[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR29 SAS, —By the time
these lines reach you the Lord Mayor of Cork will have either been released by the Government or he will have starved himself to death, or he will be still alive, and this last faot will have caused more people in Ireland to believe what is openly alleged, viz., that he is kept alive by the minis- trations of priests and the devices of friends. Whether this particular allegation be true or not the Sinn Feiners do justify, as do the Bolsheviks, every expedient, however repulsive to the ordinary decent man. Whatever happens the Lord Mayor has lost his popularity in Ireland. When he was "on the point of death" for the first time there was wild enthusiasm, and the stolid Headquarters Staff were rather rattled. But no Irish excitement can last many days, and the man in the street is frankly bored, in Dublin, with the Lord Mayor who is always dying. As an old lady said to me: " Ah, the poor man I Isn't it the bad luck he has, and he never meaning to die at all." But if in Ireland we take the Lord Mayor at his proper value, that is, as a determined ruffian who was actively associated with those who signed the death warrant of Colonel Smyth, and with that Sinn Fein inner circle which planned the murder of McCurtain, the former Lord Mayor of Cork, who was getting restive at the Sinn Fein campaign of murder, yet in England the flame, which does not blaze up so quickly, grows steadily with the Sinn Fein propaganda. And what successful propaganda, and how stupid the Government is not to reply! Take as an instance of how the propaganda, uncontradicted, deceives the average kind-hearted, stupid Radical the articles and the paragraphs of the Nation of September 4th. It accepts, without examination, the view of the Irish extremists that England and the English are a " foreign nation " to Ireland and the Irish; it compares, accepting without question, the views of the renegade English- man, Erskine Childers, and the Welshman Griffith, who leads the Irish Sinn Feiners (in the absence of the Mexican De Valera), Ireland with Belgium and England with Germany : it professes indignation that the Orangeman who fought for the Empire in the war, and who refuses to live with the men who shirked or fought against us, should be allowed to retain arms to defend himself while attempts are made in the South and West to take the weapons from those whose avowed object
(and whose idea of fair fight) is the murder of isolated police- men.
If the Nation cared to inquire, rather than accept without query, it would find that the proportion of Irishmen to whom England is a "foreign nation" is not 10, perhaps not 8, per cent. of the population. If it reflected it would realize that the comparison between Belgium under Germany and Ireland linked with England is absurd. Did the Belgians speak German? Were there Belgian regiments in the German army? Were there 100 seats for Belgian representatives in the Reichstag? All this sort of inaccuracy, which has a serious effect in deceiving well-meaning persons in England and in the world, ought to be countered by Government propaganda. The enemy, those who counted Germany their " gallant ally on the Conti- nent," are active enough in propaganda. But the Government looks on supine, though they obtain no credit for it, for Mr. Erskine Childers, whose pamphlet Military Rule in Ireland lies before me, a pamphlet full of hysterical abuse of the efforts made to bring to justice those who murder the police, has the impudence to say that the Irish people is " bludgeoned into silence." Never in the history of mankind was such abuse poured on any Government unchecked and unpunished as is uttered day by day in the Freeman's Journal—and their dupes in England, who, of course, never see the Freeman, com- plain that the right of free speech is suppressed.
The truth is that the Irish proletariat of the South and West are children, naughty children who have been spoiled and cossetted and who have never grown up. They were spared the stern lessons of the war—no conscription, no retrenchment, no rations, no air raids; and where in England and Scotland and Wales the younger generation is maimed or blotted out or starved, in Ireland they are full of bull meat, with nothing to do and no wish to do anything useful—with plenty of money from their fathers, the farmers who grew rich in the war, and who own their farms owing to the despised " English " Parliament. More, they have been brought up under a purely Irish system of education, run by the priests, and teachers wholly subservient to the priests, who have been forbidden to inculcate loyally, and who have been forbidden by the Irish Education Board to show the Union Jack—called a "party symbol." Small wonder that superstition is rampant. Not so long ago a witch was burned in Tipperary. Even last month plaster images in the same county have dripped blood, and miraculous cures resulted. It is quite gravely asserted that the Virgin appeared to a pious youth and told him to dig in the cellar. He did so and found a bottle of holy water, -which he gave to his uncle who sold images in the town of Templemore. In a week the miraculous dripping began, and in a further week 100,000 people had visited Templemore- in" motor-ears: 200 are alleged to have passed a house near in an hour, and the price of a cup of tea in Templemore rose to 10s. a cup; miracles are good for trade. The sceptical Protestants said that the whole thing arose out of a rumour that the soldiers were going to sack the town. A District Inspector of Police had been foully murdered; a captain of the regiment quartered there had been burned to death in the attempt to rescue people from a house fired by Sinn Feiners. If the place was full of superstitions people seeking for miracles, perhaps the threatened reprisals would not take place. Anyhow, there's an orgy of piety in Templemore (what would George Borrow have said and written?). And where there is superstition there is cruelty. Two District Inspectors have been shot dead in the neighbourhood, and many police- men. Dozens of barracks have been burned; girls have had their hair cut off for talking to policemen, honest farmers have been boycotted and refused access to the creameries (which A. E. tells us are " non-political ") and so deprived of their livelihood; solitary houses have been raided for arms, and lone women terrified by armed ruffians. And when one of the Sinn Fein leaders is captured and tries, or pretends to try, to starve himself, the English Labour leaders call him a hero and a martyr, and demand that he may be let out to sanction more murders!—I am, Sir, Lc., ANTI-Humeea.
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