The Evolution of Sinn Fein

by Robert Mitchell Henry

During the vigorous years of its youth Sinn Fein had not confined its propagandist activities to public meetings, the foundation of branches and the publication of a paper. The National Council of Sinn Fein had issued a series of “National Council Pamphlets” dealing with those aspects of Sinn Fein policy upon which the public seemed to require instruction. The first of these was a general exposition of the Sinn Fein policy by Mr. Griffith. Others were “The Purchase of the Railways,” “England’s Colossal Robbery of Ireland,” a study of the financial relations between the two countries since the Act of Union, “Ireland and the British Armed Forces,” “Constitutionalism and Sinn Fein” and “How Ireland is Taxed,” an exposition of the fact (often ignored) that under the Union Ireland is the most heavily taxed country in Europe. Finally, in 1912, a pamphlet by Mr. Griffith, “The Home Rule Bill Examined,” was a general review of the powers conferred and withheld by the Home Rule Bill and an examination of the real bearing of that measure upon the political and economic situation of Ireland. The increasing difficulties which attended the publication of a newspaper during the war, the increased demand for information upon the situation created by it, the increasing number of those who felt that they had something to say which required more space than could be afforded in a newspaper, led to a revival of the publication of pamphlets. Early in 1915 a series of “Tracts for the Times” was projected by the Irish Publicity League. The first of these was a tract “What Emmet means in 1915,” significant of the direction in which minds were turning at the time. It was followed by “Shall Ireland be Divided?” an impassioned protest against the policy of partition and by “The Secret History of the Irish Volunteers” (which ran through several editions), an account by The O’Rahilly of the formation of the Volunteers, their policy, their attempts to secure arms and their relations with the Parliamentary Party. The traditional Sinn Fein view was enforced in “When the Government Publishes Sedition,” an analysis of the official census returns, showing that under the Union the population of Ireland had been reduced by one-half, and in two pamphlets on “Daniel O’Connell and Sinn Fein” an attempt was made to commend the policy by an argument that O’Connell both in his methods and his aims was really a Sinn Feiner, and by an exposition (“How Ireland is Plundered”) of the question of the Financial Relations in O’Connell’s day and since. Other pamphlets were “What it Feels Like” on the prison experiences of the writer who had been imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm Act for his political activities, “Ascendancy While You Wait” and “Why the Martyrs of Manchester Died.” During the same time the Cumann na mBan, the women’s branch of the Irish Volunteers, added to their activities the publication of a “National Series” of pamphlets “Why Ireland is Poor—English Laws and Irish Industries,” “Dean Swift on the Situation” and “The Spanish War,” a reprint of a pamphlet published in 1790 by Wolfe Tone, urging the Irish Parliament to take into account in the consideration of the threatened war with Spain solely and simply the interests of Ireland, the only interests which it should allow itself to consider. The Committee of Public Safety also in 1915 published a pamphlet on “The Defence of the Realm Act in Ireland” showing how the Act was administered for the suppression of Nationalist propaganda. The speech which Mr. F. Sheehy-Skeffington delivered in the dock when charged under the same Act with interfering with recruiting was published as a pamphlet about the same time. The articles contributed to Irish Freedom by P. H. Pearse were reprinted under the title of “From a Hermitage” in the autumn of 1915 as one of the “Bodenstown Series” of pamphlets, the first of which had been Mr. Pearse’s “How Does She Stand?” a reprint of two speeches delivered in America in 1914 at Emmet Commemorations in New York and Brooklyn and of the eloquent speech delivered at the grave of Wolfe Tone in Bodenstown Churchyard in 1913. The funeral of O’Donovan Rossa in August, 1915, also produced some pamphlets on Rossa’s life and his significance as a Fenian leader and a protagonist of the Irish Republican cause. These pamphlets, and others, had a wide circulation; they were eagerly discussed, especially among young Nationalists; they widened the rift between the Parliamentary Party and their opponents, and had much to do with the shaping of Irish Nationalist opinion.

Meanwhile the activities of the Irish Volunteers continued. The secession after the dispute with Mr. Redmond had withdrawn a large majority of their original numbers: indeed some authorities go so far as to say that immediately after the formation of the National Volunteers, the original committee could not count upon a following of more than 10,000 or 12,000 men. Be this as it may, the arrest and deportation of several of their organizers, the constant supervision over their proceedings exercised by the police authorities and the sure drift of Nationalist opinion away from the Parliamentarians and their policy, not (it is true) so marked then as to cause serious official misgiving, tended to increase their prestige and popularity. The funds had for the most part gone with the National Volunteers, but the Irish in America, who sided not with Mr. Redmond but with the Irish Volunteers, supplied large sums of money for equipment and organization. The report of the Second Annual Convention held in November, 1915, contains a speech by the President on the history and aims of the movement which concluded: “Further I will only say that we ought all to adhere faithfully and strictly to the objects, the constitution and the policy which we have adopted. We will not be diverted from our work by tactics of provocation. We will not give way to irritation or excitement. Our business is not to make a show or indulge in demonstrations. We started out on a course of constructive work requiring a long period of patient and tenacious exertion. When things were going most easily for us, I never shrank from telling my comrades that success might require years of steady perseverance—a prospect sometimes harder to face than an enemy in the field.... Great progress has been made, more must be made. The one thing we must look to is that there shall be no stopping and no turning back.” There were at this time over 200 corps of the Irish Volunteers in active training and the movement was spreading, if not rapidly, yet quietly and surely. The leaders waited for time to do its work, to bring fully home to Irish Nationalists the difference between a policy in which the necessities of Empire held the first place and one in which the claims of Ireland were supreme: meanwhile it was intended that the Volunteers should act as “a national defence force for Ireland, for all Ireland and for Ireland only,” ready to ward off any assault upon Irish liberty, but resolved not to provoke or to invite attack.

But in spite of official policies and intentions there had slowly been formed a small but determined minority in Ireland who looked to revolution as the only sure and manly policy for a nation pledged to freedom. This, the creed of the Fenians, had not been openly avowed in Ireland for almost half a century: Nationalists had come to regard it either as a forlorn hope, a gallant but hopeless adventure, or as a policy out of harmony with modern civilization and progress. Here and there a lonely but picturesque figure might be seen, “an old Fenian,” in the world but not of it, who spoke with a resigned contempt of the new men and the new methods, an inspiration but hardly an example to the younger generation. There was still in existence the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an obscure and elusive body, mysterious as the Rosicrucians and to all outward appearances of hardly any more political importance. A secret but apparently innocuous correspondence was understood to be kept up by them with America where, among an important and influential section of the expatriated Irish, the hope was more widely and more openly cherished of a day when Ireland would shake off the lethargy of a generation and revert to the age-long claim for independence. For a short time it seemed as if the prospect of the grant of Home Rule would quench the last embers of the revolutionary fire, as if the English democracy had at last stretched out a friendly hand and that the rest would be the work of time. Ulster’s appeal to arms quickened the embers to a flame; in less than two years’ time a revolution was spoken of more openly than had been the case for fifty years. No man in Ireland would have taken up arms to secure Home Rule: it was a “concession” which to some Nationalists seemed the greatest that could be obtained, to others (and perhaps the majority) to be a step upon the road to a larger independence: both sections were agreed that it should be sought by constitutional methods. But force might be the only means of retaining what it had been proper to secure without it, and the Irish Volunteers were prepared to fight those who attempted to take from the people of Ireland any right which they had been able to secure.

But it was not to be expected that the purely defensive policy of the Volunteers would commend itself to all sections of Nationalist opinion nor could the formula of their association produce more than an outward and seeming unity. So much had been true before the war; and when Europe was involved in strife, when the issue between England with her Allies and the Central Powers seemed to hang in the balance, a purely defensive and waiting policy seemed to be a criminal neglect of the opportunity offered by Providence. Mitchel’s prophecy of the fortune that a continental war might bring to Ireland seemed about to be fulfilled, unless the arm of Ireland should prove nerveless and impotent. Not alone in Ireland were voices raised to point the lesson: the Irish in America who still professed the Fenian faith urged insistently the use of the opportunity. Two books written by James K. Maguire and printed by the Wolfe Tone Publishing Co. of New York, “What Could Germany do for Ireland?” and “The King, the Kaiser and Irish Freedom” had a considerable circulation in Ireland during 1915 and 1916. Written by an Irish-American who had been educated at a German school in Syracuse, and was well known for his German sympathies, they boldly announced that in a German victory lay the only hope for the establishment of an Irish Republic. They asserted not only that Germany would establish and guarantee the independence of Ireland, but that she would help Ireland to develop her industries and commerce, her resources in coal, metals and peat, which still after a hundred years of the Union were no further developed than they had been in the middle of the eighteenth century. To most Irishmen the panegyric of German disinterestedness was an idle tale, and Sinn Fein had been proclaiming (not without success) for nearly a score of years that the development of Ireland must not be expected from outsiders but from Irishmen themselves. But there were those who thought that the power to raise the heavy hand of England must be found, not in the slow efforts of a painful and hampered self-reliance, but in a hand heavier still: and it was assumed that German aid once given to free and re-establish Ireland would be withdrawn before it became tutelage and exploitation. No one dreamed of an Ireland that should exchange the penurious restraint of the Union for the prosperous servitude of a German Province: the end of all endeavour was the sovereign independence of Ireland.

The German Foreign Office, with the sanction of the Imperial Chancellor, had quite early in the war, on the motion of Roger Casement, given what was taken for an unequivocal assurance on this point. “The Imperial Government,” the statement ran, “declares formally that Germany would not invade Ireland with any intentions of conquest or of the destruction of any institutions. If, in the course of this war, which Germany did not seek, the fortunes of arms should ever bring German troops to the coast of Ireland, they would land there, not as an army of invaders coming to rob or destroy, but as the fighting forces of a Government inspired by goodwill toward a land and a people for whom Germany only wishes national prosperity and national freedom.” Even a slight acquaintance with methods of imperial expansion would point to the necessity for a rigorous scrutiny of the terms of such a declaration and no such scrutiny would pronounce this declaration to be even moderately satisfactory: even if it stood the test it would not (so mysterious are the ways of State policy) have been worth the paper it was written on. But “cows over the water have long horns”—the German promise was an anchor sure and steadfast.

Whatever aid might be expected from Germany to secure the success of a revolution, nothing could be done without a party in Ireland united in its aims and able to take advantage of any aid that might be sent. No single party in Ireland could have been said to fulfil the conditions. The only Nationalist section which could have combined with an outside expeditionary force landing in Ireland was the Irish Volunteers, but not one of them was, by virtue of his Volunteer pledge, in any way bound to do so. Nor was there any guarantee that their views as to the ultimate form which a free Irish constitution should assume were identical: in fact it was known that they were not. Official Sinn Fein still found the independence of Ireland in the Constitution of 1782: the Republicans would have nothing but a “true Republican Freedom.” The Citizen Army was Republican in its teaching but it was openly hostile to both sections of the Volunteers. To it Sinn Fein and many of the Republicans seemed a bourgeois party, from which the workers need expect nothing. To James Connolly, their leader, the vaunted prosperity reached under the independent Irish Parliament was the prosperity of a class and not of the community, and he could point to the writings of Arthur O’Connor, ignored by orthodox Sinn Feiners, in proof of his contention. To establish the political ideals of Sinn Fein the Citizen Army was not prepared to raise its little finger. The Republicans might have seemed more sympathetic and congenial allies; but many even of them seemed too remote and formal in their ideals, too much wrapped up in visions of a future Ireland, free and indivisible, to have time to spare for the formulation of the means by which all Irishmen might really be free. But there were not wanting men on both sides who saw the necessity of union in the face of a common danger for the furtherance of a common purpose, who taught that if Labour should pledge itself to Ireland, Ireland should also pledge itself to Labour. This union when it came about was mainly due to James Connolly and P. H. Pearse.

James Connolly had been for several years the acknowledged leader of Irish Socialism. His book on Labour in Irish History written in 1910 is recognized as a standard work: his Reconquest of Ireland, his pamphlet The New Evangel, and his articles in The Irish Worker were widely read and had great influence among Irish Nationalists who belonged to the Labour movement. His attitude to the two main Irish parties was one of hostility: he was hostile to the Unionists as representing the party of tyranny and privilege, to the Home Rulers as the followers of a policy which was “but a cloak for the designs of the middle-class desirous of making terms with the Imperial Government it pretends to dislike.” To ardent and vague talk about “Ireland” and “freedom” he opposed the cool and critical temper of one who was accustomed to look stern facts in the face: “Ireland as distinct from her people,” he wrote, “is nothing to me; and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for ‘Ireland,’ and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and the suffering, the shame and the degradation brought upon the people of Ireland—aye, brought by Irishmen upon Irish men and women—without burning to end it, is in my opinion a fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements he is pleased to call ‘Ireland’.” Connolly believed in Irish Nationality, but he would not have been satisfied with the right to wear the badges of independence; a national flag, a national parliament, a national culture were in themselves nothing; but if they meant the right of the common men and women of Ireland to control their own lives and their own destinies then they meant everything in the world to him. Like Wolfe Tone he believed in “that numerous and respectable class, the men of no property”; to secure their rights in Ireland he was ready for anything. The national mould in which his Socialism came to be cast did not always appeal to his followers and associates: they regretted his increasing devotion to Irish Nationalism and his apparent indifference to pure Socialism; as one said later, “The high creed of Irish Nationalism became his daily rosary, while the higher creed of international humanity that had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips was silent for ever.” As a matter of fact he tested alike theoretical Nationalism and theoretical Socialism by the facts; Nationalism, to be worth anything, must secure the rights of the common men and women who make up the bulk of the nation: Socialism, to be worth anything, must secure the rights not of “humanity” but of the human beings which compose it, and the principal human beings whose destiny an Irish Socialist could influence were the Irish. Connolly had never shared the extreme hostility to the Irish Volunteers which was characteristic of the bulk of the Citizen Army: while he championed the rights of his class he recognized that they formed, along with others, an Irish nation and that their surest charter of freedom would be the charter of freedom of their country. But it must be a real, universal and effective freedom if it were to be worth the winning. Under his guidance and influence the ideals of the Citizen Army began to approximate more closely to those of the Irish Volunteers.

The Irish Volunteers on the other hand were learning under other guidance to examine more closely the implications of the phrase “the independence of Ireland.” Their guide was P. H. Pearse, a man of great gifts, a high and austere spirit filled with a great purpose. Through all his work, both in English and in Irish, plays, poems and stories, runs the thread of an ardent devotion to goodness and beauty, to spiritual freedom, to the faith that tries to move mountains and is crushed beneath them. For many years his life seems to have been passed in the grave shadow of the sacrifice he felt that he was called upon to make for Ireland: he believed that he was appointed to tread the path that Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone had trodden before him, and his life was shaped so that it might be worthy of its end.

To Pearse the ideal Irishman was Wolfe Tone, and it is significant that one of the first occasions upon which the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army held a joint demonstration was a pilgrimage to Tone’s grave at Bodenstown. It was here that Pearse in 1913 delivered an eloquent and memorable address in which he proclaimed his belief that Wolfe Tone was the greatest Irishman who had ever lived. “We have come,” his speech began, “to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down. Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us.” Pearse saw in Tone the greatest of all Irishmen because he saw in him the most complete incarnation of the Irish race, of its passion for freedom, its gallantry, its essential tolerance: and he urged his hearers not to let Tone’s work and example perish. Quoting Tone’s famous declaration of his objects and his means, of breaking the connection with England by uniting the whole people of Ireland, Pearse concluded: “I find here implicit all the philosophy of Irish Nationalism, all the teaching of the Gaelic League, and the later prophets. Ireland one and Ireland free—is not this the definition of Ireland a Nation? To that definition and to that programme we declare our adhesion anew; pledging ourselves as Tone pledged himself—and in this sacred place, by this graveside, let us not pledge ourselves unless we mean to keep our pledge—we pledge ourselves to follow in the steps of Tone, never to rest, either by day or by night, until his work be accomplished, deeming it to be the proudest of all privileges to fight for freedom, to fight not in despondency but in great joy, hoping for the victory in our day, but fighting on whether victory seem near or far, never lowering our ideal, never bartering one jot or tittle of our birthright, holding faith to the memory and the inspiration of Tone, and accounting ourselves base as long as we endure the evil thing against which he testified with his blood.”

To show that Wolfe Tone was a revolutionary, that he aimed at the complete overthrow of English ascendancy in Ireland and at the severing of all political connection between the two countries, that he believed in an Ireland in which the designations of Catholic and Protestant should be swallowed up in the common bonds of nationhood—all this needed no proving, for it was matter of common knowledge with all to whom Tone’s name was known. But it was necessary to do more than this. Pearse had to show in the first place that Tone might be taken as the normal and classical representative of the Irish national ideal, and in the second place that he was no mere ordinary constitution-monger but a teacher of a philosophy of nationality, valid not for his own age only, but always, capable of furnishing guidance in the just and orderly upbuilding of a modern community, of satisfying at once the claims of the nation and the claims of its humblest member. To this task he gave the last months of his life: the last four “Tracts for the Times” were from his pen: the first was written at the end of 1915, the last in March, 1916, a fortnight before the Rising. The first of these four pamphlets was entitled “Ghosts,” a title borrowed from Ibsen. It is an exposition of the national teaching of five Irish leaders, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, James Fintan Lalor, John Mitchel and Charles Stewart Parnell, all of whom held and taught that the national claim of Ireland was for independence and separation; their ghosts haunt the generation which has disowned them, they will not be appeased till their authority is again acknowledged. A few sentences will make the thesis of this tract (and to some extent of the following tracts) clear. “There has been nothing more terrible in Irish history than the failure of the last generation. Other generations have failed in Ireland, but they have failed nobly; or, failing ignobly, some man among them has redeemed them from infamy by the splendour of his protest. But the failure of the last generation has been mean and shameful, and no man has arisen from it to do a splendid thing in virtue of which it shall be forgiven. The whole episode is squalid. It will remain the one sickening chapter in a story which, gallant or sorrowful, has everywhere else some exaltation of pride.... Even had the men themselves been less base, their failure would have been inevitable. When one thinks over the matter for a little one sees that they have built upon an untruth. They have conceived of nationality as a material thing whereas it is a spiritual thing.... Hence, the nation to them is not all holy, a thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that a man dare not sell or dishonour on pain of eternal perdition. They have thought of nationality as a thing to be negotiated about as men negotiate about a tariff or about a trade route.... I make the contention that the national demand of Ireland is fixed and determined; that that demand has been made by every generation; that we of this generation receive it as a trust from our fathers; that we are bound by it; that we have not the right to alter it or to abate it by one jot or tittle; and that any undertaking made in the name of Ireland to accept in full satisfaction of Ireland’s claim anything less than the generations of Ireland have stood for is null and void.... The man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a “final settlement” anything less by one fraction of an iota than separation from England will be repudiated by the new generation as surely as O’Connell was repudiated by the generation that came after him. The man who in return for the promise of a thing which is not merely less than separation but which denies separation and declares the Union perpetual, the man who in return for this declares peace between England and Ireland and sacrifices to England as a peace-holocaust the blood of 50,000 Irishmen is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation, that one can only say of him that it were better for that man (as it were certainly better for his country) that he had not been born.” The pamphlet concludes with a historic retrospect of the Irish struggle for independence till the end of the seventeenth century, of the Anglo-Irish claim for independence in the eighteenth century, and with quotations from the five great Irish leaders since the last decade of that century joining in the same claim.