On the whole they had no reason to be ashamed of their leaders, though they might have questioned their wisdom. Now, wickedness in the political sense connotes the revolt against the organized authority of the State—political foolishness, the utter impossibility of realizing a practical aim. Naturally, therefore, the law was officially bound to look upon them as a species of criminal lunatics. Public men, moreover, were forced by the very theory of government to denounce them, in consequence, as enemies, and call for the sternest penalties of retribution known to the Constitution, in order that the individual's fate might become an object-lesson to the mass.
Once having granted this, however, the civilian mind is free to make the inquiry—whether from morbid, scientific, dramatic, or emotional reasons matters little—as to what manner of men these leaders were, and what manner of minds gave the revolt its psychological aspect: but in that inquiry no criterion of loyalty except that of fidelity to their own personal convictions must be allowed to enter. Probably the most serious mistake usually made by Irish politicians is that of classing successive rebellions as the acts of traitors or martyrs, according to their respective points of view, and certainly statesmen and thinkers could make no greater error in diagnosing the present one.
Rebellions are not the outcome of innate perversity of race, but purely scientific phenomena with objective causes. First, then, let us examine the men themselves who led the revolt, before we pass on to the literature that informed and inspired it.
Sir Roger Casement was not the founder of "Sinn Fein," nor was he the originator of the Labour Movement in Ireland: he found both ready-made and used them to serve his own ideals for the future of Ireland and thus can be termed a leader.
Sir Roger Casement is an Ulsterman of the old type that was the backbone of the Rebellion of '98, when the Presbyterians of the North tried to emulate those English and Irish exiles who, persecuted out of their native shores by High Church tyranny, had laid the foundations of American liberty under Washington.
That he is a man of character, and not the "bounder and scoundrel" the Press now makes him out to be, goes without saying, or otherwise he would not have received the honour of a title at the hands of a grateful country: in fact, until his entrance into the troubled waters of Irish politics he was one of the most universally respected of our civil servants.
For ten years, from 1895 to 1905, for example, he was in the wilds of Africa, for the greater portion of his sojourn as Consul in Portuguese West Africa and then later in the Congo Free State.
After this he was sent to South America, and in 1909 he was appointed Consul-General at Rio de Janeiro. So trusted was he that when the British Government wished to investigate the labour atrocities on the Indians in the rubber forests of Peru, they chose Sir Roger Casement; and when his report was printed in 1912 it caused the profoundest stir, not merely in England, but throughout the civilized world.
This was surely a man of character and above the ordinary temptations of bribery, or else he would not in 1905 have received the C.M.G. and in 1911 knighthood—moreover, he was a man who may be said to have had ample opportunity of getting outside the narrow groove of Irish politics and seeing something of the Empire.
Yet while Irish politics had been moving with tremendous rapidity during his absence—the fateful years between 1895-1905—Sir Roger Casement seems never to have got beyond the Ulster of 1798—which I need hardly remind anyone conversant with history was as rebellious to England as was Wexford under Cromwell.