THE POSITION IN IRELAND.
SIR EDWARD CARSON went straight to the heart of the matter in his speech to the Ulster Unionist Council on Friday week. We advise any one who takes an obsolete view of Sir Edward Carson as a " bigoted reaction. ary " to read that speech. We also commend it to those who hesitate for some subtle political reason to decide whether their sympathies should be bestowed upon the Sinn Feiners whose cause is associated with systematic assassination, or upon those Ulster Unionists who cheered enthusiastically when Sir Eaward Carson spoke of the unwavering loyalty of Ulster to Great Britain and described the shame with which the Province of Ulster would regard any such outbreak of crime as disgraces the South and West. Sir Edward Carson showed his usual penetration when he said that the fate of the Home Rule Bill depended not upon Ulster Unionists but upon Sinn Feincrs. The Ulster Unionists are, in short, in this position : they recognize that times have changed ; they admit, though they deeply regret it, that the Union is out of favour, and that self-determination is the popular cry ; and they confess that they have no right to veto self-determination for others. All they claim is the right of self-determination for themselves. Consequently Sir Edward Carson said that he and his friends would undoubtedly accept the Bill if the South and West would accept it and honestly try to work it. But will they ? We have often insisted upon this very point, that all the so-called obstruction exercised by Ulster Unionists could be instantly removed by the Sinn Feiners themselves if they wished to do so. The Sinn Feiners have only to show that they wish to preserve law and order, and to work a system of government in Ireland which would not be a challenge to the safety of Great Britain, for Ulster Unionists to begin to gather confidence in the possibility of Home Rule. Of course, if the Sinn Fein and Nationalist leaders— so far as the latter have any power—were capable of reason, they would start to-morrow to create this confidence. They could easily begin by saying to the Ulster Unionists : " By all means have your separate Parliament. We do not recognize the partition of Ireland as a possible permanent settlement, but let it pass for the time being. Meanwhile it shall be our business to show you that we can not only govern but govern prosperously." Who can doubt that the result of such an attitude in the South and West would be that Ulster Unionists would at last seriously ask them- selves the question : Well, why should not this thing be done ? " Suspicion and mistrust in Ulster, in fine, would begin to die away and confidence would sprout in their place. If we were Ulster Unionists, we should be alarmed for the very reason that the South and West absolutely refuse to take up this attitude. As we have said before, almost any Bill would do for a beginning if conciliation appeared between the two great divisions in Ireland.
To show that we are not exaggerating the importance of what Sir Edward Carson said, let us quote his words :- "Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to find that the whole of society in the South and West of Ireland had organ- ized itself to accept and to give a fair trial to the proposals that have been put forward by His Majesty's Government ; and 1 can assure the Government that if such a state of facts as that existed we would undertake to govern this Province with a toleration and an example which would be well worth the consideration of any Government in the whole Empire. I am perfectly certain that if those who have hitherto been our opponents would come forward and say, We are going to work our Parliament in the South and West for the benefit of all classes and creeds and of all conditions of men, and with a view to the pride that we have in the Empire,' we would be the very first to shake hands with them and say, As brother- Irishmen, we wish you well, and we promise you that we will do the same.' " Again, consider the words with which Sir Edward Carson ended his speech to the Ulster Unionist Council. It may be said by those whose minds are fuddled by political catch. words that these words are only humbug, that they are the subtle appeal of a political strategist to religious passion. It may not be possible to disabuse some people of that idea, but we can only say to those who are willing to accept our opinion as genuine that for our part we are as sure as we can be of anything that the words with whicli Sir Edward Carson concluded his speech were spoken with all sincerity and honesty, and were not so much as tinged by any thought of making a clever appeal to a packed gallery .— " May we," said Sir Edward Carson, " have wisdom from on High in coming to a decision. May we each apply the host of the abilities God has given us in solving these vital problems. May all unselfishness be absent from us, and may we be guided by one thought, and one thought only—the thought that patriot- ism breeds in every man, the desire in his best way to serve his country."
There the matter stands for the present. No wonder that Sir Edward Carson and his friends cannot feel justified in the circumstances in agreeing to anything more than a conditional acceptance of the Bill. In the House of Commons they will help in shaping it as it passes through Committee. if only by some miracle the Sinn Feiners show sparks of reason, the Bill may yet be built up into a benefit to Ireland which one hardly as yet dares to estimate. But meanwhile the situation as regards violence in the South and West of Ireland goes from had to worse. We fear that most people in this country have not even suspected how bad it is. We receive a good many com- munications from Ireland, and the impression we get is that the patrolling of the dangerous areas has broken down. No one who knows the magnificent record of the Irish constabulary can blame these splendid men. Their barracks are attacked at night, here, there, and everywhere, and it is necessary that they should be near at hand to defend these barracks. But what, we should like to know, are the soldiers doing ? Sinn Fein rhetoric tells us that Ireland is being held down by a brutal soldiery ; but so far as we can gather, the soldiers are allowed few opportunities of being• ordinarily efficient, let alone brutal. If the troops in Ireland are not there to keep order, what are they there for ? It is- ridiculous to answer that soldiers are not policemen. We do not forget that the Army at present contains a great many raw recruits who are but half-trained boys, and a great many non-commissioned officers with next to no experience : but is it realized in this country that in large areas of the South and West every household which has the least reason to suppose that it, may have incurred the enmity of Sum Fein, or which knows that by possessing firearms it must have excited the notice of Sinn Fein, goes to bed every night feeling that the house may be raided before the morning by a party of armed and masked criminals who will not hesitate at any violence ? Is it generally realized here that every household in this unhappy position has not the remotest hope that help will be forthcoming ? We have before us a letter from an Irishman who describes how the houses of several of his neighbours were raided last week. Take one case. A knock was heard at the door, and directly the door was opened men with revolvers in their hands and masks on their faces rushed. in. The head of the house, with the responsibility on his shoulders of defending his family, advanced bravely but impotently enough with a poker. He was instantly shot down for daring to threaten the intruders. The criminals then fired several bullets through a door into the room in which the ladies of the house were sitting. Fortunately none of the ladies was hit. The firing was merely a purposeless exuberance of criminality. Afterwards one of the ladies rode several miles to fetch a doctor without meeting on her way any sort of police patrol or military guard. Imagine that kind of terrorism and brutality multiplied indefinitely. It is a blunt and disagreeable question to ask, but where is the intelligent headship in Ireland ? We can see no coherent design or leadership. Surely there are enough troops in Ireland to re-establish law and order quickly enough if they were used on a systematic plan. And it must be remembered that this would not be repression by a brutal " army of occupation," but would be first the dis- charge of an obligation of government, and secondly an act in the interests of Irishmen themselves. Though hundreds of thousands of Irishmen call themselves Sinn Feiners, they do so because they are terrorized in the true revolutionary manner by a powerful clique. They dare not assert themselves. They dare not get together to resist. But. they would be truly delighted to be delivered from their oppressors. That is the situation.
When one has in one's mind a picture of such a state of affairs within the United Kingdom, one may well grow sick, as we for our part certainly do, at the dreary repetitions in England of the old party political watchwords and hollow recriminations about Ireland. In the debate in the House of Commons on Thursday week about the application of emergency laws to Ireland, the Chief Secretary, Mr. Mac- pherson, earned the usual opprobrium of Liberals. Himself a Liberal, he was denounced as a renegade because he enunciated the simple truth that the first duty of a Govern- ment is to preserve law and order. Mr. Macpherson may often in the past have repeated the usual claptrap about cc coercion," " repression," and so forth, but his manner necessarily changes when he himself bears the responsibility and knows that in his own person he is " up against it " in Ireland. That accounts for the extraordinary passion with which he described the situation in Ireland, and we defy any one to read his speech and honestly say that Mr. Macpherson did not mean and feel what he said. Neverthe- less the old reiterations, the old senseless political incan- tations, go on. We hoped for something better from Mr. Asquith. The situation is very serious indeed, and yet it is a situation which might be turned to glorious gain. At all events it is worth trying. But speaking at the Eighty Club - on Tuesday Mr. Asquith talked about the " insensate coercion " of Ireland, as of course he was expected to do. Those who supported him at the Paisley election for special reasons, and not because they were worshippers at the shrine of the Independent Liberals, were entitled to expect something else.
The alternative to what Mr. Asquith calls coercion is of course nothing less than the plan which he and Mr. Birrell put into action—if you can call such a plan action— with disastrous results. They pretended that Irish criminals, revolutionaries, and traitors were gentlemen of honour, suavity, and all human kindness. The outcome was a revolution in Dublin, the death of hundreds of innocent persons, and an attempted German landing with the co-operation of Irishmen upon the Irish coast. We would earnestly invite our readers to reflect well on this matter, and to ask themselves seriously whether there' is not more reason, more honour, more manliness, and more hope for the future in the so-called reactionary thoughts of Sir Edward Carson than in the so-called Liberalism of Mr. Asquith.
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