“It’s too true.”
That, however, was not to say that the English had enough detachment to relish the truth underlying the irony. Roger Dainton, on the eve of signing the Ulster covenant, told me—as an Englishman—that the Irish would never be fit for independence till they had acquired respect for law; I had seen Violet Loring whiten to the lips at the report of a lynching in some southern state and then regain her colour in a spasm of indignation that a Quaker had not been shot for refusing to enter the army. Collectively, I had watched the people of London—and, for all I know, the people of England outdid them—exhibiting, at the time of the Pemberton-Billing case, a ferocious credulity that was not exceeded by the French in the Dreyfus trial.
“Well, write your own damned article,” said Bertrand. “If you think you know these people . . .”
I believe that in one respect I understand the English, among whom I was brought up, better than Bertrand, to whom they were always a race of despised aliens. What they lack in imagination they make up in a queer political instinct. Every one at the Eclectic Club was sublimely indifferent, in these days, to the case of Egyptian autonomy; the Amritsar sentences only provoked a desultory discussion whether “damned black men”, as I heard them described by Sir Roger Dainton, would not be all the better for “an occasional dressing-down”. When, however, national bankruptcy was threatened, I encountered an instinctive preference for solvency; and, when refugees from all parts of Ireland flooded England with tales of assassination and counter-assassination, the British liking for order at home grew clamant. I remember carrying back to Seymour Street an official poster in which recruits were invited to “Join the Royal Air Force and See the World”; an unofficial hand had appended the grim warning: “Join the Royal Irish Constabulary and See the Next World.”
“It’s beyond a joke: that’s what it is,” said Robson, on whom I tried the last of my experiments.
For soul-deadening years, my butler’s sentiment had been expressed, from different angles, by Crawleigh and Bertrand, by O’Rane and Dainton, by Peace and the Morning Post. I believe, however, that no change of heart can be effected by one man or one paper. England accepted the reformation and acquiesced in the decapitation of Charles the First when the Robsons of those days—inarticulate and irrational, for the most part, but numerous and determined—decided that the unreformed Catholic Church or the divine right of kings was “beyond a joke”.
“I’ve written my own damned article,” I telephoned to Bertrand. “I think it’s an improvement on yours.”
“You would,” he replied.
“I don’t think this government has very long to live,” I added.
The oldest trick in the bag of a political journalist is to find out what policy is going to be followed, to insist vehemently that this policy must be followed and to take credit for having forced his own policy on a vacillating and apathetic government. During the war, Sir John Woburn preached conscription from the moment when his chief spy in the cabinet had revealed that ministers were agreed to bring conscription in: the Press Combine advertised itself for months as the mouthpiece of that opinion which demanded conscription; and, when the first military service act was passed, Woburn stood forth as the giant who had forced the government, in his own phrase, “to give Haig the men”. I have to guard against the temptation to employ this trick in writing of our campaign in 1921. Independently of our prompting, every one was saying that ministers must govern or go; and I only realized how far opinion had swung, when I met the lately ennobled Lord Saltash at a public dinner.