TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CRTSIS.
WE are sick, and we believe the country is sick, of all the charges and recriminations of the past few days. What we want is some way out of an intolerable situation. That the Government have brought about this situation by a recklessness and folly which can only be described as criminal is no consolation. We are not going i to lose the chance of finding a way out by indulging in the luxury of vituperation, however well deserved. The need for the moment is to prevent the coach being driven over the precipice. The only absolutely satisfactory way of escape is to adopt the proposal which Mr. Boner Law made a week ago, and made with perfect sincerity, to submit the essential point at issue—the Home Rule Bill—to the judgment of the people. Let them say once and for all whether the Union is to be broken and the men of Ulster, if need be, forced to obey what the people shall have determined is to be the law of the land. The Government declare that they have the people at their back. That is an essential part of their case. But if that is so, then surely it must be their duty to use the coercion of the ballot before they use the coercion of the bayonet. No doubt all human institutions rest in the last resort upon force, and the ballot would be useless as a weapon of coercion if it had not the bayonet behind it. All reasonable men agree, however, that the ballot should always be used before the rifle, because when once the mandatory word of the people has been spoken resistance almost always disappears, or shrinks to dimensions so small that it can easily be dealt with. There can be only one reason, then, why the Government refuse to do by means of the ballot what they want to do —namely, make Ulster accept the Home Rule Bill. They know that the people are not behind them, and would reject, not accept, the Home Rule Bill, even when amended by an Exclusion clause. They dare not put their policy to the supreme democratic test—the will of the people. They must be very certain, too, of defeat, for if they could only get a Poll of the People in their favour all their difficulties would disappear like the mists before the sun. We have reached the real point at issue, the rock upon which the Government ship has struck, the cause of all their troubles. If they had been willing, or, as they might say in a moment of candour, able, to consult the people, they would not be in the fearful predicament in which they now find themselves. Because they would not consult the people, and because they were determined, nevertheless, to go on with their policy, they were obliged to prepare for the coercion of Ulster. They lad, given the conditions they had created, no option. They determined to break the resistance of the Covenanters. But the moment they had reached the decision to use force, to adopt the arbitrament of war, they were faced by the problem which must always be faced by those who take up the sword. It is useless to fight unless you make sure of winning. But the best way to win, indeed the only way to win, is to strike first— to attack, and not to wait to be attacked. Providence favours those who take the initiative, and so command the situation. That is why almost all wars begin with a race for the strategic positions. "Unless we can hold this or that position.' say the soldiers to the statesmen, "we shall fight at a disadvantage, and perhaps get beaten. You must let us occupy such-and-such places in force if we are to make aura of success. If we can seize them, we get the upper hand at once. If we can mobilize and concentrate first, and can break up the enemy's mobilization and fore- stall their concentration, we have won. Therefore, if you have decided upon war, there must not be an instant's delay." This was what happened ten days ago. The Government, as we now see quite plainly in Mr. Churchill's Bradford speech, decided, or, at any rate, a certain ruling section of the Government decided, that they would have no appeal to the country, no coercion by the ballot, but that they would coerce Ulster with the bayonet. " We have had just about enough of this sort of thing," said the First Lord of the Admiralty. " Let us go forward together, and put these grave matters to the proof." In a word, he sounded the charge. From the Bradford speech the other steps taken by the Government followed logically, nay, inevitably. Orders were given to occupy all the chief strategic positions in Ulster—the fact that the Government called it protecting stores is unimportant, a mere piece of verbiage—and to hold them in such force that if, as was no doubt antici- pated and hoped, the Government's action made the move- ment in Ulster go off at half-cock, the Government most win. And here let us say that it is not accurate to talk about a plot to provoke the Ulstermen. If there was a plot, it was presumably only the kind of plot which every strategist uses, when once war has been determined upon, in order to get in the first blow, and to get it in with deadly effect. Mr. Churchill, who,we understand, is the Cabinet strategist, and who drew up the Government plan of campaign, was pro- bably quite sincere in declaring that it was a "hellish in- sinuation" that he wanted to massacre the Ulstermen. What he wanted to do, of course, was to win, as do all men who take up arms. His crime was not in making arrangements to beat the Ulstermen when he had decided to coerce them by force, but in deciding to use force. When once war— for that is the same thing as the use of force—is decided upon, it is childish to adopt half-measures. Naturally, and from their.. point of view reasonably enough, the Government wanted to shoot the Ulstermen before the' Ulstermen had time to shoot them. If this was not their intention, then they are greater fools than we take them to be. The man who decides to use force, and then, instead of springing at his opponent's throat, gives him an unneces- sary advantage, is not merely acting like an idiot, but will probably in the end cause an unnecessary amount of blood- shed. It is essential that every mai who resorts to arms should make their use as sure and as decisive as possible. But as the action of the Government proves, they were not fools, though they are now trying to make out that they were, and that they never meant to get in the first blow. Therefore they began to put in motion a formidable force of horse, foot, and artillery, and supple- mented their military units by a number of battleships with field guns—to give the crews exercise, says Mr. Churchill ! —on their decks. Therefore they got ready siege guns, mobilized their sappers and miners, and prepared their surgical dressings by the thousand. Therefore they got ready to strike, and to strike hard. They even made out the warrants, it is said—and if it is not true it ought to be, from the Government point of view—which would be used to arrest the Ulstermen if they dared to obey the military maxim : " If force is to be used against us we must meet it by force, and must anticipate the Govern- ment's plans for seizing the strategic positions." No doubt the warrants were not to be used till the first shots had been fired, but they would have been used imme- diately after. To have them at hand was, from the Govern- ment point of view, only common-sense. To say that all this was provocative is true, but, again from the Govern- ment point of view—that is, from the point of view of those who had decided to use force—such provocation was not illegitimate, but can be defended as an act of war.
Then something happened—something which knocked the whole Government scheme to atoms. Granted the Government plea that the Home Rule Bill must be passed, and their decision not to force it on Ulster by getting a popular vote in its favour, they did the only thing they could have done : they prepared to make the necessary military measures for coercing. Ulster effective. But they failed to remember a very important fact. They forgot that they had at least half the nation, and probably an actual majority of the nation, against them. They forgot that we had reached the condi- tion of civil war. They forgot that in this civil war, as in all civil wars, the Army is divided like the nation. They forgot that English soldiers have always refused, and always will refuse, to act the part of military slaves or janissaries, and that therefore in the case of civil war you cannot use the Army in the way you can use it for foreign strife, or in the case of tumult or disobedience to the ordinary law of the land, or ordinary offences against law and order. It is the essential mark of civil war that the Army is either ditided, or that it violently takes one side or the other. When a country is brought to the point of civil war you can never expect the Army to stand neutral and indifferent. Last Saturday the Government found
put this fact, to their surprise and indignation. They could not use the Army.
" What should the Government do ? " we shall be asked by their supporters. " Do you really suggest," they will say, "that they should let the officers dictate their policy ? " Our answer is clear. Of course they cannot let the officers, or anybody else but the nation itself, dictate their policy. At the same time, even Liberal Governments must learn that there are limits to human obedience, and that, whether right or wrong, all statesmen have to cut their coats according to their cloth, and to consider whether they can make their policy effective. It is no good to say that people ought to obey. The question is whether you can make them obey. If you can make them obey, and you believe your policy to be right, then clearly you will be doing very wrong if, out of ,fear or laxity, you do not enforce obedience. When the Government decided that they would coerce Ulster by the bayonet, they should have met the resistance offered to them at the Curragh as Clive met the mutiny of the Company's officers in Calcutta. In order to put pressure upon him to adopt a particular course, they resigned en bloc. Clive retorted by accepting all their resignations, and by at once putting non-com- missioned officers and civilians in their places. That is the way in which strong Governments meet and beat military resistance, not by the miserable intricacies of a tortuous and inefficient diplomacy such as we have seen displayed during the week, or by empty rhetoric such as that which the Liberals cheered in the vainglorious vapourings of Mr. John Ward.
If the Government were sincere and meant business, they should not have held any parley with General Gough or the officers of the Cavalry Brigade, but should have dismissed them without cause assigned. But, it will be pleaded, how could the Government do that when the wicked action of those officers would have been supported by practically all the officers in the Irish command, and also by the men, and, further, when any attempt to overawe them by sending troops from Aldershot would have caused the resignation of the Aldershot officers, fol- lowed, as Lord Esher has said, by the destruction of the whole Territorial !Force and organization, and when, finally, as indeed very nearly happened on Monday, the whole General Staff would have resigned ? We admit that the Government were beaten before they had begun, and could not possibly have played the part of Clive. But surely that is not a reason for feeling confidence in the Cabinet. The Government found that they were running their heads against a brick wall and decided not to go on, but we refuse to consider that as a reason for regarding them as wise men. What they should have done was to find out first whether or not they had a brick wall in front of them. Then they should have decided either to get out of their difficulties in some other way than by the coercion of Ulster, or else, which of course was a perfectly intelli- gible thing to do, have decided that they would pull the brick wall down—that is, destroy our present Army and make a new one if they could. "You are playing with us and trying to catch us with verbal sophistries," will be the complaint of our Radical readers. Honestly, we are not. We merely want to show that the Government's only safe plan was to submit their Home Rule Bill to the country. Even such tyrants as uncontrolled Single Chambers find by experience that there are limits to their powers. •
Once again, it is no good calling names, and talking about the evils of a disobedient Army, or about soldiers having no business to have opinions on political questions, and raging at the officers because they belong to the richer and educated classes, who apparently have no right to political opinions, or, if they have, ought to be ashamed of them. Again, it is no use to say that the Unionists may some day find themselves in difficulties with the Army, and with the men rather than with the officers. All such recrimina- tions are beside the mark. Even if we concede, as we are willing to do, that the foundations of the State have received so tremendous a shock during the past week that it will take generations to resecure them, that a great blow has been given to the discipline of the Army,
and that we shall all live to regret the events of March, 1914, we are no forwarder. The Government should have
thought of all this before they decided to coerce Ulster without first having got the sanction of the nation. Angry cdmplaints and vituperative expressions are but
another way of saying what we all admit—that civil war is the supreme evil. For remember that civil war has come, though the guns have not yet begun to shoot. But because we are already involved in half the evils of civil war, that is no reason why we should not try, while there is yet time and before bloodshed has begun, to put a stop to those evils, and to come back to the regions of sanity and peace. It will not be the old peace and the old security, but it will be infinitely better than the anxiety and disgrace of the last week of March, 1914.
Previous page
