TOPICS OF THE DAY
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THE STATE OF IRELAND AND THE ACT OF UNION.
THE situation in Ireland grows worse and worse. A great part of the South of Ireland is in the grip of civil war of the worst kind. It is sometimes a social war, sometimes a religious war, and sometimes a war of pure plunder. Those who have physical force and are armed hold the weak and the unarmed at their mercy and burn and kill and rob at will. In Northern Ireland, in many places, law and order are as well preserved as here, but wherever there is a large Roman Catholic population, as in parts of Belfast City, or again where Protestant districts and Protestant houses can be easily raided from across the Southern border, plunder and murder go on without intermission. They are followed by reprisals. That is inevitable in Ireland, and would almost certainly happen here under similar conditions. Men who have seen their homes burnt and their nearest and dearest shot down as if they were mad dogs are certain to take to reprisals and to burn and slay in the madness of revenge. That revenge is useless and criminal we admit as fully as the primmest pacifist, but you cannot persuade people of the fact when they are in an agony of misery and panic—desolated by the thought of what has happened, and terrified and despairing of what may next happen. Ireland has passed from being a prosperous and, on the whole, an orderly country, as she was at the end of 1918, to a condition which can best be compared with that of Bolshevik Russia. The only mitigating feature is that at present there is no famine or disease. But if things go on as they are, these new horrors will very soon come in the South and West. It is even possible that portions of the Northern State may be affected.
Let no one suppose that this ghastly state of things is going to be improved by the strange, and childishly cynical, agreement which has been made between Mr. De Valera and Mr. Collins and the apparently " impartial " Minister of Defence, who, since he commands the Army, is really the man who counts in this amazing Triumvirate. It is difficult for an Englishman to understand and describe the conditions set forth in the new Treaty of Peace. Who shall say exactly what is " a National Coalition panel " ? Is it anything like a " coupon," we wonder ? The agree- ment as a whole, so far as we can see, represents a surrender by Mr. Collins to Mr. De Valera. It shows how well justified were those Unionists who declared that there was not really anything to choose between the leaders who signed the Treaty and the leaders who denounced it. No great difference in action was, they urged, to be looked for. The avowed and the crypto-Republicans wanted the same thing. The " National Coalition panel " at any rate involves " the entrusting of the government of the country into the joint hands of those who have been the strength of the national situation during the last few years, without prejudice to their respective positions." Those are the actual words of the latest. Treaty. How men can be the strength of a national situation it is diffi- cult to see. But let that pass. We are not in a mood to find .humour in Irish English, nor, again, to make play with the astonishing Clause 4, which a cynic might say carefully guards the rights of Irishmen to a free fight. Here is the text of this weird provision : " That every and any interest is free to go up and contest the election equally with the National Sinn Fein panel." But though the meanings of most of the seven clauses of the Treaty of Peace have to be guessed at, Clause 6 is pretty plain. We are told there that after the election the Executive is to " consist of the President elected as formerly, the Minister of Defence representing the Army, and nine other Ministers, five from the majority party and four from the minority party, each party to choose its nominees, the allocation to be in the hands of the Presi- dent." Surely it is not unjust to say that no body of this kind could ever govern peaceably in Ireland. No body is really willing to make any compromise, though we admit that all are willing to come together and talk for hours in the same room. It is, we suppose, a kind of satisfaction to talk (loudly) at your foe. Unless the National Coalition works some sort of miracle, it is not too much to say that the Minister of Defence, " repreientink the Army," or, at any rate, the section of politicians with whom he sides, will be the operative part of, the Government.
Either the Government will do nothing, which is just about what it is doing now, or else it will simply cease to be obeyed by those who dislike its. orders. Those at the centre may be calm, but there will certainly be " endless agitation " at the circumference. _ - What is the lesson of all this It is the lesson which we have tried for the last thirty years to inculcate in the Spectator—the lesson that, do what you may and try as you may and argue as you may, the Act of Union was placed on the Statute Book, and remained on the Statute Book, not as a monument of moral or political wisdom, but as a mere necessity—a practical sine qua non plan for avoiding the utter, hopeless, shameless miseries of Irish civil war and their train of anarchy, murder and pillage. In one of the first leading articles which the present writer remembers writing on the Irish question in the Spectator he urged that Mr. Pitt did not introduce and pass the Act of Union because he had a double dose of original sin, or because he hated the Irish, or because he wanted to torture those that opposed his will, or, again, because he was a constitutional pedant, but simply and solely because he saw that an incorporating Union was the only way of securing that decent government for the inhabitants of Ireland which he as a humane man longed for beyond words, and which, as a British statesman, he saw was necessary to secure the welfare of England, Scotland and Wales. He adopted the Union as the government which divided Ireland least and helped Britain most and so was the lesser evil. We had tried governing Ireland through the British Parliament. We had tried in Grattan's Parliament giving her complete self-government without legislative interference from Westminster. We had tried military rule. All had failed ; and so, as a last resort, we tried incorporation with Great Britain—i.e., letting Ireland have her fair share of representation in the Parlia- ment of the United Kingdom and admitting Irish members to their full share in the work of governing England and Scotland.
Now, unhappily for Ireland and for us all, we have been seduced into trying once more the plan of Irish self-govern- ment—with the inevitable result. The Act of Union has a miserable triumph in the present condition of Ireland, an Ireland sacrificing a daily hecatomb of victims on the altar of Ultramontane Radicalism.
Whether we shall be able to return to the only possible solution of the Irish problem before the prosperity of Ireland is completely destroyed we are very doubtful. The English people are forgiving, but, to tell the truth, they are heartily sick of Ireland, and we greatly doubt whether they would now agree to have one hundred Irish members sent to help to govern them and so to re-undermine their political system. In an Ireland demoralized as we see her to-day, what sort of representatives could we expect from the South ? Are they likely to be the sort of men that we could allow to hold the balance once more between our parties, for that is what the reintroduction of the Act of Union would mean ? We fully expect within the next five years to see the Roman Church, the commercial classes, and especially the lawyers of Southern Ireland, petitioning to be allowed to come back into the Legislative Union. We by no means feel sure, however, that the people of Great Britain will grant that prayer.
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