TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CHRISTMAS PEACE.
WE by no means agree with those who would refuse any negotiations with the Irish leaders, provided always that such negotiations are not to be a signal or occasion for dropping the maintenance of law and order in Ireland and for not punishing those who are guilty of civil crime. No matter how bad the past is, if there is any hope of a real change of mind, or at any rate a real change of action, it is not necessary, in our opinion, to inquire too closely into the motive. After all, our whole system of punishment rests upon the assumption that, though the motive of self-preservation from suffering is not a high one, better conduct begun for this reason very often ends in genuine good conduct. But though we would listen even to the Sinn Fein extremists and hear what they have got to say and be prepared to tell them, though, of course, they know already, the terms upon which we will assist them to get rid of the campaign of murder, we must never forget that the very greatest precautions are required in carrying out such negotiations and preventing them from being used by the criminal conspirators of Ireland as a stepping-stone to even viler things than those they have committed already. Though the majority of Englishmen, with their curious forgetfulness and love of self-reproach and self- depreciation, have forgotten it, some of us can still recall the facts of Irish history since 1916. Throughout these crazy four and a-half years our Government have been, until the last three or four months, perpetually listening to anyone and every one who promised improvement in the Irish situation if only we would be a little more kind and considerate, and would agree to listen to the Irish patriots and learn to love them. No sooner had we stopped the killing in the streets in 1916 and put out the incendiary fires which had reduced the best quarter of Dublin to ashes than we began to organize the production of the drama of "Forget and Forgive" at lightning speed. A few of the rebels taken openly in arms and guilty of what was in fact, though they gave it a grander name, the murder of soldiers and civilians were executed, but we reprieved the rest of the persons under sentence of death and turned their punishments into imprisonment for life. We are not objecting to these acts of mercy. Indeed, we approve of them, considering the demented character of our action in Ireland from 1908 to 1916.
If we had stopped there and made it clear that we were not going to regard a rising without provocation— there was no provocation before 1916—with maudlin clemency, and, further, that we meant to expose and punish the plots carried on between the Sinn Feiners and the Germans to ruin this country and the freedom of the world, we should have impressed the Irish with the sense that we meant business, and a great deal of bloodshed would have been saved. Instead, we tried to shut our eyes to the treacherous dealings between the Sum Feiners and the directors of the German submarine campaign and to the geneial political criminality of Ireland.
Further, when the Irish leaders and the Irish Roman Church tried to prevent us saving ourselves from the last spring of the Prussian tiger by an appeal to the whole manhood of the United Kingdom, we were so anxious not to give provocation to Ireland that we said : "You may help the Germans to win as long as such help is passive rather than active. You may be supporters of the enemy at heart if only you will deign to conceal the fact, or at any rate not express it too openly. Every Englishman and every Scotsman of military age must do his duty, terrible as it is, but we shall not ask you to share the burden. We shall even allow you to treat our fighters with hatred, ridicule, and contempt while they are in their agony and to cheer on the enemy to his orgy of blood." So much for our provocation of the poor oppressed Irish during the last two years of the war.
At the very first excuse we released a great many of the prisoners who had been condemned to long sentences of imprisonment, and in doing so we did not even take the elementary preeaution of making the prisoners promise that they would engage in no further treasonable dealings. We believe that they were asked to make such a pledge, but when they haughtily refused to do anything of the kind we let them out all the same. As is known, many of the men who had been let out very soon began fresh treasonable practices, and were once more imprisoned. Then, seeing that we were only too anxious to find some excuse for letting them out, they began to practise hunger-strikes. So timid were we of inflaming Irish opinion, that immediately there was danger to their health we let them out. That does not sound much like provocation. Then came such incidents as that in which Mx. Lloyd George personally intervened, to allow American-Irishmen to tour Ireland on a political mission. Under a thinly veiled disguise of inquiry the American investigators incited to rebellion and encouraged armed resistance to the forces of law and order. No doubt that, in one sense, was a provocation to rebellion, but the evil intent that makes the crime can hardly be laid at the door of the British Government. And of course there were the Convention and the not too honourable tendency on the part of the British Government to promise to throw the loyalists to the wolves if the Sinn Feiners only demanded it strongly enough, and if the people of North-East Ulster could be cajoled into thinking that this process was one which, after all, they would not find disagreeable. Certainly there, was no cruel provocation there.
Then came the so-called declaration of war by Slim Fein, which would be more truly described as the declaration of secret murder of innocent men. That no doubt was a provocation to reprisals, but, again, it can hardly be called an example of the British Government torturing the people of Ireland beyond endurance as it is generally described in Irish writings and speeches, and too often even by English publicists. So much for what we may call the alleged case of physical provocation to oppressed Ireland "to endure death and destruction rather than the agony of her poisoned chains." Ever since the close of the war it has been admitted by all who did not want, for party reasons, to ignore plain facts that the Sinn Feiners and Nationalists could have almost any form of self-determination that they demanded for that portion of Ireland which desired it, provided that they did not insist on coercing that portion of Ireland in which the majority of the people fiercely resisted the proposal to force them under a Dublin Parliament. Of course the Nationalists have never dwelt upon this fact because it entirely knocks the bottom out of their case, and we as a nation have, till quite recently, been too supine or too stupid to publish it abroad. Even now we doubt whether the majority of the English people realize that what is preventing the anti-English Irish from governing themselves in virtual independence—i.e., on what we may call Cuban terms—is simply the insistence of the Nationalists to refuse to North-East Ulster the right of self-determina- tion which they claim for themselves. Liberty appears te have no charms for the Southern Irish unless it can be joined with the right of persecuting the Protestants and loyalists of the six-county area.
Here it may be pointed out that there is very little in the plea that we have not really offered Celtic Ireland a republic standing in the same relation to us that Cuba stands in to the United States. Both Lord Grey of Fallodon and Mr. Asquith, it is alleged, have refused to give these Cuban terms. Yet the Sinn Feiners must know quite well that if they got the lesser terms nothing could prevent their Parliament from obtaining the fuller from a weary Imperial Parliament in a very short time. What is more, it is quite obvious that if the Nationalists did not hate the Ulster Protestants, England, and the Empire so much more strongly than they love Independence or themselves alone, or even Ireland, they could long ago have obtained that unity in Ireland for which they crave. As we have said so often before in these columns, if the Nationalists had said at the beginning : "We are not going to claim what we will not grant. Instead of trying to force the Protestants of the North into that Celtic and Roman Catholic community which we desire to found, we tell them quite plainly that we will not have them intruding upon our united household. We want no skeletons at our freeman's love-feast. Some day, perhaps, when they have mended their faith and their manners and given proof that they are loyal Irishmen, we may allow even them to enter our State. As it is, we would far rather be without them. Let them carry their black hearts and hard faces to the congenial Gradgrinds of hypocritical England." Who can doubt that the adoption of such an attitude would have given the very best assurance of fair treatment that the people of North-East Ulster could have had ? What frightens them, and what makes them feel that they must do anything rather than submit to the domination of a Dublin Parliament, is the strange, the sinister fact that no Nationalist leader, though it is so obviously to his own interests, and no leader of the Roman Church, has ever dared, or ever been willing, to express this opinion. It gives the very strongest possible support to the view which, whether rightly or wrongly, is held in North-East Miter, that the first act of the Dublin Parliament would be to wreak vengeance upon the Ulster Protestants for ever since 1800 having supported the unity of the United Kingdom. Yet even now it is not too late. If the Nationalist and Sinn Fein leaders will come forward and say that they make no claim to govern North-East Ulster, but, on the contrary, are most willing that it shall remain under a Parliament of its own, and that further, in view of the history of the past five years, they are willing to give compensation to any loyalists in the South and West who are perturbed at the idea of coming under a Dublin Parliament, the Nationalists might at once obtain the independence which they claim. -Not only would there be no desire to refuse it amongst English people, but, on the contrary, many of us would feel intensely relieved at the notion of ridding our community of a body of people who could have sympathized with the murder campaign of the last eighteen months. The Nationalists should know as soon as possible that the last thing the English people now desire is a common citizenship with Sinn Feiners.
But though we are bound to notice this sense of burning • indignation which has grown up of late in England and Scot- land, we do not want to end upon a note of anger. If the Sinn Feiners will honestly give up their claim to do what they will with that part of Ireland in which the local majority is as passionately against them as they are passionately against England, then there will be no desire here to be vindictive towards Celtic Ireland or to prevent her develop- ing on her own lines—provided that such development is carried out without cruelty and oppression, and, further, that proper safeguards are arranged to prevent the harbours and sea inlets of Ireland being used to ruin the commerce of the British Empire. We have offered Celtic Ireland again and again a wide and generous share in the British Empire—an offer in which the material benefits are on her side rather than on ours. Since she refuses these benefits and parts company with us we may regret it, but the loss will be hers rather than ours. If we take the widest outlook, there will be a loss to the world as well as to us. Homogeneity of aims and aspirations is the greatest source of strength. We dream and hope that the nexus of peace and goodwill may some day bind the whole world. We are sure, however, that if ever it comes it must come through first building up great communities such as the United States have become, and such as the self-governing British Empire is becoming, and then fusing these two great world States into an organization of a federal nature capable of gradually embracing the whole globe. The splitting off of heterogeneous communities like that of an Irish Republic may not seem to be a matter of world- wide importance, but, at any rate, the action is not that of joining together but of breaking apart. As far as it goes it is an act of retrogression not of progress. But what matters that to egoists whose motto is ourselves alone " !
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