TOPICS OF THE DAY.
" RESPONDEAT SUPERIOR "—THE MAN AT THE TOP IS RESPONSIBLE. THE great majority of those who read the evidently genuine, if defiant, words from the dock of the murderers of Sir Henry Wilson cannot but have been moved. Certainly we were ; but we were still more moved by the thought that we have expressed at the head of this article, which is the well-known maxim of our common law, respondeat superior—the responsi- bility rests on the man at the top. It is cowardly, it is foolish, it is unjust not to apply the maxim, the maxim which Mr. Kipling interpreted so well when he said of the Parnellites and the men at the head of the Land League that they only " talked and went away," and then added :- " By God ! the men that did the deed were braver men than they ! "
How far it is safe to let this principle prevail—whether, that is, it may not be necessary in the interests of society to punish severely the human instruments as well as those who direct them, in order, if possible, to cut the chain of evil at the bottom as well as at the top—is a matter which we shall not argue now. What fills us with indignation is that, thanks to others, these wretched men were bemused and demoralized with shameful sophistries, with the notion that the country they love can be made better by murder and that there is no distinction between murder and killing in war. Such sophistry cuts at the very heart of civilization. It is the great taboo on murder which makes it possible for mankind to sleep at night ; for naturally, inevitably, do men, and particularly Irishmen, who are driven by their passions take to killing. War is not murder because notice is given that the taboo is removed. But directly the rules of war are broken, homi- cide once more becomes murder and is punished as such. Still, where personal passion, personal gain, personal revenge are not involved, the more culpable is the man who orders the shot to be fired or who incites to the murder. He is more blameworthy than his mentally " doped " victim who fires. No one can look at the pictures of the men condemned on Tuesday and not see that they were just the kind of people to be moved by the sinister suggestions of those above them—though once again we do not mean to make any apologies for their crime. We must not, however, ignore the palliations pro - vided by those whom they regard as their spiritual superiors, nor the atmosphere which our Government created in releasing murderers and in not dealing sternly and efficiently, as they ought to have dealt, with those who incited to murder as well as with those who murdered, and in finally abandoning the task which they had not the moral or the physical courage to carry out.
In the trial of the assassins of Sir Henry Wilson the judge behaved with exemplary correctness in refusing to allow the prisoners to use the court for the purposes of political propaganda while allowing them such latitude as men about to be condemned to death ought to have. Again, he was of course perfectly right in pointing out that all political extenuations of murder were quite irrelevant and could not be heard and in condemning the two men to death without suggesting to them that there was any possibility of a recommendation to mercy. When all this has been said we feel bound to go back to what we said before and to remark that he would be a man either devoid of all imagination or with a heart of stone if he could read such statements about their motives as the prisoners made without feeling first that their diabolically perverted idealism was something divorced from all personal self-seeking, and secondly that these men were only the tools of others. O'Sullivan, when questioned by the judge, folded his arms, and with a touch of pride said, " All I have done, my Lord, I have done for Ireland, and for Ireland I am proud to die." When the judge had passed sentence, O'Sullivan said, " You may kill my body, my Lord, but my spirit you will never kill." Dunn, who was the better educated, and who had been qualifying himself to become a teacher, said to the jury :— " You, several of you I have no doubt, have endeavoured
to do your best in the recent great European war. I also took my share in that war, fighting for the principles for which this country stood. Those principles I found, as an Irishman, were not applied to my own country, and I have endeavoured to strike a blow for it."
He added :- " I have never appeared in any criminal court and my intentions have never been criminal as such. I am not a mean assassin who endeavoured to slink away. . . . I wish to state that the motives which impelled me to this action were seriously considered. . . . I received no money for this particular bit of business. . . . I trust that a higher court will judge me by my actions in this world and consider the purity of my intentions."
But how are we to explain the existence of the atmo- sphere of sophistry which these miserable men breathed ? To trace the origins we should have to go back a very long way indeed, but it is sufficient, and indeed better, for our purpose to look at the last few years. Life has always been held cheaply in Ireland, and it has been natural to the more fanatical kind of Irishman to use murder as a political argument. Never, however, has this tendency been so marked as lately. It is no good entering into explanations unless we are perfectly plain, and that we prdpose to be. The blame must be shared, in our opinion, by the heads of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and by the British Government. The Hierarchy in Ireland—though, of course, individual remonstrances could be quoted to the contrary—has contrived by its attitude to condone murder ; and the British Government, by entering into political negotiations with the Irish on the basis of murder, so to speak, have encouraged people to think of assassination as something less bad than the supreme crime which it is. We are not here condemning the negotiations as such. What we mean is that the Government by their whole conduct, by relaxing their efforts to suppress murder after declaring to the whole world that they intended to suppress it, invited the belief that murder was not only excusable but was politically profitable. They failed to put their mark upon murder. They made it a light thing by treating it as a light thing. They forgot that other crimes only speak, murder shrieks out.
An article which was published in October, 1920, in the Irish Theological Quarterly, the official organ of the Hier- archy, provides a perfect illustration of our case. That article, which was written by Professor Alfred O'Rahilly, and which was given the place of honour in that particular issue, was entitled " Some Theology about Tyranny." The gist of the argument was that killing was no murder in the sacred Irish cause.. If one had read the article carelessly one might have thought that it was nothing more than a justifiable defence of " the sacred right of insurrection." But attentive reading shows that it is a piece of deliberate theological sophistry having for its aim and end an apology for that kind of murder which had become the chief feature of Irish political life. The Irish Theological Quarterly is edited by five professors of Maynooth and every number is published with the official imprimatur. The imprimatur is not attached to any issue till each article has been passed by the Theological Censor. When the article was published we strongly protested against the poisonous and wicked doctrine which it contained. Shortly afterwards the officials responsible for the Irish Theological Quarterly explained that this particular article had somehow escaped the attention of the Censor. The printers, they said, thought that the Censor had passed it, but really he had not. Thus the unhappy printers received all the blame. We do not know how this explanation may have been received by other people, but we will content ourselves with the remark that the Hierarchy had no apology to offer till the article was denounced in England. We will quote an important passage from the article :- " It has already been pointed out that usurpation is not simply a subjective theory to be decided upon by individuals ; it is an objective verifiable fact which is initiated by a hostile invasion or by a public repudiation on the part of the community or by both. The Scholastic view is that the subsequent relation. ship of usurper and nation is essentially a state of war. Furthermore, they are of the unanimous opinion that in these circumstances each individual is free to commit acts of war on the unjust invader of his country. This opinion is not, as Protestants have asserted, an invention of the Jesuits ; it is the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas and of practically the entire School.' It was held even by such strong Royalists as Barclay and Gregoire.* The reason assigned is that at such a crisis each individual may be assumed to have the consent of the nation to defend its liberty against aggression. So long as a tyrant unjustly holds a kingdom and rules by force,' says Suarez,' he is always actually using force against the nation ; and thus the nation is always waging against him an actual or virtual war. And so long as the nation does not declare the contrary, it is always considered to wish to be defended by each of its citizens, indeed even by any outsider. Hence if it cannot be otherwise defended save by slaying the tyrant, any one of the people may slay him.' That is, the ordinary procedure of war as of criminal jurisdiction must be regarded as dispensed with, so long as the nation is in the physical impossibility of organizing regular warfare. If such irregular methods—with their consequent danger of demoralization—are permitted or even enjoined,' it is perfectly clear that when the nation is able to organize and equip a quasi-military force, acts of belligerency require no special justification. Nor is there any need of a formal declaration of war, for such a declaration is merely an ordinance of positive international law which affects only the signatories of the Hague and Geneva regulations.' It Is the usurper who by his continued occupation has declared war on the nation. It is the right and duty of the nation to defend, by every effective means in its power, its liberty, its honour, and its independence."
That is simply a justification of assassination in civil war. It is really worse—it incites as well as justifies. Imagine the effect such a doctrine must have had in a country where murder for political reasons was being committed every day of the week—in a country where the voice of the Ecclesiastic is as potent as it is in Ireland.
To us the argument seems the more terrible because it is so unstable and so ill-founded when Ireland is described without a word of reservation as a nation. The reader who did not know the facts might suppose that the Irish were a united people justly struggling to be free. He would remain quite uninformed of the fact that a very powerful and intelligent minority, compactly inhabiting a definite part of Ireland, absolutely resents and repudiates the idea of distinct nationality for the whole of Ireland. This falsity of argument appears at every turn in Repub- lican manifestos without a word of apology. As we have shown already, one of Sir Henry Wilson's murderers said that he killed Sir Henry because, having fought for the self-determination of small nations in the Great War, he found that self-determination was withheld from Ireland. That, of course, is quite untrue. The difficulty has always been that though the Southern Irish wanted sell-determination for themselves, they refused to grant it to the Protestant loyalists of Ulster. We notice a letter from Miss MacSwiney, a Republican irreconcilable, in last week's number of the Nation, which contains precisely the same false statement. She advocates war to the death in order that there may be " no partition "—in other words, in order that the Northerners may be coerced.
But that is not our main point. The point is that when we called attention at the time to the alarming spread of the old doctrine that killing is no murder, neither the Roman Church in Ireland as a body nor the British Govern- ment strained every nerve to put an end to the horror. It was perfectly certain that if they did not do so Nemesis would overtake them both. And what worse Nemesis can we point to than the self-possessed and apparently genuine arguments of those two wretched murderers who are condemned to death ? It may be that the Hier- archy in Ireland was alarmed when the article in the Irish Theological Quarterly was denounced here, and they may well have regretted it, feeling that the writer had been allowed to go too far. Again, we can well believe that the Vatican conveyed some private reproaches to Ireland. But it is fair to say that, so far as the world could see, there was no strong, unmistakable public repudiation of the campaign of murder. We looked to the moderate Sinn Feiners. We looked to the Heirarehy. We looked to the British Government. All failed.
Murder was being systematically taught in Ireland.
(1) 2 Sent. d. 44, q 2, a 2, ad 5. The question of tvrannicide cannot of course be dealt with at the end of an article. Nor is it directly relevant—a modern tyrant is hardly ever a single person—except In its general principle. (2) Petrus Gregorius, De republica, 26. 7, 5 ; ed. 1609,11. 2238. Barclay De regno et regali poteetate, 1600, p. 268. (8) Defensio, vi. 4, 19. A similar quotation might be given from almost any of the great Schoolmen.
(4) 81 commode id Seri potent, tenebitur in conscientla ilium occidere pro patria suisque liberandis ab Iniusta vgxatione, cum sit manifestus invaeor aggressor bonoque common' hanticus.—Petrus a Navarra, De ablatorum restitutions, U. 3, 320 (1589, 1. 308). So also Petrus de Aragon'', De iustitia et aura (1590), 2. 2, q 43. a 3. (5) The point is that such declaration is not necesauxy for the moral validation of a war of self-defence. It might be advisable, e.g., it It could Induce the usurper to observe the laws of war, When we protested as strongly as we knew how and appealed to every responsible person to support us nothing that could possibly be described as adequate was done. The British Government ought to have seen how deep- rooted the disease was in Ireland when such an article could be published from Maynooth. They ought to have taken up the matter at once with the Roman Church in Ireland. They ought to have said that even if they might be willing to deal with the Irish secessionists they could not possibly do so till murder had been stamped out. Even now, though it is very late indeed, we think the Prime Minister might produce a considerable effect if he said what he ought to have said long ago and took the trial of Sir Henry Wilson's assassins for his text. He might acknowledge frankly that he was in part to blame for not showing clearly enough in the past what of course he must have felt. We can imagine a Prime Minister in such a position saying, " These things do not happen of themselves. Those who are high up and those who are well educated and have acquired a sense of responsibility are in a sense the most guilty of all when they allow ideas to spread which end in frightful acts by subordinates. The Roman Church in Ireland must also share the blame, but I confess here and now that the Government might have strengthened its hands by insisting clearly upon what we required of it. In these circumstances, without abating one jot or tittle of our detestation of murder, without allowing it to be thought for a moment that political murder is not as bad as any other kind of murder, or that murder of whatever sort will not regularly be visited by a sentence of death, I cannot allow men to go to the gallows in this particular instance for a crime for which many others must share the responsibility." It is dreadful to think that such an admission, if it were made, would represent the facts and might con- ceivably be desirable. We do not say that it is desir- able. We must leave it to the conscience of the Govern- ment. If only they had made it perfectly clear that murder would never be tolerated, whatever the momentary convenience of toleration might seem to be, no one who believes in the necessity of capital punishment could possibly have been in two minds now as to the absolute justice of hanging Dunn and O'Sullivan. When a Govern- ment have done their duty, no plea on behalf of men who commit political murders can fairly be raised. But as it is, we cannot get rid of the feeling that we should not like to be in the shoes of either the Government or the leaders of the Roman Church in Ireland.
What do men with a sense of justice say when, in some place of business, the cash box is, through carelessness, habitually left open and some junior employee yields to the constant temptation and helps himself ? They con- demn the employer as having made a criminal by his levity. This analogy is worthy of consideration.
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