THE STATE OP IRELAND.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.") FIR,—The Censorship, for some reason best known to itself, works to prevent the British public from hearing to much of the state of affairs in Ireland. Last year the pretext put forward was the necessity of securing a good " atmosphere" for the Convention; but even now, when the Convention has reported its inability to agree on a single vital point in the new "Constitution" it was supposed to be engaged in drafting, the prohibition is still maintained. Thus the reader of the English or Scottish papers hears little or nothing of the boycottings, shootings; riots, cattle-drivings, and so forth that are going on daily, and still less of the determined anti- Conscription and disloyalty campaign carried on by the unholy alliance of the Irish Hierarchy and the Bolshevik Sinn Feiners. All the more welcome, then, are such sidelights as are from time to time thrown on the situation. The Daily Chronicle, whose Home Rule orthodoxy will not be questioned, published on Monday last a letter from a special correspondent in Ireland which is
worth more notice than it has received. Here are some of his points:— " Intimidation is universal. . . . Many of the subscriptions to the so-called National Defence Fund and many of the signatures to the anti-Conscription pledge were obtained by intimidation direct and unashamed."
" When a well-known agriculturist astonished his Unionist friends by subscribing ..£300 to the Defence Fund he was asked for the reason, and this is what he said : 'All my extra tillage this year would be wasted if I did not subscribe, for I should not get any men to reap my crops and gather in the harvest.'" " Six members of the Wicklow Urban Council, all local trades- men, who took exception to the Council passing a resolution against Conscription have ever since been subjected to a rigorous boycott."
Intimidation and cowardice naturally result in duplicity:— "Many months ago an Irish Member bitterly lamented to me the success of a policy for which he had voted repeatedly in the House of Commons."
" Just as the deportation of the Sinn Fein leaders has pleased the farmer in his heart of hearts, any step taken by the Govern- ment to deliver the country from the oppression of the intimidator will be welcomed, though it may be with profound silence or a pretence of resentment."
But perhaps the most interesting point in the letter comes at the end. It will be remembered that there has of late been a shrill outcry over the appointment of Sir James Campbell, the most brilliant lawyer in Ireland, to the Chancellorship :- " I should like to warn English politicians that much of the disproportionate indignation about recent changes in the Irish Executive is inspired by disappointed, cynical lawyers."
" The very little admiration I had from the first for the new combination of Lord-Lieutenant and Chief Secretary diminishes day by day, but I would convert it into fulsome praise rather than see the criticisms I could make used as a lever to elevate mean and paltry men here who are intriguing for purely selfish ends."
Truly the " mean and paltry men " have changed little since Charles James Fox, after a short experience of them, said that the Irish patriots always wanted "a job for themselves," or since Swift, who knew it, spoke of the Irish Parliament as a "den of thieves." Nor was it different in O'Connell's time, when, as Gavan Duffy tells us in Young Ireland, "there was an O'Connell Bank, of which he was governor, and an O'Connell Brewery, to which his youngest son lent his name for a share of the profits "; when Thomas Davis wrote of O'Connelliem as a combination of " unaccounted funds, bigotry, billingsgate, Tom Steel missions, crude and contradictory dogmas and unrelieved stupidity," and MacNeiin- called it a base mélange of tyranny and mendicancy."
The point to note is that these " mean and paltry men" got into the saddle during those ten years when, as Mr. Austen Chamber- lain has been reminding us, " there was no government in Ire- land "—or, to put it more correctly, when a Chief Secretary neglected all the high and responsible duties of his office and handed over the patronage of the country to the nominees of the United Irish League and the Ancient Order of Hibernians.—I am,
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