TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PROBLEM OF CIVIL WAR.
T"public mind (and no wonder, considering the cross currents and divergent proposals) remains hopelessly confused in regard to the latest developments of the Irish problem. We desire to make an attempt to clear up some portion of that confusion. The first thing to remember at the present moment is that what the country has now to consider is not whether it is good for Ireland and good for the United Kingdom as a whole to break up the legislative union, or whether the present Home Rule Bill is in itself a bad Bill or a good Bill, just or unjust, likely to bring prosperity or the reverse. What we are now faced with, as Lord Loreburn saw when he made his proposals for a conference, is the far more terrible question how to avoid civil war. That, and nothing less than that, is the problem. We trust, then, that our readers, in con- sidering what we may say to-day about the ways of avoiding this the most appalling evil that can fall upon any State— an evil infinitely worse than foreign war—will keep this point in mind, and not imagine that because we say things that may seem to make the path of the Government and of their legislative proposals easier, we have in the slightest degree modified our views as to those proposals per se. We still regard their Home Rule policy, or any scheme of breaking up the legislative Union, as injurious to the best interests of Ireland and of the United Kingdom as a whole. Their Bill, with all its monstrous proposals for break- ing up the Customs Union in the name of federalism, and for taking the money of the English and Scottish taxpayers and banding it over to the people of Ireland, to be spent by them without any supervision or control by the people who pay that money—this is what will happen under the Bill to the tune of some five millions a year—is profligate and unjust, and therefore certain to be unstable. If we seem to make concessions, or move in the direction of promoting the passage of a Home Rule Bill, it is only to avoid the still greater disaster of civil war.
Imagine the captain of a ship who has brought a large and unwieldy vessel into a region of rocks and shoals, where the ship is in imminent peril, and where it is clear that if he keeps on the course be has chosen the ship must certainly be wrecked. In such circumstances to suggest a course which, though in itself dangerous, is less dangerous, and which does afford some opportunity of extricating the vessel from destruction, is not in the slightest degree an endorsement of the navigation which has placed the ship in peril. Again, it does not involve any responsibility for the evils that attend the proposed line of lesser danger. The way out suggested is obviously much worse than merely reversing the course of the vessel, but if the captain cannot be induced to take his vessel back to the port from which it came, it must be tried. It is, at any rate, better than going full steam ahead on the rocks. In a hurricane any port, even though a very bad and a very dangerous one, is better than leaving the ship exposed to certain destruction.
We desire to examine in order the various proposals for avoiding that civil war which must come upon us if we adopt Mr. Redmond's mad policy of " full steam ahead," for if " full steam ahead " is adopted, and an attempt is made to force the present Bill upon North-East Ulster, there will without question be civil war, and civil war which may spread beyond the confines of Ulster. And here let us say that we are not going to examine the question whether Sir Edward Carson and the people of Ulster are morally right or morally wrong in the action they are taking. We have got to deal with hard facts and not with a question of ethics. The fact, for good or ill, remains that if an attempt is made to force the rule of a Dublin Parliament upon them, the people of North-East Ulster will resist with a force of arms so considerable as to require military repression which will lead to blood- shed on a very large scale and involve as great an exercise of military force as would be required for a Continental war. To put the matter in military terms, if the resist- ance of Ulster is to be overcome by arms the first use of our newly organized expeditionary force will have to be the coercion of Ulster.
(1) Assuming, as we are bound to assume, that the Government will not recede from their Home Rule policy, by far their best plan 'would be to submit the Home Rule Bill to a Referendum. Let them pass the Bill through all its stages, but before it receives the Royal assent let them put this plain question to the electors of the United Kingdom : " Is it your wish that a Bill entitled A Bill for the better government of Ireland ' shall come into operation ? Yes or No." If the voters of the United Kingdom express their assent, then of course the Bill must come into operation. In these circumstances, how- ever, the Government will have the immense advantage of the deliberate endorsement of their Home Rule policy by the electors. The weight of such an endorse- ment will be the most effective way of coercing North. East Ulster. In the abstract, and in hot blood, the Protestants of the north-east counties may say that they would not yield even to the deliberately expressed opinion of the whole nation, but as a matter of fact even their spirit, vigorous and determined as it is, would be daunted by the vote we are supposing. Whatever the Ulster Protestants may say now, nothing in the nature of civil war would take place if the Home Rule Bill had been approved by a poll of the people. On the other hand, if the Bill—as personally we are certain would be the case— did not receive the approval of a majority at the polls, then we should have escaped the peril that now confronts us. And here let us note that the machinery for carrying out a Referendum is perfectly simple. It has already been put before the country in the Bill introduced into the House of Lords by Lord Balfour of Burleigh. A Refer- endum would be no more difficult of accomplishment than a general election. It is perfectly ridiculous to say that the voters of the United Kingdom could not do what the voters of Switzerland, who are not more intelligent, do every year, and the voters in various States of the American Union are repeatedly doing. One point remains to be noticed. The Referendum, as in Switzerland and in America, must be taken on the plain issue of the veto or the endorsement of a specific proposal. To put an abstract question or series of questions to the voters would be a.' hopeless act of folly. The people must be asked to veto or endorse a specific measure, the details of which have been threshed out and passed by Parliament. But though we are certain that the Referendum is the best way of solving our present difficulties, we regret to say that there seems little hope of the Liberal Party being willing to adopt this solution. The active spirits among them dread this great instrument of true democracy too much to allow it to be tried. They realize that if the Referendum were once adopted here, even for an exceptional occasion, it would come to stay, as it has stayed in every other country where it has once been tried. No nation that has adopted the Referendum—remember again we are not talking about the plebiscital humbug of the Second Empire, but of the true Referendum on prepared legislation — has ever abandoned it.
(2) If the Referendum is ruled out, then in our opinion-, the next best proposal for avoiding the disaster of civil war is a general election. We may remark parenthetically that such a general election might take place either at once or by arrangement after the Bill had been passed a third time through the House of Commons, but before it had received the Royal assent. If that were done, sup- posing the verdict of the country were favourable and the present Government were retained in office, there need' be no delay over the Bill, which could then go through the final form of receiving the Royal assent. Here, however, we appear to be blocked by the determination of the Government not to risk an appeal to the people. They or their advocates tell us that they have got other great, legislative schemes, i.e., Welsh Disestablishment and the Plural Voting Bill, and that they are not going to risk losing these by a general election, and that therefore they will not and cannot choose this way out.
(3) Is there any other way by which the evil of civil war can be avoided ? Though Unionists who believe all forms of Home Rule to be dangerous, we hold that civil war can be avoided by the exclusion of North-East Ulster from the Bill. That would not turn a bad into a good. Bill, but at any rate it would not add to the evil of bad. legislation the supreme horror of civil war. It would be an evil that some day might be repealed ; but remember that an evil like civil war, when it has once come, must affect nation for generations and cannot be wiped out as a bad law can be wiped out from the statute book. We suggest then to the Government that if they will not accept a Referendum or a general election, they are bound—assum- ing, of commis, that they are not so mad as to say that they have no objection to civil war or to forcing the people of Ulster under a Dublin Parliament by the use of the rifle and the machine gun—to exempt North-East Ulster. The proper plan to follow would be to say that any Irish county should have the right to demand a poll of the electors as to whether it should or should not be included in the area to which the Irish Home Rule Bill is to apply, and that any county in which a poll went in favour of exclusion should become an English county. That would no doubt mean certain modifications in the finance of the Bill, but the difficulties here, even if somewhat perplexing from the draftsman's point of view, are in no sense insuper- able. The fact that a central Government is in any case going to be the tax collector makes the financial alteration one chiefly of accounts. When in former times we have urged exclusion on the Government, not as a Unionist proposal, and not as a thing good per se, but as a means of avoiding civil war, the Liberals have in effect always declared that it would do no good, because the people of North-East Ulster would still resist. That cannot be said now. No doubt the people of North-East Ulster would still think - the Bill ruinous, just as we think it ruinous, but, at any rate, they would not take up arms to prevent the Government trying their bad system of local autonomy in the south and west of Ireland. The Protestants of the north realize that they cannot claim to do that, and that the moral right to take up arms only accrues to them in the case of an attempt to throw them out of the Union and force them under the rule of Dublin. That matter has been made perfectly clear during the last few days. For example, the correspondent of the .Daily Mail, telegraphing from Belfast on Tuesday, uses the following words :— "If Ulster is excluded from the scope of the Home Rule Bill the opposition of the Irish Unionists to this measure will be with- drawn in its present form of virulent hostility, and the physical force resistance movement in Ulster will cease. This statement I am able to make to-day on high authority, and it represents a definite offer of the Irish Unionists to the Government, which will no doubt receive Mr. Asquith's close attention, if it has not already done so."
This, of course, really represents no change. It was, in effect, what Sir Edward Carson told the House of Commons when the proposal for the exclusion of North-East Ulster was before the House. Exclusion would not turn Sir Edward Carson and his followers into Home Rulers, but at any rate it would convert them from resisters to non- resisters. This point was brought out with special emphasis in speeches made by Mr. F. E. Smith, speaking in Ulster on Wednesday. Here are his actual words :— " We say here, as we have said from the first moment, we are organized to resist the movement and to show that any attempt to impose Home Rule upon the homogeneous portion of this northern province would be met by armed resistance, if necessary carried to any length. If Mr. Redmond or anybody else has proposals to put forward upon which you or your leaders can reasonably confer, which do not come into collision with the position I have just stated to you, there never has been a moment at which we were not prepared to hear what they have to say and to consider any proposal they may put forward. . . . We have believed and we do believe that the proposal of Home Rule as applied to any part of Ireland is politically and economically a great disaster, but we confined our opposition to proposals which we believed to be disastrous within constitutional means, until the attempt was made against the will of that portion of this province which is homogeneous in its views. Wo have never claimed—the Provisional Government itself does not claim—to dictate to the rest of Ireland. What we have claimed to do, what we are trying to prevent, and what, if necessary, we will take up arms to prevent, is the compulsion of that part of Ulster which is and always has been opposed to Home Rule."
In view of these statements it is quite clear that if the Government want to avoid the risk of civil war and will not avoid it by a Referendum or a general election, they can avoid it by consenting to the exclusion of Ulster. In a word, they have three courses open to them, and if they will not choose either the first or the second, they are bound to choose the third. We need hardly say that we would infinitely prefer that they should choose the Referendum or the general election, but we are not talking now of what we should prefer but of how civil war is to be avoided. What we say is, " Exclusion rather than civil war." Probably the best means for carrying out exclusion would be to adopt Lord Loreburn's proposal for a conference.
We shall be asked, perhaps, what right we or anybody else has to dictate to a Government with a majority of a hundred in the House of Commons. We shall be told that they have got the power to go " full steam ahead," and also that if they do not go full steam ahead with the Home Rule Bill, Mr. Redmond will throw them out of office. Therefore, as we live not in a Utopia but in the world, the Government will not commit suicide, but will obey Mr. Redmond and refuse even to consider the question of exclusion. No doubt there will be certain people rash enough to adopt this point of view, but we do not believe that the Government will adopt it. We do not believe that they dare run the risk. They know that Ulster's resistance will be real in any case, but that it will be greatly strengthened by the rejection of the proposal for exclusion, and also that the support given to Ulster here will be immensely increased by such rejection. Possibly the Government would rather that the offer of exclusion bad never been made from Ulster, but, once it has been made, they cannot ignore it. Remember, when we speak of the increased support and sympathy that Ulster will get here if her present offer in regard to exclusion is rejected, we are not merely speaking of Unionists. We believe that there is a very large number of Liberals who will be deeply disgusted at the notion of coercing Ulster with horse, foot, and artillery, when that loathsome task could have been avoided by the simple procedure of allowing any Irish county that likes to exclude itself from the Bill.
To recapitulate. The Government has three courses open to it. It can choose a Referendum, a general election, or the exclusion of Ulster. If it rejects all these pro- posals for avoiding civil war, for that is what they are, and in obedience to Mr. Redmond says, in effect " We have a better plan than any of these nostrums. It is to shoot down enough Ulstermen to knock the nonsense out of the rest and to render them for the future obedient to a. Dublin Parliament and a Dublin Executive," we are confident that the British nation as a whole will find means for delivering itself from such a Ministry. But in fairness we must say that that is not the kind of line which Mr. Asquith and his colleagues are the least likely to take. We venture to predict that in the end they will either induce Mr. Redmond to let them exclude Ulster or they will fall back either upon a Referendum or a general election.
Meanwhile the Unionist leaders have a duty. Let them press the three ways of avoiding civil war on the Govern- ment, and insist on a choice being made before some accidental spark explodes the powder magazine in North- Eas tern Ireland.
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