As I felt we could hardly have too many opinions in our symposium, I urged Frank Jellaby and Carstairs to join us; and every party was represented by the time that Roger Dainton pulled a chair to the end of the table.
“I detest coercion,” I said; “but, if it has to be applied, I’d sooner coerce the few than the many. Because ministers refused to coerce Ulster in 1913, the rest of Ireland has been coerced ever since. And I never know why a thing should be called coercion in one country and ‘maintaining law and order’ in every other.”
Having propounded my own policy, I was free to listen while others propounded theirs. Our speeches, at this date, would make melancholy reading, for every one said precisely what was expected of him and precisely what he had said a hundred times before. Writing now at two years’ remove, I believe and hope that Ireland is on the road to a settlement; and this dinner two years ago lingers in my recollection as one more heart-breaking proof that, if the Irish were incapable of governing themselves, the English were no less incapable of governing them. Crawleigh, a former viceroy; John Carstairs, a retired diplomat; my uncle and Dainton, Jellaby and I, with some hundred years of parliamentary experience between us, all talked with the white-hot irreconcilability of Capulets and Montagues. It was this temper, I reminded myself from time to time, that kept me exiled from the County Kerry: it was this temper that tore me from Barbara’s side. In the years that followed, when I tried to mark the rock on which my life split, I always thought of this fatuous debate and of the pale, angry faces round our echoing table.
It was something, I suppose, that no one prayed for a new Cromwell, though I attribute this moderation to a doubt whether even Cromwell could now “reconquer” Ireland and to a fear that those who had drawn the sword might be the first to perish by the sword. In the last six years Ireland had made the dire discovery that the north had won an advantage by threats of violence and that, if the south wished to redress the balance, it must employ the same means.
“Can’t we cut out ancient history?,” I suggested, as my patience wore thin. “We need a policy to meet the present position; and the present position is an evenly matched civil war.”
As the phrase left my lips, I wondered whether the war was any longer an even match. Two days before, I heard from Hornbeck that a mail-train had been held up and the contents of the lord lieutenant’s bag forwarded, after perusal, with an endorsement “Passed by the Censor I. R. A.”; my agent reported that stores were being looted and ammunition seized. If attacks on private persons and on property were still rare, this was due to prudence on the one side and to intimidation on the other. Some one, however, would soon be shot because he refused to be intimidated; the shooting would be avenged; there would be reprisals against the avengers; and, worst fate of all, no one would be allowed to remain neutral.
“It’s begun already,” said Dainton. “That man they murdered in Limerick . . .”
“That spy they shot?,” Jellaby substituted.
“You call a man a spy for saving British troops from being butchered in an ambush?,” Crawleigh enquired acidly.
“You called Flaherty a spy,” boomed my uncle, “from your place in the House of Lords. He gave exactly similar information to the republican troops.”