INSURRECTION AND OUTRAGE.
IT is difficult for the Unionist Party to understand the change that has come over the minds of many of their opponents with regard to questions which they thought well
above the high-water mark of political ebb and flow. Mr.
Chamberlain's fine and temperate speech of Tuesday, March 11th, urging that the question at this moment to be decided
is not : Would the need of Home-role justify insurrection ?- but : Would that need justify outrage ?—gathers up the hopes and disappointments of many persons who may have very little definite opinion as to the strictly political matter at all. Men and women whose sympathies, if the Home-rule movement had already taken the shape of civil war, might have been on the side of some gallant Irish soldier wounded at the head of his band, would yet, we should have thought, have been unable to look on the deeds that have been done on the Irish aide with- out abhorrence. But we have to discover, explain it how we -will, that not only do people in general now take a different view of the guilt of insurrection from what they did, but also that they have learnt to look with indulgence on what is a different matter,—the endeavour, as it were, to get insurrection done cheap, and to keep its licence without its responsibilities. It is only the last issue we would raise now. We allow that, rightly or wrongly, the sympathies of the world have gone over from the side of those who wish to keep the unity of the group to the side of those who wish to change it, and without conceding that the sympathies of the world can never go wrong, we do not propose here to examine that vast ques- tion. We see everywhere that the centrifugal force is at some advantage in the opinion of the day, and we do not now go behind that concession. Still it remains to ask : Does sympathy with a resolve tested by willingness to endure, -commit us to sympathy with that same resolve when it is tested only by the willingness to inflict, suffering ? It is strange to reflect that the emphatic No with which all writers and most readers of the Spectator would answer it, is not the only con- ceivable answer that would be given by good men.
It is not possible for our generation to minimise the horrors of war. We have all, through the medium of the electric telegraph and the special correspondent, been forced, as it -were, to survey the scene of a recent victory and realise its price. Nothing like this, we fully concede, has been endured in Parnellite Ireland. But no war would bring about evils so
hideous, so enduring, and so pregnant for posterity as any movement in the minds of good men which should confuse the difference of peace and war. What prevents war from being unmixed evil is that it is a vast and obvious evil. The responsi- bility for originating it has, indeed, been incurred with criminal levity, as well as with many other sorts of guilt; but still, we may rest assured that only those will plunge their country into war without serious reflection who are incapable of any serious reflection whatever. The perils and the sufferings of warfare are a winnowing-fan, whereby, in the harvest of a nation's life, the chaff is severed from the grain. All that opposes the unity of a nation has hitherto had to face these perils and these sufferings; every impulse towards a national schism has been tested in this flame; and though we are not prepared to concede that all which it spares is pure gold, we should fully allow that nothing which has stood that test can be wholly base. But allow that whatever justifies war justifies any kind of violence, and that test is swept away. When men have given up the belief that the alternative to war is peace, and hold that they may cease to be citizens before they begin to be soldiers, they have turned their back on the virtues of peace and war at once. Those who seek the protec- tion of laws they have defied and continue to defy, who demand shelter from the institutions from which they have withdrawn allegiance, and which they are labouring to subvert, are untrue to every principle of political integrity. Their creed throws a loose rein on the neck of spite, of revenge, of cruelty; but it issues no summons to courage or endurance ; it undermines at once the spirit of honour and of humanity; and while it slackens peace to the requirements of the brigand, it cheapens war to the scope of the coward. It is no political question whether we are to make a place in our sympathies for those who preach such a creed. It is a political question whether any party or division in a State shall say :
We will have none of your protection, as you shall have none of our loyalty.' We must learn much before we can condemn men who have taken such a step,—much also before we can acquit them. But we need know no more than that they would sever the rights from the perils of belligerents, in order to be sure that they are foes at once to that which buttresses the life of a nation, and that which makes the lives of in- dividuals prosperous, merciful, and just.
Previous page
