“If they try to put Home Rule over us,” he said, “I shall fight. I’m a pretty good shot, and if a Catholic shows his head, I’ll plug him.”
He pulled out a rifle, which he kept concealed behind some bundles of linen, and told me he spent his Saturday afternoons in target practice.
“What do you think of this? Good shooting, eh?”
He pulled out a handful of pennies and showed me how at so many paces (I forget the range) he had plugged the head of His Majesty, King George V. It seemed to me a queer way of proving his loyalty to the British crown and Constitution.
Carson’s way of loyalty was no less strange. By what method of logic this great lawyer could justify, as a proof of loyalty and patriotism, his raising of armed forces to resist an Act of Parliament passed by the King with the consent of the people, passes my simple understanding. I can understand rebellion against the law and the Crown, for Liberty’s sake, or for passion’s sake, or for the destruction of civilization, or for the enforcement of any kind of villainy. But I cannot understand rebellion against the law and the Crown in order to prove one’s passionate loyalty to the law, and one’s ardent devotion to the King.
Nor can I understand how those who condemn the “direct action” of Labor in the way of general strikes and other methods of demanding “rights” (as Lords Carson and Birkenhead and Londonderry condemned such revolutionary threats), can uphold as splendid heroism the menace of bloody civil war by a minority which refused to accept the verdict of the government and peoples of Great Britain and Ireland.
Sir Edward Carson was an honest man, a great gentleman in his manner, a great lawyer in repute, but his blind bigotry, some dark passion in him, made him adopt a line of action which has caused much blood to flow in Ireland and made one of the blackest chapters in modern history. For it was the raising of the Ulster Volunteers which led to the raising of the Irish Republican Army, and the armed resistance to Home Rule which led to Sinn Fein, and a thousand murders. It might have led, and very nearly led to civil war in England as well as in Ireland. When the British Officers in the Curragh Camp refused to lead their troops to disarm Ulster, and resigned their commissions rather than fulfil such an order, the shadow of civil war crept rather close, and there were politicians in England who were ready to risk it, as when Winston Churchill raised the cry, “The Army versus the People.”
But another shadow was creeping over Europe, and fell with a chill horror upon the heart of England, when, as it were out of the blue sky of a summer in 1914, there came the menace of a war which would call many great nations to arms, and deluge the fields of Europe in the blood of youth. Ireland—suffragettes—industrial unrest, how trivial and foolish even were such internal squabbles when civilization itself was challenged by this abomination!
In June of 1914—June!—there was a great banquet given in London to the editors of German newspapers, where I renewed acquaintance with a number of men whom I had met the previous year in Germany. Lord Burnham, of The Daily Telegraph, presided over the gathering, and made an eloquent speech, affirming the unbreakable ties of friendship between our two peoples. There were many eloquent speeches by other British journalists, expressing their admiration for German character, science, art, and social progress. A distinguished dramatic critic was emotional at the thought of the old kinship of the German and English peoples. The German editors responded with equal cordiality, with surpassing eloquence of admiration for English liberty, literature, and life. There was much handshaking, raising of glasses, drinking of toasts.... It was two months before August of 1914.