LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE IN IRELAND AND THE MOLLY MAGUIRES.
[TO THE EDITOU 07 THE "SPECTATOR,"]
SIR, -It is amazing to read of Mr. Joseph Devlin addressing Mr. Horne's congregation at Whitefield's Tabernacle in
London, though doubtless he is versatile enough to adapt himself even to such an unusual audience, and did not find it
necessary to explain the principles of the Ancient Order of Hiberniaus, of which he is president. But when be led his hearers to believe (I suppose they did believe him) that no cases of intolerance were known where the Roman-Nationalist influence rules, his audacity is more than amazing. I myself have closely followed the cases of three servant girls who lived with friends of my own in different districts, and all of whom were at different times forcibly kidnapped because they ventured to become Protestants. One escaped from the con- vent to which she was taken ; the others their emploprs have never heard of since. I know now a respectable young Pro- testant, widow of a Roman Catholic (who had committed the charge of their children to her), a working woman, one of whose children was stolen from her house when she was at work, and two (boys) taken to a Catholic orphanage against her will. One died shortly afterwards ; the other she is never allowed to see. She was saved from the loss of a remaining child (a girl) by the active efforts of relatives of my own. Only the other day a highly respectable woman, a Quaker by profession, whose son married a Catholic, came to my sister in grief at the loss of her only grandchild, an orphan, who is now hidden from her by Catholic relatives, though she is the child's legal protectress. Such are a few of a multitude of instances I could relate. As I write, there lies before me a list of cases of extraordinary intolerance in a locality in the West of Ireland, on the personal authority of an able and respected resident. You ask why not bring such cases before the courts ? (Mr. Devlin apparently guarded himself by say- ing that no cases had been "made out.") But, in the first place, need it be said that some of the worst kinds of intoler- ance can be practised without breaking the law ? Secondly, who is to brave the odium and, further, to furnish the hundreds of pounds which would certainly he needed to fight each matter through? To abuse and, if possible, ruin the plaintiff or his champion is the most effective method of argument in the portions of Ireland where the Roman Church and Mr. Devlin's Order rules. That Order and the Ecclesiastical Authorities have unlimited means in money and power of intimidation for the purposes of making a contest practically impossible for the poor people among whom these things happen. They have also unlimited ability in evading the law Such suggestio falai on Mr. Devlin's part is the best possible evidence for the justice of the Ulster protest against the methods adopted by his party.
This afternoon I happened to have a conversation with an able and charming young Salvation Army captain, a Scotswoman, who was collecting for " Self-denial Week." She has recently been quartered at Waterford (Mr. Redmond's constituency), and tells me that no Salvation Army officer dare walk through the streets of that Nationalist town in uniform. The first officer stationed there—not very long ago—was, soon after his arrival, knocked down while quietly walking in the publio street and savagely beaten. He would have been killed but for the intervention of two sailors. She herself had always to be met, when she arrived at the railway station, by special police sent for the purpose, and the open-air service held once in the week is only made possible by a strict guard of police. Such protection, she says, now restricts assaults on Salvation Army girls to spitting and cursing—which are freely indulged in. Two Catholics who ventured to join the Army while she was there had to leave the town, as they were fiercely boycotted, and could get no work. " But Waterford," she said, smiling, " is not worse than other towns down there. I could not have believed it had I been told of the state of things in Ireland. English people ought to go and see for themselves what the South of Ireland is like. But unless you live there you cannot judge." After years of experience of Ireland and of England—and I speak as one who has no sympathy whatever with any form of religious intolerance—I do not believe that all the cases of intolerance of Anglican clergy added together for twenty y ears would equal that which makes the weekly experience of many single individuals who live under Clerical-Nationalist control in Ireland. It is time that English people understood these facts. This state of things is not always due to the general feeling of the respective neighbourhoods ; for the milk of human kindness is, till it is poisoned, strong in the Irish- man. Nor is it wholly due to the Church of Rome. The worst tyranny in Ireland is the tyranny of that " great unknown power" of which Mr. Redmond publicly boasted (on October 5th, 1906) as " behind " his Parliamentary party ; and of that " power " the most potent arm is just that secret society over which Mr. Devlin now presides, and which was opposed by the Church until the Church found that she could not do without its powerful and sinister influence in Irish life and politics.
This Order, under its popular name of "Molly Magnires," was characterised by Mr. O'Brien, M.P., on January 6th of this year, as the "most loathsome, most cowardly, and most inimical to the higher hopes of religion and nationality in the history of secret societies in Ireland." " Success of the party supported by it meant," he said, "a hideous scramble for Dublin Castle jobs." It meant" keeping alive religious bigotry and agrarian turmoil." It meant "midnight politics of she- been houses and murder clubs. It meant to treat one million of their Protestant fellow-sesuntrymen as irreconcilable enemies, taking care to keep them irreconcilable enemies by digging an impassable chasm between them. It meant acting on the sublime doctrine of Mr. Dillon that their hereditary enemies were now ' the under dog.' It meant that one-fourth of their countrymen were to be treated not to a policy of reconciliation but to a policy of retaliation. It meant, in plain English, boycotting them, persecuting them, making their lives intolerable for them in their native land, and making intolerable also the lives of such Irish Nationalists as dared to preach the doctrine of peace for them, of toleration, of forgiveness for the past, and of co-operation for the future." These strong words of a Roman Catholic Irishman who has broken with his former party, in order to pursue a policy of conciliation, may well be studied by English Nonconformists, who, in seeking to win liberty of conscience in England, are in great danger of killing it all over Ireland. We owe your various correspondents a debt for pricking Mr. Stephen Gwynn's delusive bubbles, one by one, with the sharp point of the appropriate facts.
I may say, finally—and I hold no brief for Orange ebulli- tions—that at the present time the little finger of Ancient Hibernian bigotry is thicker than the loins of Orange intoler- ance, and to read of freedom-loving and sincere descendants of English Puritanism applauding Mr. Devlin is, as I began by saying, to us who know the truth, amazing in the last degree.
The fact is that in unscrupulous methods for applying intolerance and intimidation the Roman Curia itself can be outdone. When Mr. Redmond, in order to reassure English Protestants, rehearses a few cases in which Irish Nationalists have refused to obey Papal commands, I imagine that most lovers of freedom and justice would, after a study of these cases, have found themselves for once on the side of the Pope, and not on that of Mr. Devlin.
Even clerical influences are sometimes by no means so bad as those which they unfortunately help to bring into being, or whereby, from expediency, they strengthen themselves.—I
P.S.—Further facts in regard to Mr. Devlin's " Order" will be found in " Nationalist Organisations in Ireland " (office of the Outlook, 167 Strand, W.C., 6c1.) ; in " The Unknown Power behind the Irish Nationalist Party" (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.); and in "The Molly Maguires—Who are They F " a pamphlet published by the Unionist Associa- tions of Ireland, 109 Grafton Street, Dublin.
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