THE IRISH AGREEMENT.
ONCE again Sir James Craig has placed not only Ireland, North and South, but also Great Britain and the Empire as a whole under a deep obligation. After the cynical and, in effect, disloyal way in which Sir James Craig was treated over the Boundary question, a smaller man, or a man who thought more of his dignity and less of the public interest, might very well have said that he would conduct no more negotiations with the Southern Irish leaders or with the present Cabinet. Yet, at a moment when the difficulties of the Free State Provisional Government were daily increasing, and when the pressure brought to bear upon them by the extremists was at its height, he showed no vindictive feeling. He might have been well excused for saying : " You have made your bed and you must lie on it." Instead, he showed himself willing to hold out his hand and to help his enemies, nay assailants, out of their difficulties. A proud man, a revengeful man, a Machiavellian man, or even an over- cautious man might very well have refused to parley and have insisted upon playing a waiting game. Again, a man who looked on the thing in a purely businesslike spirit might have said : " We see quite well what a lot we have got to offer the Free State. But arrangements of this kind cannot be one-sided. What we do not see is what they have got to offer us." He had the boldness and the patriotism to see that, though he had been badly treated by the Free State Government as well as by the Imperial Government, it was to the public interest in the widest sense to forget those injuries. But he went further than this. He did not merely refuse to be vindictive:; he agreed to be constructively friendly to the Southern Government. He showed the supreme courage and supreme statesmanship required to sign an Agreement which, on the surface, seems to give so much to the South that it could easily be represented as an Agreement in which all the concessions were on one side. In spite of this, and in spite of our strong sympathy with the people of the North, we are sure that Sir James Craig did the right thing in adopting this generous attitude, and we fully believe that when he has explained the terms of the new Agreement to his own people he will have the support of the great majority. Once more, remember that the bigot of Belfast is a creature of carica- ture and of Celtic and Roman Catholic calumny, and does not correspond with the truth. Sir James Craig kept his eye upon the object, and here is the mark of statesmanship. Given the destruction of the United Kingdom as something which it was not out of his power to avert, and which had already been accom- plished, Sir James Craig's object was to make the best peace he could in Ireland, consistent with the complete inde- pendence of the Northern Parliament. But if these premises are granted it is in the interests of the North and of the Empire that the Provisional Government should win in its struggle with the Republicans. It is true that many of the men in the Provisional Government camp have a very bad record and are stained with toleration, or even with open approval, of crime. Still, judged by the standard of the lesser evil, they are to be preferred on every ground. Therefore, Sir James Craig determined to forget the past and to help. them. But the way to help the Provisional Government in its struggle was to enable them to show that they, the Provisional Government, were able and willing to do all they could for the Roman Catholics of the North. If the moderate Sinn Feiners could show, as they would put it, that they had " wrung " a series of concessions from the black Protestants of the North, they would be able to meet the allegation that they had become the tools of Protestantism and England, and so forth. To be specific, the Agreement, with its series, of concessions to the Roman Catholics and to the Southern Government, is a distinct triumph for the Free State.
But, after all, what does that matter ? In reality Sir James Craig has sacrificed little except his amour propre, a thing which we are certain he cares nothing about. It is all very well to talk about " wringing " concessions from the Protestants of the North ; but, as a matter of fact, there was no " wringing " in the matter. The Protestants, of Belfast hav ^ always, during our generation, been perfectly fair to the Roman Catholics. They dislike, as they have a perfect, right to dislike, the tenets of the Roman Church, but they have not attempted to put the Roman Catholics wider any disabilities, legal or social Take their attitude' on the marriage question. There has never been any attempt on their part to deal with mixed marriages in the spirit of the Ne Temere encyclical. In a word, all the so-called concessions made are simply guaran- tees that the Protestants will act on the principles on which they have always intended to act. They regard the killing or maltreating of Roman Catholics as atrocious crimes in themselves and as doing enormous injury to the Northern State. Such outrages maintain that savage spirit and that state of disorder to which, above all things, the Loyalists of the North desire to put an end. A foolish man, when asked to make such concessions, might have said : " Though we are quite willing to make them we cannot appear to have them forced down our throats." Sir James Craig, being a wise man, took exactly 'the opposite line. He was perfectly willing to oblige the other side by making concessions which were no concessions at all—because they were based on his prime principle of equal justice to all Roman Catholics. To see his own policy paraded as a victory for the Provisional Government did not worry him in the least. As we have said, the British people owe him a great debt of gratitude for this. But debts of gratitude, remember, are not discharged by talk. A debt of gratitude means a real obligation, and that obligation can be quite easily expressed. After the way Sir James Craig has behaved, if there was no other reason for not deserting him and the North it would be found in the Agreement. Apart from all other considera- tions, the British people are under a sacred obligation of honour not to let him and the people of the Northern State be in future tricked out of their rights, or otherwise deceived or coerced. He has done a great public service and we• must see that the Government keeps faith. This means not merely a contractual repayment on " pound of flesh " lines, but that the North shall be treated sympathetically and benevolently.
Hitherto the attitude of many of our leading politicians towards the North has been of a very unsympathetic kind. We have heard far too much of this sort of thing : " Well, if you insist upon having what you call your rights, we suppose you must have them, but we cannot pretend that you have shown a very agreeable or statesmanlike temper in the matter. Even though a man's rights may be, from the legal, or even from the moral point of view, undoubted, there is a selfish and' an unselfish way of maintaining them." That was always a grossly unjust, as well as a grossly ignorant, way of treating the Ulster people ; but after the Agreement, and indeed after the whole of the behaviour of the Northern leaders during the last nine months, it cannot possibly be maintained.
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