The offer of partition likewise was promptly rejected by Ulster: like the Irish Citizen Army they “meant business.” They meant to smash Home Rule for good and all, for the South as well as for the North of Ireland, and in conjunction with the English Tories they felt strong enough to do it. They began openly to tamper with the allegiance of the army. Nor were their efforts without success. Not only did large numbers of ex-officers offer their services to the Ulster Volunteers, but many officers upon the active list announced their intention of refusing to obey orders if despatched to preserve order in Ulster and forestall the intention, broadly hinted, of some of the Ulstermen to seize military depots in the province. It was an open boast in Belfast that the ship conveying the arms from Hamburg to Ulster had been sighted, but allowed to pass unchallenged by officers of the Royal Navy on the ships detailed to intercept it. They seemed deliberately to have adopted the policy of Catiline, ruina exstinguere incendium, “to put out the fire by pulling down the house.” If the Protestant interest were to go down in Ireland, then should the British Constitution which had fostered it go down with it.
All this was, of course, matter for unfeigned delight to all the “advanced” people both in Ireland and outside of it. If officers were to have the option of obeying orders or not at their will why should a like latitude be denied the common soldier? If officers refused to act against Ulster why should a private be required to fire upon strikers? Thanks were publicly returned by Irish Freedom to “the gallant British officers who have helped their beloved Empire on to the brink above the precipice.” But so far as England was concerned, the crisis was tided over by the usual method of compromise. There had been a “misunderstanding” for which both sides were more or less responsible. There had been no actual intention of employing force in a political dispute and therefore the question in debate did not arise. The Minister of War was dismissed on a side issue, the Premier assumed his responsibilities and everybody was more or less satisfied, except the Irish.
Whatever were the rights or wrongs of the dispute between the Army and the Government, it was plain that the dispute had been composed at the expense of Home Rule. Partition in some form or other was now certain to accompany Home Rule, if Home Rule were not actually shelved. The Irish Party were solemnly warned by the advanced Nationalist papers. “Mr. Redmond has had his chance,” wrote one of these. “When partition is again mentioned, let him stand aside even at the cost of the ‘Home Rule’ Bill. There is a force and a spirit growing in Ireland which in the wrangle of British politics he but vaguely realizes.”
But Mr. Redmond was not so preoccupied with “the wrangle of British politics” as he seemed. He realized quite clearly that the Irish Volunteers were growing in numbers and in influence and that neither their object nor their existence was compatible with the principles of Home Rule. They proclaimed their intention of putting themselves eventually at the disposal of the Irish Parliament: but the Bill contemplated a Parliament which should have no right to accept their services. They were largely controlled by men who thought little of Home Rule and everything of the “rights of Irishmen,” which might mean just what the Liberal Government proposed to give but might also mean a great deal more. They were a menace to the success of the parliamentary policy, and it seemed to be his plain duty to suppress or to control them. To attempt suppression would be dangerous: to control them seemed not impossible. He decided to demand the right to nominate on their committee twenty-five “tried and true” Nationalists whose allegiance to his policy was unquestioned. The committee, faced by the alternative of either declaring war on Mr. Redmond (a course as dangerous to them as to declare war on them would have been to him) or of submitting to his demand, decided to submit. The twenty-five new members (four of whom were priests and the majority of the remainder Dublin Nationalists) joined the Committee and the Irish “military crisis” seemed to have been solved. In reality it was only beginning. The Citizen Army promptly declared war upon the reconstituted Volunteer Committee. “Is there,” asked The Irish Worker, “one reliable man at the head of the National Volunteer movement apart from Casement who, we believe, is in earnest and honest?... We admit the bulk of the rank and file are men of principle and men who are out for liberty for all men: but why allow the foulest growth that ever cursed this land (the Hibernian Board of Erin) to control an organization that might if properly handled accomplish great things.” It accused the committee of having passed the Volunteers over to a “gang of placehunters and political thugs” and called upon the rank and file to sever all connection with them: “Our fathers died that we might be free men. Are we going to allow their sacrifices to be as naught? Or are we going to follow in their footsteps at the Rising of the Moon?” The Citizen Army was gradually coming round to a standpoint more and more national, and saw in the control of the Volunteers by the Parliamentarians nothing but disaster to its idea of what nationalism involved. Sinn Fein was equally vehement: “Redmond is only a tool,” it wrote, “in the hands of Asquith and Birrell who wish to destroy the Volunteers as Lord Northington was a tool in the hands of Fox, to whom he wrote in 1783: ‘They have got too powerful, and there is nothing for us but for our friends to go into their meetings and disturb the harmony of them and create division.’” When Mr. Redmond appealed to America for money to “strengthen” the Volunteers it pointed out that if he had been in earnest he would have asked not for money but for arms, and would have had the Arms Proclamation withdrawn by the Government. It printed a series of letters to the Volunteers, of which the first contained the words: “The object [i.e. of the Volunteers] is obtaining and maintaining the independence of Ireland. Those who are in earnest should have their own committee, independent of Redmond and Co.” Irish Freedom headed its leader on the transaction “The Kiss of Judas,” and declared that “after the British Government the Irish Parliamentary Party in its later years has been the most evil force in Ireland.”
The original members of the Volunteer Committee were clearly uneasy and tried to put the best face they could upon the matter. In their official organ; The Irish Volunteer, they informed the public “The control of the committee by Mr. John Redmond does not matter, provided his nominees represent the feelings of the Volunteers: if they do the Irish Party will see to the withdrawing of the Arms Proclamation and proceed to arm the Volunteers at once.” But the Irish Party did neither; and if Mr. Redmond was expected to share the feelings of the Volunteers, the Volunteers cannot have shared the feelings of the committee. A month before this the Irish Volunteer had printed the following: “For over a generation Ireland has taken her national views from men whose whole lives were bound up with the preservation of the peace. Suddenly, in a day, in an hour, the whole situation has undergone a change. Force has reappeared as a factor in Irish political life.... It is to be hoped that men are not joining the national army from any motives but those which actuated the founders. The object of the Volunteers is to maintain and preserve the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland. There is no question of preserving merely the ‘legal’ rights graciously permitted us by a foreign power.” If the original committee seriously expected Mr. Redmond and his nominees to acquiesce in the views expressed in the last sentence they must have been simple to a degree. They were admittedly in a difficult position; but they knew what they meant and they knew what Mr. Redmond meant; and the sequel might have been foreseen.
It was put upon record later by a member of the committee that in the task of arming the Volunteers the new members gave little effective assistance, and that when arms were obtained they tried to have them taken from the men who had paid for them and handed over gratis to the Hibernians of the North to use (without, it is true, a supply of ammunition) to overawe the aggression of the Ulster Volunteers. But the members of the original committee procured arms upon their own responsibility. In July they succeeded in imitating the exploit of the Ulstermen at Larne. They ran a cargo of rifles into Howth and another was landed at Kilcool. But the forces of the Crown, absent at Larne and inactive in Ulster ever since, displayed their unsuccessful vigour at Howth. The Volunteers were intercepted on the way back, but after a scuffle succeeded in getting away with their guns. The soldiers on the return journey fired upon a provoking but unarmed crowd in the streets of Dublin. The country had barely time to appreciate the contrast between Larne and Howth, when the sound of the German guns in Belgium broke upon its ears.
SINN FEIN, 1914-1916.
John Mitchel had prophesied that “in the event of a European war a strong national party could grasp the occasion” in Ireland, and Mitchel held too high a place in the estimation of Irish Nationalists for his words to have been forgotten or ignored. When Saurin (who, though an Orangeman and a Tory and, after the Union, one of the law officers of the Crown in Ireland, opposed the policy of Castlereagh) uttered his famous dictum on the validity of the Act of Union, he provided Irish Nationalism with one of its most authoritative maxims: “You may make the Union binding as a law, but you cannot make it obligatory in conscience: it will be obeyed as long as England is strong, but resistance to it will be in the abstract a duty and the exhibition of that resistance will be a mere question of prudence.” Irish Separatists did not always find it prudent to speak with the precision of the future Attorney-General: but the principle which he laid down was always understood to be one of which they acknowledged the validity. It had been repeated in language less classical, but equally emphatic, by Parnell and Mr. Redmond; but the occasion to put into practice the prudence of which Saurin spoke had either never come or never been seized. But that it would come some day and in an unquestionable shape was a maxim of the Separatists. The increasing signs of antagonism between England and Germany had not since the beginning of the century escaped watchful eyes in Ireland. In the year 1900 The United Irishman in discussing German diplomacy had referred to the alliance between Irish and Germans in the United States which (it added) “is such a welcome feature of contemporary politics.” When, two years before the war, Mr. Churchill had referred in guarded language to the necessity to England of a “loyal Ireland” in the near future, Sinn Fein commented as follows on his words: “We have, for instance, no illusion whatever on the subject of Germany. If Germany victorious over England comes to Ireland, Germany will come to stay and rule the Atlantic from our shores. She will give us better terms than England offers. She will give us that Home Rule which all the States of the German Empire enjoy.... We have no doubt whatever that Ireland under German rule would be more prosperous than she has ever been under the rule of England.... The fact would not induce us to love Germany or to fight for a mere change of masters. But as a matter of bargaining we can say to Mr. Churchill, when he offers us a bogus Home Rule for aiding British policy against Germany, that Ireland would get better terms from a successful Germany if she withheld that aid.” This was the language of a journal which voiced the opinions of a party definitely committed against an Irish policy of force: the Republican Party, not so committed used words less nebulous and guarded. In 1911 Irish Freedom, printed a letter from John Devoy of New York, a prominent Irish-American and ex-Fenian, pointing out that a German war was coming in the near future, that England would need conscription before it was over, and that Ireland must fight either for England or against her. A month or so later an editorial returned to the point: “Wolfe Tone, though he appealed to France for aid, did not ask Irishmen to sit idly by; and the arguments Tone advanced with considerable success to induce France to aid in establishing an Irish Republic can be applied to-day in the case of Germany.” Later in the year an article entitled “When Germany fights England” discussed the policy of Ireland, having first stipulated for her complete independence, throwing her weight on the side of Germany in a war. Germany, it was thought, might play the same part as Tone had hoped that France would play in 1798—might release Ireland from English domination and then declare her absolute independence. No doubt seems to have been entertained that such a policy would be acceptable to Germany; for in Germany the Separatists saw, not an ambitious empire grasping at world power, so much as a brave and efficient people trying to burst the bonds with which English policy, and English intrigue had surrounded them. Sinn Fein had taken its official economic policy from the German List, and pointed to its success in establishing German industry upon a sure footing (in spite of the industrial rivalry of England) as an augury for Irish success and as a model for Irish effort. Germany was looked upon as the one European nation at once bold enough and strong enough to challenge English supremacy and vitally interested in challenging it effectively. For, with Ireland in the possession of England, the key to the Atlantic was in English hands: if Ireland were independent then the key would go to whatever hands framed the most favourable alliance with Ireland.