TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE VOTE OF CENSURE.
ri 1 HE inevitable happened in the House of Commons on 1 Monday last. Only forty-three members could be induced to vote for a motion condemning the Government's negotiations with the Sinn Feiners. The Government's majority was only four short of four hundred. The true position, in our opinion, was that taken up by Lord Winter- ton. The way in which the Government have handled the Irish question during the past three years is utterly deplor- able, and has directly led us into the perilous situation in which we now find ourselves. But in existing circumstances it may very well be more dangerous to try to turn round and go back than to go on. The fact that the driver has taken a wrong and very dangerous road and is driving recklessly does not make it wise to pull him off the box when things are at their worst. To say this is not to commend his driving or to free from blame the people who insisted that he was the ideal coachman. It is merely a piece of necessary expediency. We may add to this the fact which Lord Winterton insisted on. In any case, a very few days will tell us whether we shall get through on our driver's road or whether the crash will come. That completes the case for giving another chance, however slender, to the Conference.
But to say that the Unionists in the Commons had no choice at the moment but to vote for Mr. Lloyd George is perfectly consistent with the deep sense of anxiety which we feel in respect of the situation and with a steadfast determination to take the earliest opportunity of preventing the recurrence of events so dangerous. Remember, the worst is not yet over. It is by no means impossible—nay, it is more than likely—that before a week has passed we shall find ourselves up to the neck in perils and perplexities which could easily have been prevented but which were not prevented, and which may in the end force us to adopt a course deeply distasteful and humiliating to the British people and to the whole British Empire. It is true that Mr. Lloyd George spoke almost with horror of such a result, and declared that we could never consent, and he could never consent, to such humiliation. Unfortunately, how- ever, the past experience of Mr. Lloyd George's mercurial temperament (it is, we confess, that rather than conscious and deliberate bad faith) makes his oratorical protestations of little or no value. Again, if he misleads us now, it will be by no means the first time that a passionate declaration that he will never consent has been quickly followed by a rapid and complete surrender. That was what happened in the case of Ireland and Conscription. Mr. Lloyd George insisted with the greatest solemnity that he would never agree to Ireland permanently evading her obligations in this essential matter. All the same, he never applied Conscrip- tion to Ireland. We and other students of the Prime Minister's methods and temperament felt sure that he would not apply it, and said so openly, with the result that we were strongly condemned for our unfairness and our prejudice. We devoutly hope that we may, on this occasion, be more accurately condemned for distrusting Mr. Lloyd George's solemn asseverations.
Mr. Lloyd George will not openly propose to do the things which he tells us are unthinkable as parts of a settlement. We are not afraid of anything so crude as that. What we are afraid of is that a situation will be brought about, or, shall we say, will come about, in which the British people will have presented to them a hateful and odious dilemma. Mr. Lloyd George is an expert in dilemmas. If Mr. Lloyd George should be able to carry the Sinn Feiners with him and to get them to consent to the sine qua non of settlement, which is the recognition of the two Irelands, all may be well. If, however, which we fear is much more likely to be the case, the Conference breaks down owing to the determination of the Sinn Feiners not to recognize this fact, we shall not be surprised, when Mr. Lloyd George appears " at this box " to announce the deadlock, if he adds that he is not the proper man to carry out the only alternative left. That remaining alternative will be the conquest of the South of Ireland and the re- establishment therein of the authority of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, This is, of course, a very artless, way of putting it. We do not imagine that Mr. Lloyd George will so openly tell us that he has let the whole South of Ireland slide into the lap of Sinn Fein, that the military position there is ten times worse than it was before the Truce, and that in view of these, facts he proposes to let someone else clear up the mess he has made. What we expect him to do is to develop his personal views on the lines indicated in his oratorical masterpiece of Monday. He will tell the House of Commons that any man who undertakes to carry out the awful policy of spreading fire and the sword throughout the length and breadth of Southern Ireland must be convinced that every other just and reasonable alternative has been produced. He will then go on to tell us that there was another alternative in view, but that unfortunately his previous pledges made it impossible for him to carry it out. Though he thought it an infinitely better policy than that of war, it could not be adopted by him. Pressed to be more specific, he would tell the House that at the last moment he had found that if he had been in a position to allow the withdrawal of the counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh from Northern Ireland a settle- ment could have been reached. But he was personally pledged not to assent to any suggestions of that kind. Then would follow a very fine panegyric of the stern spirit of the Ulstermen and a pathetic and moving lament that they should have thought it their duty to keep their whole pound of Northern flesh. It was not for him to judge. It was not for him to lay the blame on any particular shoulders, and especially on men who had been tried so sorely by circumstances as the men of the North. In spite, however, of this he could not but feel, and feel deeply, the tragedy of the incident. But once more it must be some man who felt more certain than he did that there was no alternative to the arbitrament of physical force who should be entrusted with the carrying through of a policy fraught with issues so tremendous as the conquest of Southern Ireland. If what we have sketched as likely to happen were actually. to happen, what should be done ? Are the rest of the leaders of the Unionist Party going to stamp out a guerrilla war in Ireland, with all that it means, with Mr. Lloyd George sitting by in the House of Cominous and audibly muttering ' The pity of it " ? That would be the strain of the first six weeks. " Too late ! " would suit the second six weeks. In the third, " This is more than flesh and blood can stand." And at the end of six months it would be " By heaven 1 This is too much 1 " Unless we are very much mistaken, if Mr. Lloyd George, at the end, of a speech of extreme moving power— undoubtedly he is the greatest orator of our day, or perhaps of any day—were to Jay down his great office, what would happen would be something of this kind. In the first place there would be a very real, but also a very well organized, feeling of consternation amongst the Unionist Party. Half the old women of both sexes—in the Commons, in the Lords and in the country—would shout " Ruin ! We have no one to save us from that dreadful Labour Party, revolutionaries who want to cut our throats and take our money. Mr. Lloyd George knew how to defeat them because he had been one of them himself, but mercifully he was converted to .patriotism and the rights of property by the war and the great responsibilities of office. They .must be mad to turn him out of office and to leave us absolutely defenceless merely because of those horrid Irish."
Again, there will be plenty of " disciplined " Unionists who, though they do not approve of Mr. Lloyd George's policy and methods of leadership, will imagine that if he goes out in this way the Unionist Party as a Party will suffer injury. Finally, there will be the people who are just now intensely and most naturally anxious that nothing shall be done to prevent a revival of trade. But nothing injures trade so much as political unrest. All these will be deeply perturbed at the thought of Mr. Lloyd George's resignation. Accordingly, we shall see what the newspapers call " overwhelming " pressure brought to bear upon Mr. Lloyd George to induce him to remain our leader. Ultimately he will consent, but on his own terms.
When these terms are stated, we expect that they will be found to be in effect those which we have reluctantly and with great regiet seen for the last six months to be the inevitable end of such a step as the Conference and the Truce. Once again, we are Unionists and hate the destruction of the United Kingdom, but the invitation to the
Conference and the way in which matters have developed
since the Truce have destroyed in us all hope of the preserva- tion of the Union. Our only hope has been to get out of the deadly peril into which we have been so unnecessarily thrust on the least onerous terms available. These we believe w ill prove to be the segregation of the Sinn Feiners in a bloodstained autonomy of their own, for which, thank heaven ! we shall have no responsibility whatever.
Remember that the foundation of a Dominion in the South against the will of the Southern Irish can only end in complete independence and under conditions for us.of a specially unfavourable kind. The power to secede goes, in fact if not in name, with every Dominion Con- stitution. We make an Irish Republic quite as certain by this road as by any other, except the maintenance of the Parliamentary Union.
We shall be told, perhaps, that we have not given proper consideration to what Mr. Lloyd George declared on Monday was quite possible—the conquest of Ireland by the prosecution of a great anti-guerrilla campaign. We agree, of course, that the thing is possible. We agree that it would be justifiable. What we do not agree with is the assertion that Mr. Lloyd George is capable of carrying it out—assuming that he would accept the task. Therefore we do not consider it as practical politics. The most he would ever do would be to carry out a whirlwind military campaign on a tremendous scale for six or seven months, which, no doubt, might result in the rebels going temporarily to the bogs and mountains, or else to prison. Peace would be said to reign in Ireland. Then there would follow a great reconciliation scheme. Everybody would be let out of prison and everyone would be given a share of the large Parliamentary conciliation and com- passionate vote. And in the next six months it would all begin over again. We should find Sinn Fein, under a new alias such as, for example, " The Catholic League," with the motto " Killing no murder," once more triumphant ha Ireland.
To make the waging of guerrilla warfare successful you must impress your enemies with the idea that you mean business. Nit are Mr. Lloyd George and the Govern- ment, who have been letting the Sinn Fein leaders in and out of jail, and rationing them alternately with " skilly " and cigars, ever likely to impress the guerrilla chiefs with the belief that they really mean business ? As a postscript, we may say that there is one card which Mr. Lloyd. George might play which, if he played not as bluff but in earnest, would bring even the Sinn Feiners of this Conference to reason. Suppose he were to warn them that if the Conference breaks down and we go back to the status quo ante we have in our possession a form of counter-attack upon the people of South Ireland which will prove much more effective than hunting them across the bogs. We shall subject the whole of the produce of Southern Ireland to a fifty per cent. ad valorem duty, and only make exception in the case of producers who can show that they have been loyal to the Govern- ment of the United Kingdom and have given no succour to our enemies. If Mr. Lloyd George would say that he would find the South of Ireland much more amenable to reason than he ever will by allowing his supporters in the Press to publish hints and suggestions that the Ulster people are preventing " a sublime explosion " of amity by their selfishness and that it is they who are the enemies of Peace.
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