EXCLUSION.
WE have given our reasons in the article which precedes this for deeming little better than insane the Govern- ment who could choose such a moment as the present for giving the Extremists in Ireland something which they do not really want and will treat with contempt, and the Moderates something which they will not dare to thank us for, since it follows on Conscription. Now we must say something on another point which is just as fatal to the Government's Irish policy.
Let us assume for the purpose of argument that we are entirely wrong in applying the proverb, " Once bit, ,twice shy," to Ireland. Instead let us assume that one should never grow weary in the attempt to conciliate the Irish people with schemes which, as they themselves tell us, are annoying them rather than conciliating them. Let us assume, in fact, that one should eternally persist in churning sea-water in the hope that it may eventually turn into butter. Even if this large assumption is made, and we draw no lessons whatever from the Simi Fein revolt and from the present condition of Ireland, which for the majority of the Southern and Western Irish is one of veiled rebellion and sympathy with our enemies, it can still be shown that the Government's promised Home Rule Bill is a criminal blunder of the worst type. It is a measure monstrous and ill-formed, even granting their own mad premiss, that now is the acceptable time for Home Rule. It is an utterly false, illogical, and tyrannical measure, and violates all the principles on behalf of which it is supposed to be set up.
To prove this, we will ask the Government a few plain questions. Why have they rejected the principle of Exclusion, a principle which, if they had proposed it, would at any rate have freed them from the charge of injustice and ingratitude to their best friends in Ireland, and would have converted a partial and contradictory measure into one which, whether politic or not, would at all events have been reasonable and not utterly unjust ? For ourselves, we do not admit that the principle of " Self-determination " applies to that part of the United Kingdom called Ireland, because, in spite of Bolshevik and Prussian pseudo-idealism, we hold that unity, homogeneity, and integrity in a State are as essential as the recognition of nationality—as long as free, representative, democratic institutions exist in the said State. The claim to Self-determination is clearly more urgent in an Autocratic or Oligarchic than in a truly Democratic and Constitutional community. Let us, however, as we presume the Primo Minister and his obedient colleagues do, give for the moment the full rein to the principle of Sell-determination, and, without any thought of the remoter consequences or of the time chosen for putting it into operation, admit that it must at once be conscientiously applied in the case of Ireland.
In that instance, and assuming the Government premisses, will they tell us why Self-determination is not to be allowed to that homogeneous area which, for want of a better name, we call the Six-County Area ; i.e., that portion of Ireland in which the population is ethnologically akin to that of England and of the Lowlands of Scotland, which is English in speech and non-Celtic in its ideals and modes of thought and in morals—we use the word not offensively but in its widest sense—further, an area which is Protestant in religion, intensely Imperialistic in senti- ment, which is politically democratic in the true sense, and which, to give a lightning-flash example, is as determined that Germany shall not beat Britain, and that the temporal power of the Vatican shall not be restored, as Mr. De Valera and his Ultramontane friends—these include the active part of the Roman Catholic Church—are that these " benefits ' shall be conferred upon the world ? Let the Government answer us inplain terms. Why. if they are bent on. asserting the principle of Self-determination, is the Six-County Area of North-East Ulster, an area so specially suitable for separate treatment on historical, ethnological, and religious grounds, apparently to be the sole place in the world where Self-determination is not to apply? Till the Govern- ment have given an answer to said question, no Unionist, no good Democrat, we had almost said no sane and honest man, has any possible right to vote fora Home Rule Bill which applies to the whole of Ireland.
We shall be told that the Government could not think of introducing Exclusion because all the Southern Unionists in the Convention said it was impossible and unthink- able, because a certain number of distinguished Southern Irishmen have expressed their abhorrence at the bare idea of partition, and finally because it is physically impossible to put Exclusion into an Act. Our answer is that the Convention shows nothing of the kind. Of course no Irish Unionist would ask for Exclusion as something good per se. The very fact that he is a Unionist—i.e., a person who believes that the Act of Union is by far the best, probably the only-, solution of the Irish difficulty—precludes his taking up such a position. The most he can say—if he lives in North-East Ulster he says it with the utmost firmness and conviction—is that if unhappily it should be decided by the people of England and Scotland that it has become necessary to undo the healing work of the Union, and to grant the dangerous and ill-timed demands of the majority in the Twenty-six-County Area, then justice, logic, and expediency all combine to compel the Imperial Parliament to exclude North-East Ulster from the Home Rule Bill on the exact grounds on which that Parliament is proposing to include the rest of Ireland. Every argument which gives self-government to the Twenty-six-County Area can be applied without alteration to prove that the Six-County Area has the right to be the master of its own fate, and to demand as its form of Self-determination exclusion from the Home Rule Bill, and, as that is its wish, rather than the foundation of any separate provincial system, its inclusion as a County in the Kingdom of England. Without the grossest betrayal of those who have stood so loyally by the United Kingdom and by the good cause, you cannot give the Nationalist what he demands, and at the same time tell the Ulsterman that what is hardly good enough for his disloyal fellow-subjects in the South and West is too good for him. You cannot strike him across the mouth with a " Hound ! you mutiny," when he dares to ask that a right which is to be given as a sop to rebellion shall at any rate be allowed to him as a reward for the staunchest loyalty.
The Government dare not tell us that our Exclusion demand is impracticable, that the sacred soil of Ireland cannot be broken up, that unity in a State must be respected, and that Exclusion is an undraftable chimera, because, if they do, how are they going to answer our next question—Why then do you break up the United Kingdom ? The Government are only logically safe when they rely on the principle of Self-deter- mination for homogeneous units in which the great majority favour a particular policy. But, remember, the Roman Catholic, Celtic, pro-German, Sinn Fein minority in the Six-County Area is roughly proportionate to the Loyalist, Protestant, anti-German ininority in the rest of Ireland. If, driven from pillar to post as the Government advocates must be, they tell us that we are unpractical logicians, that the great affairs of nations cannot be decided by logic-chopping, and that the exclusion of the Six-County Area is physically impossible, then we will ask them yet one more question. Why only ten months ago (on May 16th, 1917) did the Prime Minister address a letter to Mr. Redmond* in which he offered the Nationalists (a) a Bill for the immediate application of the Home Ride Act to Ireland but with the Exclusion of the Six Counties of North-East Ulster, or alter- natively (b) a Convention ? That letter is, in our opinion, the most important fact which emerges in the whole of the Con- vention Reports. It shows how flimsy is the pretence that the Government regard Exclusion as physically impossible. They knew and admitted ten months ago that it was physically possible, and were prepared to apply it. The letter puts the policy of Exclusion as regards Home Rulers like the Prime Minister on a perfectly different footing from that on which it stood before. It might have been sneered at as " mere idealism " before. After Mr. Lloyd George's letter it can never be denied that Exclusion has come into the region of practical politics.
We are not Exclusionists on the merits. We believe in the Union to-day as firmly as, nay, ten times more firmly than, we believed in it when thirty years ago, the Irish problem first became acute. All the same, we have always felt that, injurious as we regard Home Rule per se, we cannot in existing circumstances refuse to a local majority so large as the majority in the South and West of Ireland (i.e., in the Twenty-six- • See the reprint of the Unionist Minority Report given In the Morning Pod pt Saturday, April lath, 1018. County Area) the experiment of self-government—provided always that that experiment is only tried in that part of Ireland which desires it, and is not tried in that part of Ireland in which the local majority loathes the experiment as passionately as, nay, a great deal more passionately than, the other local majority desires it.
The refusal of the Nationalists to accept Exclusion as the solution of the Irish problem affords a sure test of their alleged sincerity. Exclusion is the touchstone by which we can dis- cover the true nature of the Home Rule demand. Its rejection shows us that what the Nationalists want is not so much self- government as the right of domination over the Protestants and Unionists of the North. It is clear that if they cared more for their own ideals than for this right of domination, the Nationalists, instead of rejecting, would welcome the exclusion of North-East Ulster, especially at the beginning of their career of independence. It is because they desire the right of coercing, being revenged upon, and punishing, as they would say, the Black Protestants of the North, that they do not realize the justice, and also the special value to themselves, of Exclusion. Exclusion would give the Nationalists an absolutely homo- geneous Parliament, and would make them, or, as we may now say, the Sinn Feiners, masters in their own house. They would not be worried by the presence of unsympathetic and Imperial istic "anti-Irish Irishmen," always ready, as the Extremists would declare, to oppose legislation intended to widen the wholesome and necessary breach with England, and to destroy instead of maintaining Roman Catholic and Celtic ideals against Protestant and British prejudices. The sincere Irishman, who really wanted self-government, and to be allowed to make the attempt to found a model nation and to give the Southern Irish or Celtic and Hibernian nationality its full rights of head and heart, ought to thank God for the opportunity to exclude from " his freeman's feast " an element so dangerous to the formulation of Irish ideals as the English-hearted people from North-East Ulster—spawn of the Elizabethan and Jacobean plantations and of Cromwell's bloodstained soldiery.
The only alternative answers that we have ever seen to the considerations just set forth are (1) that Ireland must have some wealthy people to tax, that high-browed Celts arc not wealth-makers, and that wealth is to be found alone in Belfast —an argument which the business houses of Ulster naturally find very significant—and (2) that you must never break down ancient national boundaries. We may leave the " your money we want " argument alone. It is too naive for disser- tation. As for the other argument, it has no historical basis whatever. Ireland never was a nation. Before Henry H.'s forces landed it had always been a disreputable and distracted welter of small States which maintained a lively anarchy throughout the length and breadth of the island. These strange conditions allowed the Celt, the Hibernian, the Dane, and the Scot—there was even, we believe, a place for the Welsh—to engage in a series of confused faction-fights. Through them ran an engaging thread of religious acrimony in the shape of the persecution of the old Celtic Church by the Roman Hierarchy, a religious feu de mart the last embers of which, if we are not mistaken, glowed almost up to the time of the Reformation. In any case, so purely geographical an expression had Ireland always been that Henry Viii., with his Renaissance love of political neatness and logic, actually passed an English Act of Parliament making Ireland a kingdom, and thus for the first time recognizing a sort of unity in Ireland. Ireland, then, has no historical claim to be regarded as an inseparable national unit. Once more, Exclusion is a test which when applied shows us what the Nationalists and Sinn Feiners are really after, We most sincerely trust, then, that if there are any Unionists left in the House of Commons they will ask in season and out of season, during the passage of the Bill, that the principle of Exclusion be applied. It must be fought for at every stage, and if possible in every clause, of the Bill, until the Government give some answer why North-East Ulster is to be denied the right of Self-determination given to the rest of Ireland. If the stock answer, " Look at our beautiful line in safeguards," is applied, we retort : " Let North-East Ulster herself rather than a Home Rule Prime Minister choose the safeguards which shall save her from destruction." We know what North-East Ulster's choice would be. It would be Exclusion. Yet again, it cannot be said that Exclusion is physically impossible, because the Government themselves proposed it only last May. Further, as the readers of the Spectator may remember, we published in these columns in March, 1914, a scheme for amending the Home Rule Bill of 1914, so as to produce Exclusion—a scheme which • it was admitted by our severest critics was perfectly workable, even if it was not, as we were the first to agree, as good a scheme of government as that provided by the maintenance of the Union.
Finally, we would ask Unionists in the very last resort, and if beaten in the lobbies by an unholy combination of English Home Rulers, renegade Unionists, and persons who, in spite of past events, still think that Birrellism is the true Irish policy, to insist that the Six-County Area shall be given the right that was given to Natal at the foundation of the South African Union—the right to hold a Referendum (soldiers at the front being, of course, allowed to vote) on the simple question : " Shall the Six-County Area be excluded from the operation of the new Act ? " Surely the Imperial Parliament at such a moment, and remembering what Ulster has done for the Empire, could not be so base as to refuse so reasonable, so just, so democratic a request as that I Before we leave the subject of the Irish Bill we must express our loathing at having at such a moment as the present, and when our soldiers are locked in a deadly struggle with the enemy, to discuss the sordid details of Irish sedition and of British Parliamentarianism. But the fault is not ours. It is that of the Prime Minister, and the supine Unionists who sup- port him in the Government. We dare not without a protest see North-East Ulster sacrificed on a punctilio of sentiment which will win not one word of respect or mercy from our Sinn Fein enemies. It is our duty, however heavy, to stand by those who have stood by us. As long as our paper is permitted to appear, we shall denounce the monstrous plea that the unity of Ireland must be maintained inviolate, even though it is necessary in the process to break the unity of the United Kingdom.
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