SEDITION IN IRELAND.
THE treatment by the Government in the last few weeks of criticism in England and of sedition in Ireland presents one of the strangest contrasts we can call to mind. In his defence of his management of the Press Bureau last week Sir Stanley Buckmaster claimed a right under the Defence of the Realm Consolidation Bill to stop all criticism which" might destroy public confidence in the Government." A moment's consideration will suggest the abuses to which a general application of such a vague principle might lend itself. The Press Bureau might be used to hush up every blunder or folly of a Minister. By skilfully manipulated suppression it might be employed even to glorify a policy which would be admitted, if the truth were known, to be disastrously opposed to all the interests of the country. Fortunately, common-sense soon prevailed, and on Wednesday Sir Stanley Buckmaster—who, of course, never had any intention of abusing his office—admitted that it was desirable to change the wording of the clause so that all appearance of evil might be excluded. Enough power, however, is retained by the Government to make it quite clear that they are using, and mean to use, the Press Bureau as a potent instrument of government. We do not in the least complain of this. When a country is at war it is the duty of the Government to stop the publication of anything and everything which might create or magnify obstacles in the way of carrying on the war thoroughly and resolutely. In our opinion, it is ridiculous in such times to argue academically about fine shades of the rights of freemen. When the head of the Press Bureau is in doubt let him say " No," and he will not be far wrong. The amendments to the Defence of the Realm Consolidation Bill will prevent him from going too far in any essential matter. But now we come to quite a different side of the question. If this use of the Press Bureau as an instrument of government be granted—and for ourselves we freely grant it—it postulates a survey by the Government of the whole field. It is an impossible policy to cut out bits of the field and say : " The plan does not apply here," or, " The plan does not apply there." We do not complain of rigour. We complain of stupidity, partiality, and ignorance. It is absurd, and very dangerous to the public health, to strain at a gnat in England and swallow a camel in Ireland. The campaign of sedition in Ireland has quite outrun the conceptions or the information of nearly every one in England. We must give some examples of it. On October 10th the Irish. Volunteer (which is, of course, the organ of highly disaffected Irishmen, and not of Mr. Redmond, or of those National Volunteers who are friendly to the British cause) stated triumphantly that the poison of anti-British feeling had been so well spread that the National Volunteers in the West had decided to a man not to join the new Army. "No Recruits from the West " was the joyful headline, and the article declared that one of the objects of the British Government was to get rid of Irishmen by having them slaughtered by Germans. It cannot be supposed that recruiting will flourish in Ireland while such infamous lies are scattered among credulous and ignorant peasants. But there are other publications at the same work. There are Sinn Fein, Irish, Freedom; and the Irish Worker. The November issue of Irish, Freedom (we quote from a summary in the Times of Tuesday) contained the following words :- " To your most distinguished patron and benefactor, England, we say : fight your own fights, we want none of the glory of your bloated Empire ; we got more glory out of the fight at Fontenoy when we beat you than from the thousand fights we, unfortunately, won for you. We are not concerned with the hobble you are now in except that we hope you may be beaten. If you are not beaten now the hope still lives on, the hope that the day of reckoning may come in our time. We care not whether your victor be Turk, Teuton, or Cossack, white man or yellow ; and on the day your putrid old carcass gives its last kick the Irish nation shall send aloft a pawn of exaltation that shall rend the heavens."
The Irish Volunteer on November 7th printed a speech in which these words occurred :- " She [England] calls on the people of Ireland to fight against a race who never injured the hair of a single Irishman's head, but, on the contrary, were always in sympathy with the people of this country as proved in the Irish-American German-American Alliance. I say if the Germans came to-morrow and took our country by force they would just have the same right to it as
the robbers who hold it at the point of the bayonet. My friends, we have no quarrel with Germans, and I hope we never will."
Both Irish Freedom and the Irish Worker absurdly pretend that Ireland is " neutral " in the war ; but the possible outcome of " neutrality " was described in Irish Freedom as follows :— " It is true, indeed, that Ireland would be better off were she a protectorate of the German people, who are more advanced in civilization and culture than the English. Their interests and ours would not clash, as the English and Irish interests do.. . • If the British Navy gets the worst of the coming fight, we shall have our German friends cruising in the Irish Sea."
Sinn Fein of November 21st published and approved of an article in a German paper which showed that " in the fate of Ireland Germans recognize what would be their own fate if they succumbed to England." Many of the sheets and pamphlets which praise Germany and vilify Britain are well printed on good paper, and are to a large extent distributed free. Where does the money come from ? No doubt somebody under the Government has made it his business to inquire, and we should very much like to know the answer. Sir Stanley Buckmaster, we suppose, would not be likely to know, as he stated in the House of Commons that he does not see the Irish papers. It has even been suggested that it is not certain that the Censorship applies to Ireland. This is the state of things which we call utterly wrong, muddle-headed, and lax. If the Press Bureau is an instrument of government, it should take Ireland into its field of operations as much as any other part of the kingdom, and perhaps more. If Sir Stanley Buckmaster does not read the Irish papers, it ought at least to be some one's duty to place them before him or to read them for him. If the Press is to be muzzled, why do not the muzzling laws hold good in Ireland? It is against all common-sense to place Ireland in a privileged position—to give roving licences to any Irish- men who care to kill recruiting. Men have been arrested in England for spreading foolish false reports, which were not very much worse than the gossip of idiots. Why have the deliberate, callous preachers of sedition been allowed for so long to go untouched in Ireland ? We might draw attention to many other strange facts in Ireland. But we must content ourselves with two more. On November 15th a meeting was held at St. Stephen's Green, in front of the arch erected to the memory of the Irish soldiers who were killed in the Boer War. The purpose was to protest against the dismissal from the Ordnance Department of a man named Monteith, who is a Captain in the Sinn Fein section of the Irish Volunteers. An armed contingent of Irish Volunteers was present. One of the speakers, Mr. John Milroy (we quote from the Irish Tinzes), said :— " They were told Your King and country need you,' but they had no King, and they had no country but Ireland. They would have none of it. That Empire which they were asked to serve had done all that inhuman ingenuity could do to crush and destroy their nation. But it had not succeeded. The Irish nation had sur- vived, and would outlive the British Empire. (Applause.) He said to them deliberately—Gloria in excalsis Deo that that Empire had met at last an opponent that could give back blow for blow. (Applause, and a voice, 'Three cheers for the Germans.') This was the hour for which their fathers had craved. As it was with Captain Monteith to-day, so it would be with others to-morrow. This traitorous blow against Ireland's army had got to be answered, and they, men of Dublin, were the men to answer it. They must all join either the Volunteers or the Citizen Army to be prepared for the day of reckoning, which was much nearer than many of them imagined. Let them get ready for that day, when their arms would not be words, but cold steel."
Mr. James Connolly said :— "' Sooner or later either they had got to get rid of the British Government or the British Government would get rid of them. He had heard several stories about the holding of that meeting, and the preparations the authorities were making therefor. He had arranged, if the police or the military were let loose on the citizens of Dublin, that before the week was over it would be known to every soldier serving at the front—(applause)—and when it was known that they were being slaughtered in Dublin, the next time that the Dublin Fusiliers were sent to cover the retreat of the British, the Dublin Fusiliers would forget to follow the British. (Applause.) If there was a landing of Germans in England or in Ireland, ten minutes after that landing every Volunteer officer, every leader of rebel tendencies, would be sent away to Mountjoy or to Arbour Hill. Any such wholesale arrest of leaders would be proof that the British Empire was tottering to its destruction.' On the motion of Mr. Connolly, the crowd pledged themselves as fighters for Ireland, and never to rest until they were privileged to see Ireland a free and independent republic among the nations."
After the meeting the Irish Volunteers showed. their enthusiasm by firing off their rifles, and meanwhile the police looked on without moving a hand, no doubt because their chiefs are too sensitively conscious of snubs recently received. We know very well that all this has the ordinary marks of mere vapouring, and in peace such words might be left to die of their own weight of ridicule. At least that is an arguable opinion. But now it is very different. We are at war, and it is absolutely impossible to state any rational case for the most severe suppression in England and the most sloppy indulgence in Ireland. Those who ,proclaim themselves the enemies of the King should be instantly taken at their word and treated as such.
The other matter to which we must draw attention is the strange communication contained in the German official wireless news printed in the papers of Monday :- " Sir Roger Casement was received yesterday at the Foreign Office in Berlin, and said that statements had been published in Ireland to the effect that victory for the German arms would result in great loss to the Irish people, whose homes, churches, priests, and land would be at the mercy of an invading army actuated only by motives of pillage and conquest. These state- ments, coupled with the recent speeches of Mr. John Redmond, had caused apprehension among the Irish regarding the German attitude towards England [Ireland ?] in the event of a victory for Germany in the present war. The Acting Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by order of the Imperial Chancellor, officially declared that the German Government repudiated the evil inten- tions attributed to it, and only desired the welfare of the Irish people and their country. Germany, he said, would never invade Ireland with a view to its conquest or the overthrow of an Irish national institutions, and should fortune ever bring the German troops to Ireland's shores those troops would land not as an army of invaders to pillage and destroy, but as forces of a nation inspired by goodwill towards Ireland and her people, for whom Germany desires national prosperity and freedom."
We have not heard Sir Roger Casement's version of this peculiar incident, and shall therefore do no more than record our astonishment at the bare fact that he should be stated to have visited the German Foreign Office and to have afforded the German Government a pretext for issuing such a declaration. That there will shortly be published an explanation perfectly satisfactory to Sir Roger Casement's friends we do not, of course, doubt for a moment. But we must emphasize the extraordinary manner in which this German profession of love for Ireland fits in with some of the seditious statements in Ireland that we have quoted. This fact alone makes it impossible that the Government should look upon the Irish sedition-mongers as mere vapourers. They are encouraged by Germans, and they are possibly paid by Germans. The Government should not lose a day in proving to these men that they cannot expect to be treated as irresponsibles, but must be dealt with as enemies of the realm.
Previous page
