While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

"It may not be known to the rank and file of Unionists," announced The Irish Churchman on 14.11.13, "that we have the offer of aid from a powerful continental monarch who, if Home Rule is forced on the Protestants of Ireland, is prepared to send an army sufficient to release England of any further trouble in Ireland by attaching it to his dominion, believing, as he does, that if our king breaks his coronation oath by signing the Home Rule Bill he will, by so doing, have forfeited his claim to rule Ireland. And should our king sign the Home Rule Bill, the Protestants of Ireland will welcome this continental deliverer as their forefathers, under similar circumstances, did once before."

Since the consequences of their menace have been observed in the desolation of a hundred million homes throughout the world, Orangemen have not dwelt with pride on this aspect of their campaign; and, even at the time when the last threat was uttered, the more temperate souls felt that the controversy was being pushed beyond the limit of fair government-baiting. Weapons of an older type were brought into play: Ulstermen, who of all dour, independent races can best look after themselves, were depicted as the future spiritual and financial victims of "Rome rule"; and of the plea that Ulster only wished to remain a part of Great Britain and Ireland much was made by controversialists who would not consent to be governed for a day, had the tables been turned, by an insignificant minority of Ulster nationalists, backed by political sympathizers in another country.

With the thunder of opposing oratory mingled the rattle of grounding arms and the tramp of marching feet; but, though the Orangemen warned the government that the Ulster rebels were too much in earnest to be disregarded, ministers were by now grown indifferent to the bluff of their enemies, the counsel of the disinterested and the public insults which highly-placed ladies showered upon them with impunity at court and in private houses. Whether the anarchy and treason, preached and admitted by Sir Edward Carson, would ever have flamed into civil war is a matter of guess-work. The nationalist leaders, rightly or wrongly, thought that it would not; the prime minister who afterwards discounted the strength of nationalist idealism from August, 1914, until the Easter rising was unlikely to give its true value, whatever that might be, to the strength of unionist idealism two years before; by now, moreover, he was too well used to actual crises to be alarmed by a crisis which had not yet arisen. Mr. Birrell, the chief secretary, was too busily engaged in concealing his defects as an administrator under his brilliance as an epigrammatist to supply the imagination that his leader lacked. No attempt was made to scotch the rebellion or bring the ringleaders to book; enrolment increased, drilling continued, arms were purchased and imported. In the spring of 1914 some uneasiness made itself felt in the bosom of Colonel Seely, the secretary of state for war, and a confidential question directed to the loyalty of the troops stationed at the Curragh elicited that a number of officers, holding the king's commission, would refuse to obey orders if commanded to proceed against the Ulster rebels.

Though it was still a matter of guess-work whether the Orangemen would rise, no one could doubt that, in the event of a rising, there would be difficulty in making the army obey its orders. No less a person than the leader of the opposition had said that the officer who refused would only be doing his duty. For a few hours the House of Commons tried heatedly to assert itself against this attempt to establish a military ascendancy over parliament; the tail wagged and came near to lashing the dog; but the creation of a crisis created with it an opportunity for the prime minister to shew his adroitness in overcoming crises; Colonel Seely resigned, and Mr. Asquith undertook the administration of the War Office, thereby surprising the Curragh and the House of Commons so completely that the revolts in both places flickered out. The government, however, had only escaped from one difficulty by plunging into a greater; ministers, at last realising that Ulster must be coerced or conciliated and that Sir Edward Carson, relying on his volunteers, was pressing them harder than Mr. Redmond, who could only rely on a government's honour, decided to conciliate. It was announced that the home rule scheme must be amended; a conference was summoned; the Orangemen were comforted by a promise that the home rule act would not be enforced without an amending act; and ministers committed themselves to a formula which has become an accession-oath to succeeding administrations: Ulster must not be coerced. To a liberal, the idea of coercion is so hateful that he welcomes any declaration which undertakes to circumscribe its tyranny; if it has to be applied, he would sooner see one man in bonds and three at large than one at large and three in bonds; but the liberal loathing of oppression, as expressed by Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George, seems to have been confined to onehalf of one province of Ireland. To the tortured and distracted other three provinces their process of thought has never been satisfactorily explained.

In the venerable story of an international gathering which was set to write an essay on the elephant, it will be remembered that, while the Englishman wrote on "Elephant-Hunting" and the Frenchman on "The Love-Affairs of the Elephant", it was a German who evolved an elephant out of his inner consciousness and a Pole who devoted himself to "The Elephant in Relation to the Polish Question." For a subject-nation to be obsessed by concern for its nationality is perhaps tiresome to others; not to be so obsessed is despicable; and the Irishman and the Pole have at least escaped the degradation of a deracialised Jew. None the less, though nationality be the first, it is not the only concern; and even an Irishman may have felt, during these years, that Irish independence was being purchased at the cost of a liberalism that was not confined by national bounds. Political science has changed so little in two thousand years that, whatever the origin of the state, it now exists primarily, as it existed in the days of Aristotle, to make life possible: the personal safety of the individual must be assured and he must be guaranteed the essentials of living. On this foundation there rises now, as in the days of Aristotle, the second law, which alone separates an assembly of men from a pack of wolves, that the state exists to make possible a life of excellence; the individual must be afforded a chance of living a nobler life. Despite sporadic crime and external war, the first condition of safety was satisfied in England; and, though death by starvation was not unknown, the existence of work-houses testified that none need starve. Because the second condition is still so far from being fulfilled and because the chance of living a noble life is confined to an infinitesimal handful of the population, a party pledged to social reform came into existence and will justify its existence so long as oppression or fear of oppression, injustice, insecurity, disease, ignorance, poverty and squalor remain to be removed. It was the business of liberalism to remove these handicaps.

How far did it succeed? The violence of political controversy in those days hid from most observers how little was being done to improve the lot of man, woman or child in England. After the passion for reversing the legislation of their predecessors had run its course, ministers did indeed carry a courageous measure of old-age pensions; their insurance act was generous in intention even if it was unneeded and ineffectual in practise; and the parliament act created a procedure for expediting social reform in the future. But how much else did they find time to achieve in the intervals of the constitutional crisis and of the unending clash over Ireland?

While they wrangled, the possibility of a noble life was brought no nearer. Hundreds of thousands were insufficiently fed, ill-clad and verminous, with insufficient air, light and warmth; millions were corrupt with phthisis, cancer or venereal disease. On these physical wrecks and starvelings education left little mark; and a century of labour combination and industrial legislation had not laid that spectre of unemployment which stunts the soul and turns cold the heart of even the healthiest and most independent when they live within sight of the margin of subsistence. Day after day the opportunity of noble living was withdrawn from the thousands of women who through moral weakness, poverty, indolence or greed were pressed as recruits to prostitution; it was withdrawn from the homes that were ruined by drink and gambling. The shadow cast by the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of modern civilisation was so dense that there still existed in England, in the twentieth century, private societies to preserve animals and children from being tortured.

From time to time a sudden attack was made on the trade in human bodies and souls known by timid English euphemism as "the white-slave traffic"; the criminal law was amended and made more vigorous; the defencelessness of children was recognised and safeguarded. For what they were worth, let all credit be given to these gingerly attempts to heal unsightly sores, provided that no one mistake part cure for complete prevention. A prison flogging may deter the pander from dealing in human flesh, but it does not dispose him to noble living for its own sake; this is begotten of a sense of beauty by education. During these years a cartoon by Max Beerbohm depicted Lord Lansdowne trying, with all the amenity of his kind, to understand just what Mr. H. G. Wells meant by the barrenness of official politics; the successive education bills of the liberal administration sacrificed the elementals of good citizenship to an ingenious game of protecting church of England children from the perils of religious instruction in the tenets of dissent; and whether in after life a man starved his children or lived on the hire of his wife's body mattered less than that for the first twelve years of existence a unitarian should be secured from believing or even understanding that God was Three-in-One and One-in-Three.