deal with than ever existed before the rising or in the rising itself. Thus, when Sir Edward Carson raised his Volunteers in Ulster he had calculated most upon the moral effect the spilling of blood would have upon Englishmen. The Sinn Feiners had calculated upon exactly the same psychological factor with their countrymen.

When the Government had refused to take their arms by force, which Unionists were in their hearts hoping they would, the refusal left them powerless and discredited, save in the eyes of cinema operators, who only looked upon them as so much copy.

When the authorities proposed, after this example, to take the arms of the Sinn Feiners and leave the other two bodies in possession of theirs, they were, in fact, deliberately provoking rebellion; but not only this, but unconsciously they were also strengthening the cause of the Sinn Feiners, who, like the Covenanters, looked more to the moral effect than to the material results of their efforts.

Once the link of race had been appealed to, of course every attack that reflected in any way upon the character of the fighters was resented by the whole nation as a matter of honour, and that was what led John Dillon, provoked by countless insinuations and accusations to his onslaught upon the principle underlying the wholesale executions and deportations.

Had these penalties been inflicted upon those who had perpetrated the "cold-blooded murders" of the first few days, whose cry for vengeance had been voiced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it would have been equally a matter of national pride to see the culprits were yielded up to justice; but "it was not these murderers that were being pursued," as Dillon pointed out; it was the rank and file of the insurgents, and these had, by almost universal admission, behaved in a manner absolutely beyond reproach as fighting men. He admitted they were wrong, but they fought a clean fight, and they fought with superb bravery and skill, and no act of savagery or act against the usual customs of war, that he knew of, had been brought home to any leader or any organized body of insurgents.